Crowds of Pupils but Little Else in African Schools

As much as our schools need improving, Africa's are 100x more needy...

Finding places for millions of new students is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most overwhelming and gratifying missions. After two decades of sluggish growth in enrollment rates, the region’s 45 countries find themselves with an embarrassment of eager schoolchildren.

Nearly 22 million more students flooded classrooms between 1999 and 2004, increasing the enrollment rate by 18 percent, more than any other region of the world, according to Unesco. More than 6 out of 10 primary school-age children are now enrolled — and that does not include older students, like 14-year-old second graders, who have also streamed into schools.

Not since the 1970s has sub-Saharan Africa made such strides.

“The whole climate has changed,” said Nicholas Burnett, who produces an annual global report on schooling for Unesco. “Resources are becoming available. You can definitely see the attitudes of African parents changing. Africa is starting to move in such a positive direction.”

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Crowds of Pupils but Little Else in African Schools

 

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

Published: December 30, 2006

BAMAKO, Mali — Even before workers hung the last wooden shutter on the new classrooms here, School H was overcrowded.

In a community school, one created by parents, children recently attended a second-grade class in Bamako, Mali. The school is next to the newly opened and overcrowded public School H.