N'Dri T. Assié-Lumumba

Educational and Economic Reforms, Gender Equity, and Access to Schooling in Africa

This paper investigates the relationship between economic reforms, particularly the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) and educational policies with regard to gender equity in access to schooling in Africa. Using qualitative, historical, and quantitative methods and based on data from UNESCO and African Development Bank, it analyzes the impact of economic factors, specifically gross domestic investment, public expenditure on education as a percentage of gross national product, public expenditure on education as a percentage of government expenditure, and government deficit/surplus as a percentage of GDP at current prices, on women’s access to higher education. 1. Introduction: Issues and Objectives THIS PAPER IS divided into five major sections including the introduction that presents the issues and objectives. The second part deals with specifications regarding the concepts and methodology. The third section recalls the unequal original distribution of education and the quest for gender equality as articulated in some of the educational reform documents and experiences. The fourth section analyzes the economic crisis, reforms, and especially the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and the impact of their conditionalities on social services, with focus on the education sector as a whole. The fifth section examines more specifically the structural relation between the economic crisis, the SAPs, and women’s access to higher education. The conclusion addresses some of the issues for future educational development and research direction in the next century. Following the political independence of African countries that started in the 1950s, the next two decades were characterized by high optimism in the possi

Sustaining Home-Grown Innovations in Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa : A Critical Reflection

In the early post-colonial period, African leaders articulated in unison the necessity for promoting substantive change in their inherited systems through reforms. Paradoxically, during the same period they built new higher education institutions, especially universities, modeled after those in the former colonizing colonial powers. As the majority of these reforms were not satisfactorily implemented, since the beginning of this first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been greater interest in innovations as a more focused and promising strategy for change to improve the performance of the universities. This paper is basically a reflective essay that conceptualizes innovative strategy as a necessary and permanent corrective tool to redress and prevent institutional deficiencies. After presenting some of the African experiences in recent innovations, it examines the conditions for rooting and sustaining home-grown innovations. Given the powerful dependency framework and the external control over the financial resources, national policies are in effect set by external powers. The latter determine priorities in Africa including the type of innovations that may be considered worth being supported. It is argued that the most effective way to sustain innovations in African higher education for social progress is to create the conditions in the learning system to foster innovative minds.

Cultural Foundations of the Idea and Practice of the Teaching Profession in Africa: Indigenous roots, colonial intrusion, and post‐colonial reality

In this article I analyze some of the cultural factors that have determined and influenced the teaching profession and its evolution in African countries. Firstly, I use an historical approach to review conceptual issues on teachers, teaching and learning; secondly, I examine salient features of the idea and practices of teachers and teaching in the pre‐colonial and less Westernized contemporary African contexts and elements of Quranic schools; thirdly, I offer an account of how teachers were introduced to formal learning of European education in the colonial era; and, fourthly, I examine the declining prestige and other outstanding issues of teaching and the teaching profession amidst the call of quality Education for All. In the main, most African countries have to grapple with the daunting challenges of providing quality education to the entire school‐age populations in African countries, especially with the approaching 2015 date for meeting the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of achieving universal primary education and Education For All (EFA). At the secondary level and even more clearly articulated for higher education, there is a sense of urgency in providing quality education particularly in science and technology to position Africa with competent human resources in the global economy. Paradoxically, however, the perceived and actual prestige of the teaching profession and the social status of the teacher as a professional category, especially at the lower levels of the educational systems, have not consistently been positive.

The owl of Minerva on a baobab tree, schooling, and African awakening: half a century of post-colonial education for development in Africa

N’Dri Assié-Lumumba,*,a with Ali A. Mazruib and Martial Dembéléc a) Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University Email: n.assie-lumumba@cornell.edu b) Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, SUNY Email: amazrui@binghamton.edu c) Département d’administration et fondements de l’éducation, Faculté des sciences de l’éducation, Université de Montréal Email: martial.dembele@umontreal.ca