Literacy issues in the African context

Abstract

Despite the proportion of illiterate people in sub-Saharan Africa having declined between 1985 and 2008, the number of illiterates has actually increased during the period. It is within this context, that since April 2000, the international community has been committed to six Education for All goals. One of these goals is to achieve a 50 per cent improvement in adult literacy levels by 2015. This thesis aims to analyse how primary education and literacy programs (two processes on which educational policy can intervene) enable the populations of sub-Saharan Africa to acquire basic reading skills. In the vast majority of African countries, the analysis based on household surveys shows that schooling to the end of the primary cycle is not sufficient to enable literacy as an adult, and the former also show that it is critical to have had education of some quality. Furthermore, the individual literacy levels can be very different from one country to another, even with the same teaching time. This shows significant disparities in terms of educational quality. These disparities cannot be explained by differences in the levels of resources allocated to educational systems. The former would rather appear to be related to differences on the one hand, in the teaching time received by individuals, and on the other, to how the school is organized within this time. If primary education, as it currently operates, is not enough to ensure sustainable literacy for individuals, thus this implies that literacy activities play a significant role. The analysis of household surveys shows that participation in literacy programs is, on average, quite limited in SSA. In addition, there is high variability between countries in terms of the impacts of literacy activities on reading skills. This is probably due to the wide variety of the literacy programs that are implemented. This diversity, combined with no real national policy on the development of literacy, makes it very diffi