Authors: Savchenko, Evgenia De Simone, Martin Elias Tisserand, Jason Allen Rasolonjatovo Andriamihamina, Harisoa Danielle Bentil, Ekua Nuama Tan, Jee-Peng Baranshamaje, Étienne Dahal, Mahesh Mosuro, Wuraola Olubusola Silva, Karishma Talitha Yukseker, Elif Yonca
Site of the publication: World bank
Type of the publication: Report
Date of the publication: June 2022
Regional Context
The AFW region comprises 22 countries with a combined population of half a billion people, projected to reach 1 billion by 2050. In addition to the hundreds of local languages spoken, the primary official languages in the region include English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. The geography ranges from semiarid areas in the Sahel to large coastal zones on the Atlantic Ocean and lush tropical forests. The region hosts the most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria, with more than 200 million people, as well as small states like Cabo Verde. Half of the countries face situations of fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV). Some 48 percent of the region’s population now resides in cities as a result of rapid urbanization, which is expected to continue.
The economies of AFW countries are diverse. Some depend heavily on agriculture, a sector that accounted for 42 percent of employment in the region in 2019. Others rely on natural resources such as oil (Gabon, Nigeria, Republic of Congo), gold (Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso), cocoa (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana), and cotton (Benin, Burkina Faso). The region experienced high economic growth from 2005 to 2015, powered by high commodity prices, but since then growth rates have slowed.
Enhancing Progress in Education
Access to basic education has expanded rapidly but is still lower than in other world regions. In 2020, average net primary school enrollment in AFW was nearly 90 percent, up from less than 50 percent in the 1990s. Secondary enrollment more than doubled in the last decade to an average of 55 percent. However, in a region where early childhood education is free of charge in just five countries, only 31 percent7 of AFW’s children, on average, benefitted from this good head start to their education. While enrollment in primary education is approaching universal coverage, coverage at the secondary level lags far behind that of other regions.
With 20 percent of the school-age population not in school, AFW hosts the largest share of the world’s out-of-school (OOS) children. Nigeria has more than 11 million OOS children – the highest in the world. The OOS population comprises children in three distinct groups: those who have never enrolled, those who enrolled but dropped out before finishing, and those attending nonintegrated religious establishments.
The region also faces major gender disparities in access to education. For example, on average, only 44 percent of girls in AFW are enrolled in secondary school (junior and senior), compared with 52 percent of boys.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of the region’s chronic education challenges and has jeopardized its hard-earned progress. At the peak of the crisis, 101 million learners in the region could not attend class in person, and most could not learn online due to lack of internet access. In Nigeria, for example, the pandemic reduced students’ probability of attending school by nearly 7 percentage points.
Many learners, especially girls, are also likely to drop out permanently.9 In Ghana, girls account for 60 percent of post-pandemic dropouts. Across the AFW region, an estimated 10 million more girls are at risk of early marriage as a result of the crisis. Limited data exist on the magnitude of pandemic-related learning losses in AFW countries, but experiences in other countries suggest that losses, especially among disadvantaged populations, will be significant.
The region faces chronic gaps in job attainment and workforce participation, especially among young women, and youth unemployment is high even among the educated and trained. Poor workforce skills limit business success and reinforce the vicious cycle of few job opportunities and high youth unemployment, which have fueled protests and violence in the region.
The region also faces major gender disparities in access to education. For example, on average, only 44 percent of girls in AFW are enrolled in secondary school (junior and senior), compared with 52 percent of boys
Education also enhances child survival and health outcomes and reduces child marriage and early pregnancies. In Nigeria, each additional year of female schooling reduced fertility by at least 0.26 births per woman. Educated women are more likely to use contraception, play a larger role in family fertility decisions, and display greater awareness of the trade-offs in having children. Better-educated mothers raise healthier and better-educated children. Controlling for other factors, educated women are more likely than those with less education to work in paid jobs outside the home, remain longer in such jobs, and earn more.
Education can help build social capital and stabilize a region where the social fabric is fraying. By helping ease demographic pressures, reduce poverty and inequality, and accelerate economic growth, education can make a vital contribution to relieving the underlying sources of FCV in the AFW region. It can foster more peaceful societies by promoting tolerance and cooperation and discouraging people from resorting to violence to settle conflicts.
Importantly, parallel efforts to increase job opportunities are essential. When job prospects are favorable, the opportunity cost of violence rises, making it harder for terrorist organizations to gain new recruits.
Seven Regional Megatrends Affecting Education Outcomes
Rapid population growth in AFW countries, averaging 3 percent a year, puts pressure on education systems to accommodate rising enrollments. The region’s total fertility rate averages 4.6 children per woman, almost twice the global average of 2.4. Its population of 459 million people is growing much faster than the average rate of 2 percent a year for Sub-Saharan Africa and will double by 2050, based on the data from the World Development Indicators. Additionally, the region has urbanized rapidly, and cities now host 48 percent of the population. Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and Dakar, Senegal, with 3.7 million and 3.1 million inhabitants, respectively, are the largest francophone cities in the world after Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Paris, France. Lagos, Nigeria, is among the largest English-speaking cities in the world.
Climate change is adding new challenges with adverse impacts on education. Africa accounts for only 2–3 percent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide but is projected to suffer the most from climate change. The frequency and severity of climatic shocks threaten livelihoods, increase food insecurity, press households into coping strategies that reduce human capital, and aggravate conflict. They also force schools to close temporarily or relocate permanently, disrupting children’s schooling.
The digital technology revolution is creating new opportunities and new challenges. New technologies offer significant advantages for the region’s development, including education. They enable AFW countries to leapfrog some technological developments. One example is mobile phones, which have overtaken landline telephones. In the AFW region, there are, on average, 88 mobile subscriptions per 100 people. The expansion of mobile and internet connectivity has the potential to create new jobs in the digital sector and increase productivity in traditional sectors, such as agriculture, services, and industry.
Galvanize Shared Commitment to Priority Goals in Education
Political will and commitment from top leaders are vital but not sufficient. Priority goals must also appeal to diverse stakeholders and persuade them to cooperate in the national interest. The leaders of East Asian countries have been widely recognized for their success in mobilizing sustained support for investing in quality education as a key driver of economic growth.
Education can help build social capital and stabilize a region where the social fabric is fraying. By helping ease demographic pressures, reduce poverty and inequality, and accelerate economic growth, education can make a vital contribution to relieving the underlying sources of FCV in the AFW region. It can foster more peaceful societies by promoting tolerance and cooperation and discouraging people from resorting to violence to settle conflicts
Dialogue and networking to strengthen coalitions for reform are especially important where social norms, religious preferences, or cultural concerns present major barriers to change. In Egypt and Jordan, for example, advocacy for gender equality was more successful when the dialogue was framed around family values rather than women’s rights and when support came from influential players in the community.
Ensure Adequate Financing and Effective Use of Resources for Education
Insufficient and unpredictable education funding throughout the AFW region gives top policy makers a critical role in managing strategic decisions on education finance. This is especially true for trade-offs in allocations among competing priorities, including the three highlighted in this strategy. Rising demographic pressures, modest education outcomes, bleak economic prospects, and weak opportunities for aid flows create a challenging environment. Since 2010 public spending on education in AFW countries has been rising steadily, from an average of 2.9 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent of GDP in 2018–19, comparable to the average in other low-income regions but still only 80 percent of the average level in middle-income countries.
Tight budgets intensify the need for AFW policy makers to promote and support a more equitable allocation of resources. Biases in the structure of enrollments and public subsidies for education suggest that the poorest households tend to benefit much less from public spending on education than wealthier ones. In an assessment of 42 countries (2010–17), researchers identified the eight AFW countries in the sample as having the least equitable distribution of spending on education.
Strengthen Children’s Readiness to Learn
Many children in the AFW region start school facing severe barriers to learning. More than a third of those under the age of five are stunted, and severe malnutrition puts their mental and physical development at risk and reduces their ability to learn. Barely a third of each cohort has benefited from early childhood education. Most children arrive in first grade emotionally, socially, and intellectually unprepared for learning with other children.
Ensure Safe and Inclusive Learning Environments
Governments in AFW countries with a significant number of unsafe schools must take three major steps to address the problem. They must build databases to register attacks on schools, create early warning systems, and formulate comprehensive security plans that incorporate physical protection. They must also sign and act on the Safe Schools Declaration—an intergovernmental political commitment that was opened for endorsement by countries in 2015—and implement the Guidelines for Protecting Schools and Universities from Military Use during Armed Conflicts. Finally, they must establish backup venues or mechanisms for schooling when regular schools become too unsafe to operate, such as community buildings, homes, or other types of government facilities.
Governments in affected AFW countries must leverage education and community engagement as a tool for preventing violence in schools and promoting innovative approaches. In Uganda, the Good School Toolkit—an 18-month whole-of-school approach— reduced physical violence by 42 percent.
Reinforce Coordination and Governance of Providers of Training Services
Better governance of training service providers would help integrate AFW countries’ highly fragmented skills-building systems. Publicly funded-formal TVET and higher education programs alone are insufficient to cope with all of the region’s skilling needs. In many countries, gaps are filled by master craftsmen and private firms, among others. AFW governments can create a more integrated system that benefits users and providers of training services alike. To this end, three areas of governance warrant attention: (a) reforming traditional apprenticeship models, (b) formalizing the role of employers in skills development, and (c) developing simple yet inclusive skills qualifications frameworks.
AFW countries must put in place simple yet inclusive skills qualifications frameworks to clarify learning pathways and to ensure the quality of training provided. National qualifications frameworks (NQFs) and regulatory frameworks help countries align competency-based curricula to skills outcomes and expected career pathways. Such frameworks must provide guidance and tools for the recognition of prior learning and post-training certification, both of which are especially important for skills acquisition through traditional apprenticeships or other informal avenues. Because skills qualifications frameworks take time, resources, and sustained commitment to set up and operate, they should be pursued in phases, first targeting industries where certifications are most pertinent.