If in Africa health service’s and transports’ data are negative, education is living some positive trends: the number of children attending primary school is increasing. This leads to an increase in basic notions and an almost perfect knowledge of an international language.
In Kenya, for example, children attending class 1 start their school course in English, learning words and grammatical rules from the beginning. When they achieve their first diploma, they have a good knowledge of spoken and written English, which becomes their second language after Swahili, their mother tongue.
A school in Nairobi.
But let’s not cross optimism’s borders: in sub-Saharan Africa, at least 30 million school-age children are excluded from school system.
UNESCO experts say that sub-Saharan Africa has registered some uneven progress towards EFA since 2000. Even though the pace of progress towards universal primary education in the region has been faster than during the 1990s, some countries have lagged behind and some goals, such as early childhood care and education (ECCE), the learning needs of young people and adults, adult literacy and the quality of education, have received insufficient attention. Most countries failed to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2012 and the region is still home to nearly 30 million children of primary school age out of school.
