A group of economic policy experts have warned that the low quality of education in many African countries is hampering their economic growth and development.
The experts presented their findings at the 25th Senior Policy Seminar (SPS) organized by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) in Nairobi, Kenya on March 29-30, 2023. The seminar focused on the theme of human capital development in Africa.
According to the experts, Africa has made significant progress in increasing school enrollment rates but still faces a learning crisis, where many students do not acquire basic skills such as reading and numeracy.
Prof. Adrienne Lucas, Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Delaware, said that in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, about three-quarters of grade 3 students cannot read a simple sentence. She said this learning crisis is acute and undermines the potential of human capital to contribute to economic growth.
“As barriers to schooling have fallen, the primary school net enrollment rate is now over 80 percent (UNESCO 2019). Yet, in many cases, schools are continuing to fail the children they are supposed to be serving by not imparting them with adequate knowledge to be successful,” Prof Lucas said.
He added, “As an example, in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, about three-quarters of grade 3 students cannot read a simple sentence (World Bank 2018). This “learning crisis” of students being in school but not learning is acute. The scale of this problem was recognized and codified in Goal number 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals focuses on “quality education” and not just the number of years of schooling.”
Prof. Germano Mwabu, Professor of Economics at the University of Nairobi, said that foreign direct investments (FDI) stimulate education achievement in a host country by enabling the youth to acquire on-the-job training and providing tax revenues that the government can use to construct schools and fund scholarships and research.
He said that multinational firms provide incentives for skill acquisition because workers know they must be highly skilled to work for foreign-owned enterprises, which pay higher wages than local firms.
He, however, noted that the education stimulus from FDI depends on the host country’s capacity to absorb the investment. He said that critical to the absorption is the previous skill accumulation in a host country, as well as local workers’ ability to adapt to production technologies of multinational firms.
Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and Digital Economy Eliud Owalo, who was the chief guest at the SPS opening ceremony, called for strengthening capacity-building efforts at the human capital development level to facilitate economic and social growth.
Owalo challenged delegates at the SPS, including high-ranking government officials, ministers, governors of central banks, permanent secretaries, ambassadors, a queen, and special advisers to Heads of State, to move out of their comfort zones by embracing emerging trends in the digital space to advance economic policy.
He said that AERC must contribute to leading Africa into the new order as an equal partner by conducting relevant research. He said that if Africa missed out on the first three industrial revolutions, the time to make up and catch up is now. He said that this seminar must go down in history as a turning point for Africa’s human capital development.
The AERC is a capacity building institution that supports economic policy research and training in sub-Saharan Africa. It was established in 1988 and has a network of researchers, universities and policy makers across the continent and beyond.
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