Differentiated improvements in access to basic education in sub-Saharan Africa

• In Event: Highlighted session: Education for sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa

Proposal

This paper documents progress in access to basic education (defined as Grades 1-9) in Sub-Saharan African countries. In the first section of the paper, we analyze a wide set of data to document the formidable progress in access to basic education, particularly in primary education, where enrollments surged from 63 million students in 1990 to 152 million students in 2013. We find that countries have followed diverse trajectories of expansion and we group countries by their performance in access to primary education (Grades 1-6) based on enrollments in 2000 and the latest year of available data across 45 countries, the percentage of children of primary school going age who are out of school, and the primary school retention rate. What emerges are four distinct groups of countries ranging from the ‘established’ group (including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana) on one end of the spectrum that have managed to get almost all children to complete primary school, to the ‘delayed’ group of countries (including Chad, Liberia, Niger) on the other end of the spectrum that have a high percentage of children who are out of school. The two groups in the middle, the ‘emerged’ (including Tanzania, Cameroon and Togo) and ‘emerging’ (including Burundi, Mozambique, Ethiopia) group of countries have made impressive gains in enrollment but still have a fair share of children who are out of school and retention of students through to the end of Grade 6 is a concern. We also analyze improvements in lower secondary enrollment (Grades 7-9) for 34 Sub-Saharan African countries and find some diversity in progression towards universal basic education coverage. Some countries have made gains in both primary and lower-secondary education such as Burundi, Cameroon, Ethiopia; some others, like Senegal, have made gains in lower-secondary but not primary education; and others have made gains in primary but stagnation in lower secondary education, such as Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Overall, and not surprisingly, the countries that are considered ‘established’ in access to primary education, tend to do better in access to lower-secondary education and those considered ‘delayed’ in access to primary education have also not made as much progress in lower-secondary education.

The second part of the paper, analyzes seven social and economic characteristics of Sub-Saharan African countries that may have presented specific challenges in expanding access to education over the last 25 years. These characteristics include large population size, rapid child population growth, low or stagnant Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, high inequality, high poverty, high linguistic diversity and frequent or severe conflict. We find that not all the countries faced all these challenges and some countries faced few. We conclude that many countries with “few” challenges achieved positive schooling trajectories, while only a few countries with “many” challenges were able to do so. There are also examples of countries with “some” or “many” challenges that, despite all odds, have made significant progress in access to education such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia.

Authors

• Elizabeth Ninan Dulvey, World Bank

• Marlaine Lockheed, Princeton University

• Sajitha Bashir, World Bank

• Martin Moreno, Independent Consultant