More than half of Africa’s population, about 700 million people, are under the age of 25, and most are denied decent education or training.
Around 300 million of the 350 million school-age children and youth are not on track to reach minimum levels of secondary school skills, according to estimates made by the Education Commission, whose groundbreaking 2016 report The Learning Generation highlighted the global learning crisis.
Of them, 240 million will not be opportune to achieve primary level learning and nearly 100 million are not at school at all.
This means Africa is home to ONE-THIRD of all children who are not learning around the world.
Access to education is a vital tool for development and increased prosperity in any community or society, especially in the African context. A World Bank report released in 1991, The African Capacity Building Initiative: Toward Improved Policy Analysis and Development Management in Sub-Saharan Africa, argued that one of the main challenges that African countries faced in their development was the lack of skilled professionals to manage their policies, institutions, and economies, which was a gap that tertiary education institutions intended to tackle. While disregarding the colonial histories that have impacted and continued to shape education on the continent, the World Bank’s analysis made a strong connection between higher education and capacity building in Africa.
On the same issue, a World Bank report published in 2017, Sharing Higher Education Promise beyond the Few in Sub-Saharan Africa, states that while more people have been educated, there remains a huge gap between elites and the rest of the African population, which has stalled its productivity and economic growth. Despite the slow progress, reading these two reports more than 25 years apart,
one can conclude that developing skilled individuals through education has consistently remained a key tool for effective and sustainable development on the African continent.