PANAPRESS
Panafrican News Agency
Three-year plan to improve education in Africa launched
Tunis, Tunisia (PANA) – A three-year plan to address the quality of education in Africa was launched in Tunis on Friday with various education officials from Africa calling for radical reforms to set guidelines for the sector.
The programme, which begins in 2011, to be hosted in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou, is on theme, “Education and training in service of Africa’s sustainable development.”
Organisers say that the goal is to adapt education mechanisms to train competences to meet the needs expressed by companies and the job market.
In addition to the officials from the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), the key player of the event, several African ministers attended the ceremony marking the official launch of the plan whose major objective aims, according to experts, at taking up the challenge of the improvement of the quality of education.
According to ADEA, the objective of the programme is also to “promote knowledge, competences and qualifications likely to take up the challenges of Africa’s sustainable development”.
In this context, ADEA proposes to mobilize all political, economic and social actors around the need to work out efficient and pertinent education and training mechanisms.
ADEA said the three-year plan should answer the question of how African countries could work out and implement the present and future systems of the reforms and innovations transforming those systems so that they could produce efficiently a mass of critical competences for sustainable development.
ADEA noted that the present education mechanisms, despite the important efforts engender “huge failures”.
According to Richard Walther, an international consultant in education, between 50 and 70% of the education system runs for 12-13 years and only 5% study technical sciences, whereas the needs expressed by African countries is about 50%.
To face those shortages, he calls for a paradigm shift and advocates the use of traditional paths to promote the competences and move towards a renovated learning with relation to the demands of the professional sector and the needs for development.
Walther said the three-year plan for education in Africa, therefore, must see to it that most young people were trained on the basis of the demands expressed by companies and society, which would not fail to stimulate the economic activity likely to favour sustainable development.
-0- PANA BB/JSG/MSA/MA 4Dec2010
The programme, which begins in 2011, to be hosted in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou, is on theme, “Education and training in service of Africa’s sustainable development.”
Organisers say that the goal is to adapt education mechanisms to train competences to meet the needs expressed by companies and the job market.
In addition to the officials from the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), the key player of the event, several African ministers attended the ceremony marking the official launch of the plan whose major objective aims, according to experts, at taking up the challenge of the improvement of the quality of education.
According to ADEA, the objective of the programme is also to “promote knowledge, competences and qualifications likely to take up the challenges of Africa’s sustainable development”.
In this context, ADEA proposes to mobilize all political, economic and social actors around the need to work out efficient and pertinent education and training mechanisms.
ADEA said the three-year plan should answer the question of how African countries could work out and implement the present and future systems of the reforms and innovations transforming those systems so that they could produce efficiently a mass of critical competences for sustainable development.
ADEA noted that the present education mechanisms, despite the important efforts engender “huge failures”.
According to Richard Walther, an international consultant in education, between 50 and 70% of the education system runs for 12-13 years and only 5% study technical sciences, whereas the needs expressed by African countries is about 50%.
To face those shortages, he calls for a paradigm shift and advocates the use of traditional paths to promote the competences and move towards a renovated learning with relation to the demands of the professional sector and the needs for development.
Walther said the three-year plan for education in Africa, therefore, must see to it that most young people were trained on the basis of the demands expressed by companies and society, which would not fail to stimulate the economic activity likely to favour sustainable development.
-0- PANA BB/JSG/MSA/MA 4Dec2010
