Education must not fail another generation by Obasanjo

MY life was utterly changed at the age of eight when I was sent to school – a journey that saw me abroad for further and higher education.
This precious education meant I could return to my country and support efforts to improve the lives of future generations and make meaningful contribution to development process all over the continent of Africa.
This was more than five decades ago. Today, as the publication this week of UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report shows, we the world continue to fail our children.
The UNESCO report shows that one in five young people in developing countries have never completed primary school. In Nigeria where I grew up, we have more children out of school today than we had at independence.

Education is not merely a problem for the education ministries to solve. In today’s global economy, failing to provide proper education will undermine economic growth and reinforce social inequalities.

Africa has some of the world’s fastest growing economies, as we highlight in our 2012 Africa Progress Report, and this pace looks set to continue for the coming years. But oil and minerals alone will not sustain this economic growth. And development indicators suggest the growth figures are much less impressive than they initially seem.

Places like the Republic of Korea and other East Asian ‘tiger’ economies teach us that a meaningful and sustainable growth surge can only be maintained by emphasizing the development of our youth with skills and education.
At the Africa Progress Panel, we talk about a “twin crisis” in Africa’s education. The numbers of children out of school may have dropped significantly between 2000 and 2009 but Africa is still on track to have 17 million children out of school in 2025, a decade after the world’s 2015 target date for universal primary education.
Meanwhile, many African children are receiving an education of abysmal quality. Far from equipping themselves for a globalized economy, millions of Africans emerge from primary school lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills.
They face the prospect of marginalization, poverty, and insecure unemployment. They easily fall into crime and squalor.
UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report shows that investment in schoolchildren and students represents a sound financial opportunity.
If 75 per cent more 15-year-olds reached the most basic benchmark in maths, then economic growth could improve by 2.1 per cent, and 104 million people could be lifted out of poverty.  An African NGO, Camfed (The Campaign for Female Education), supports poor girls from rural areas with grants and training in business management, for example.
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