Without education revolution, Africa’s economic green shoots will wither

Things are looking up for Africa. After half a century when the continent has been largely defined in the international media by famine, disease and strife, the last twenty years has seen a steady improvement in economic performance in most African countries. Over the last two decades, trade with the rest of the world has […]

Things are looking up for Africa. After half a century when the continent has been largely defined in the international media by famine, disease and strife, the last twenty years has seen a steady improvement in economic performance in most African countries.

Over the last two decades, trade with the rest of the world has quadrupled. This week, the African Development Bank, the OECD and the UN Development Programme jointly released their African Economic Outlook for 2017 – showing continued economic growth along with even higher levels of foreign investment than in 2016.

While the picture is cautiously positive, however, it’s not all good news. Last year, growth across the continent slowed due to falls in commodity prices (crucial to Africa’s economy) and weaker global growth. What is harder to tell is whether this is just a brief era of plenty for Africa – and whether it will benefit the whole continent: 54% of the population in 46 African countries are still living in poverty.

In the next two decades, Africa must become capable of negotiating a global economy increasingly driven by technological advances and new trading relationships. Much of Africa’s economic performance flows from resource-rich industries that are hardly models of sustainability. Rather than relying on its natural resources, Africa must accept that the most important factor in its future success – as it is for all economies, developed or not – is education.

Education is now the best predictor of wealth creation worldwide, and in the coming decades that pattern will only intensify, as economic productivity becomes increasingly focused on innovation, technology, specialisation, and creativity. Many types of jobs will also be automated in the coming years, and this will change Africa’s labour market – partly because many industrial jobs in Africa consist of tasks that could in theory be replicated by new technologies. Countries must think about creating or promoting sectors with jobs that are high in ‘soft-skills’ and creativity if they want to be competitive globally in the decades to come. Without investment in educational standards, Africa will be left behind.

That would be a tragedy for the continent’s greatest resource – its young people. Last year, the Varkey Foundation published the Generation Z: Global Citizenship Survey into the attitudes of young people aged 15-21 in 20 major countries, including Nigeria, The survey measured a wide variety of attitudes on issues such as social questions, immigration, and personal values. While we can’t take Nigeria’s responses as representative of Africa as a whole, it was noteworthy that young people in Nigeria were placed 2nd out of all 20 countries in their overall happiness. Nigerian youth’s most important career priority was acquiring skills, and their most important personal value was “working hard to help myself get on in life”. They thought that Nigeria was a good country mostly because people were “able to get on if they work hard”.

This generation of young Africans are optimistic, motivated, and can achieve great things if given the right start. As the Economic Outlook report underlines, the entrepreneurial culture of Africa is vibrant, with 80% of Africans viewing entrepreneurship as a good career opportunity. Entrepreneurship can help reduce poverty, and governments can remove barriers to this by promoting education, skills and vocational training. But various changes are needed to achieve this.

First, we need initiatives to improve teacher training, recognised as crucial in the new UN Sustainable Development Goals. Technology is indispensable in putting this into practice. The Train for Tomorrow project, Africa’s first live two-way interactive distance-learning teacher training programme, will train up to 5,000 teachers in Ghana (where over 45 per cent remain untrained) over two years. But this particular project will only go part of the way toward training the number of teachers needed to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goal of providing every child with 12 years of quality education by 2030.

Still, projects like this can encourage parents to send their children to school as they see the benefits of their children genuinely engaged and learning. 57 million children in developing countries remain out of school, and more than half of these live in sub-Saharan Africa. The challenge to get all children into school is partly financial; but it is also partly about using resources in an efficient and targeted way, harnessing the right expertise and using technology in clever ways.

Also, the benefits of private sector involvement are often overlooked. If the right models of partnership are adopted, the private sector has the resources and flexibility – as well as the access to foreign investment – to build schools at the right scale and pace and bring expertise from tried and tested education systems from across the world. Also, public-private partnerships offer the possibility of working closely with industry to identify growth sectors and opportunities so that vocational education is offered in the right areas. African governments need to work closely with employers to find out where skills gaps lie and keep youth unemployment down.

Finally, the most important education reform we can make is to collectively acknowledge that teachers matter, and must be well paid, well trained, and well respected. We should resist the temptation to blame them for educational failure. Teacher absenteeism, the curse of many African school systems, is not due to teachers being idle. More often, they are out of the classroom working in a second job because they can’t rely on their Government salary. Teacher pay has been falling in Africa for 40 years. How will we attract the brightest teachers if their status remains low?

The future can be bright for Africa, but governments, businesses, and NGOs need to get creative and work closely together: that’s how they will leave it a sustainable economic player with a thriving and well-educated workforce well into the 21st-century.

 

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation​