The Learning Crisis in Africa: Students and Teachers who Can’t Read
If you’re an African reading this, then you’ll be surprised if I told you that you’re one of the very few people in the continent who can read this. Yes! It seems like simple English but the truth remains that the majority of African students finish their primary school without any literacy and numeracy skills. According to a World Bank report from a large study conducted in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Togo, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Senegal, “a large share of children in low income countries learn little and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills.”
A previous study of grade six children in fifteen Southern and Eastern African countries in 2007 also found that fewer than 40% of the students scored beyond “basic numeracy.” Basic numeracy in this case refers to the most basic pieces of math involving addition and subtraction of numbers. Similar findings were observed in the “reading for meaning tests” which showed that less than half of the students surveyed could read and comprehend simple words and sentences.
The problem persists in Central and Western Africa. Grade six children from ten Francophone countries who participated in a regional assessment found that less than 45% of the children assessed met the needed competencies needed to continue with schooling.
Generally, literacy levels in Africa are low even though illiteracy rates vary from country to country. In Mozambique, 79% of the children surveyed could not read simple words in Portuguese while in Kenya only 17% of children who had completed three years of education could not read simple words in English. Most of the students (71%) in all the countries surveyed could not read all the words in a given sentence.
Many people like to argue that maybe these foreign languages are hard and culturally biased and so we should not expect children to pass them. But the problems persist even in math which is expected to be culturally fair. From the survey, twelve percent of the students could not recognize numbers despite having completed three years of primary school. A further 55% could not write numbers in the correct order from 1 to 1000. Addition of single digit numbers was a problem to 24% of the students while 44% had difficulties with double digits. Very many of these students (70%) could not subtract numbers that have double digits.
This trend of illiteracy is reflected even within secondary schools where poor academic performance persists. In three countries (Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa) that participated in the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study examination in 2012, average test scores revealed that students from the these countries scored below “the lowest 5th percentile in the US” meaning they scored lower than the lowest scoring Americans in that test. The authors even add that some students from these three countries scored “lower than chance” meaning the test was by itself unreliable in capturing their true knowledge. Their performance was indistinguishable from guesswork.
So where’s the problem and why can’t these children learn basic words and simple math? There is no single answer to that question. For a start, an observational study in all these schools found that students learn for an average of 2 hours 50 minutes every day. We all know students spend more than eight hours in school, so how come they only learn for less than three hours? Findings suggest in most cases teachers are never in school during school hours, or are in school but not in class. That points to a systemic problem in management and the lack of accountability in African Schools.
Another problem is that as governments have increased the enrollment of more students into schools, many teachers who were hired to meet this demand were generally unprepared. The vetting process for teachers was never carried out and there was no way of knowing whether the teachers employed had met standard qualifications. In a different post, I will show how African teachers, just like students, cannot read simple English words or subtract two digit numbers.
Another reason is that African teachers have very few incentives to teach well. Most African teachers are paid based on their academic background or seniority within the school hierarchy. That’s despite the fact that the teachers with the highest rates of absenteeism in school were either those with higher education credentials or those with higher seniority. The high performing teachers; in both competence and work ethic, had the lowest pay. Add that to the fact that most teachers too cannot read or write and you realize the whole system is corrupted and defective. As the authors argue, only a complete overhaul of the education systems can help salvage the situation since targeted interventions are unlikely to work under the prevailing mess.
Finally In this post, I list the average IQ of all African countries. Sub-Saharan Africa has an average IQ of 68.92, which might explain the dismal performance in the continent in such exams as TIMSS. In this post, I delve deep on Kenya’s average IQ of 75 which also has pointers on what could be the cause of the poor performance observed in African children.
Reference
Bold, T., Filmer, D., Martin, G., Molina, E., Rockmore, C., Stacy, B., … & Wane, W. (2017). What do teachers know and do? Does it matter? Evidence from primary schools in Africa. Does it Matter? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2906568.
