The African Child faces a myriad of challenges ranging from poverty, hunger, and insecurity, to diseases and much preventable death, among others.
Every June 16, the world marks the International Day of the African Child, which recognises learning challenges, despite the fact that many African countries have made education more accessible to all.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reports that today, children in Africa are five times less likely to learn the basics than children elsewhere and that in sub-Saharan Africa, for every 10 children, only two emerge at the end of primary school able to read and understand what they are reading.
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This was highlighted in the ‘Born to Learn’ report, which is a spotlight report from UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM Report) highlighting gaps in foundational access to education, completion, and learning in African countries.
Patrick Montjouridès, Senior Project Officer and Technical Lead at GEM Report talks to The New Times’ Glory Iribagiza about regional differences and how the gaps can be bridged.
What key regional differences are there in basic education completion and foundational learning in Africa?
According to available data, the African child is five times less likely to complete primary education and to learn basic literacy and numeracy skills in comparison to any other child in the world. This means that in many cases, African children do not complete primary education but also they do not learn even when they are in school.
In terms of access, the main thing that needs to be highlighted here is that many African countries have made tremendous progress towards guaranteeing access to education at the primary level and this should be celebrated.
In Africa, the share of primary school-aged children who are out of school has basically been divided by two between 2020. So we went from 40 per cent of primary school-aged children who are out of school to 20 per cent today, across the continent.
Rwanda has done a lot of progress but is still not performing as the country would need to perform to reach universal primary education completion. At the moment, it’s between 55 per cent and 60 per cent of children who completed primary education. That represents an increase because in 2000 it was only two out of 10.
Despite the demographic pressure and despite the conditions in the country, Rwanda has managed to increase by a certain percentage, which is extremely good.
We also look at completion. So it’s important to access primary school but it’s equally important to complete. The overall message is that one in three children (in Africa) does not complete school on time. One in four children does not complete at all. In Rwanda, 60 per cent of children finish primary school on time.
Why is Rwanda lagging in learning when it is close to achieving universal access to education?
I think it may be unfair to some extent to say that Rwanda is lagging behind because Rwanda is actually starting from a very low starting point. And progress in education is also fairly slow. When we look at the progress that the country has achieved against what progress could be in general, Rwanda has actually improved quite fast in terms of enrolment and also in completion even though the levels remain low.
Remember we only had two out of 10 children in 2000 who were completing primary education and today we have around six out of 10 children. So, four more children out of 10 are completing, which is quite an achievement within such a timespan.
But it does not mean that nothing can be done and what we saw in the report, and when we look at Rwanda in particular, is that some of the key issues that may undermine the improvement are around the quality, quantity, and frequency of teacher training.
Rwanda has adopted a competence-based curriculum. When you change the curriculum, you need to develop new teacher training, new teaching and learning materials, and a new pedagogical strategy.
What was felt in the country, was that the quality and quantity, and frequency of teacher training needed to improve or increase so that it can meet the ambition behind the education reforms that are being implemented.
Another aspect is an assumption that I mentioned earlier, that there is a scarcity of use of tools for guidance and for formative assessment, or for assessing capacities of children, or the learning of children and acting upon some of the key issues. So in terms of the formative assessment system, this needs to be strengthened at the classroom level.
Teachers and head teachers need tools and guidance on how to assess what’s happening in the classroom, and then act upon what is happening in the classroom.
One of the findings or one of the recommendations of the Rwanda Spotlight report was that the focus on supervision and monitoring to support teachers in mastering pedagogical practices, aligned with the vision of the government. So a competence-based curriculum is needed so that teachers can implement it in the classroom.
The spotlight report shows that in Rwanda, girls tend to outperform boys in numeracy in P3, but boys later significantly outperform girls in P6 and S3. Why do you think that is?
Physically, in terms of learning, the difficult thing in the region, in Africa, there is a critical lack of data to have a proper assessment of what’s happening. We estimate that at most, about one in five primary school-aged children achieve minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics. That progress over time in Africa is just half as fast as in the rest of the world. So there’s an issue of level but also an issue of the speed of progress in terms of improving the level of learning.
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In terms of Rwanda, there is some data that we can use, but none of it is really systematic, or comprehensive. One, for instance, is this assessment that was carried out by the Rwanda Basic Education Board that looks at oral reading fluency for grades 1 to 3, and they set some benchmarks in terms of correct words per minute.
In grade 2, the benchmark was set as 28 correct words per minute, so it means that children who can identify or pronounce 28 correct words per minute were the ones meeting the expectation level. 62 per cent of the students that were tested met the expectation.
There was a learning assessment in 2011, 2014, and 2017, and that is where there was discussion about girls being outperformed by boys.
This is not an unusual pattern that is observed there. In general, we can say that there’s not enough data to analyse the issue properly. Half of the countries in the region do not have any data on levels of learning in mathematics.
In general, girls outperform boys, but more often than not, girls are underrepresented among the top performers in mathematics across the world when you go into higher grades.
More evidence is needed on the issue of how to explain it, but some researchers believe — and this is something that has been studied quite extensively — that gender norms can play an important role. You can relate this to even career choices or career expectations.
If science, technology, and mathematics careers are considered male-oriented tracks, for instance, it can have an effect on girls’ overall affinity for mathematics, which will in turn influence their performance.
Another possible explanation that could be true, and again, this is against the caveat that we don’t have enough data, is that there may be a selection bias in the first place because what the report also highlights is that boys drop out more than girls. And by the end of the primary education cycle, only around 50 per cent of boys complete, while around 60 per cent of girls complete.
This means that when you measure performance in mathematics overall, the population of boys that are still in school will tend to be at a higher level in terms of learning outcome than the population of boys that was at the beginning of the cycle.
What are the key recommendations from the report, specifically for Rwanda?
So we have key recommendations overall and for each of them, there may be points that could be interesting to relate to the Rwandan experience.
For instance, one of the key recommendations is to provide all children with school meals, because that’s part of the minimum conditions that are necessary. In this aspect, Rwanda is a very interesting example here, because the country has recently demonstrated a strong national commitment to school feeding.
In 2019, the government was funding 65 per cent of its school feeding programme and at the time, the school feeding only covered 10 per cent of the children.
But then, at the end of 2019, the government launched its national school feeding programme, with the double objective of providing all children with daily school meals, but also improving local livelihoods, by developing a stable and predictable market for local farmers.
And so, what’s interesting is that it prioritises a home-grown approach to school feeding and the government has also the intention to fund around 70 per cent of the cost of the school feeding programme while leaving the 30 per cent to the local community, and this is much higher than the average in Africa.
The overall thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that it’s not one reason or one factor that affects the level of learning or primary education completion, but the convergence of factors that need to be looked at from a system perspective, so that the combinations or the issues are generally considered as a whole and not as one intervention or another. Because some of these trade-offs will actually generate more issues than what they’re trying to solve.