Placing human rights at the heart of education policy in Africa

With several schools across Africa reopening, Amnesty International has released a report that highlighted the depth of the inequality in Africa’s education system. Rather concerningly, the global Covid-19 pandemic has seemingly connived with African governments’ failures to worsen this inequality.

This aforementioned report is a follow-up to another, released in February 2020, just before Covid-19 struck, which found a broken and unequal state of education in Africa. That report uncovered blatant inequalities in Africa’s education system, uncovering how the infrastructure of schools serving poorer communities does not meet minimum government standards for educational facilities.

An unequal system

The current report also finds that the schools with poor infrastructure, serving children in Africa’s poorer communities, also most likely found it most difficult to provide continued education during the lockdown.

To buttress the foregoing, in South Africa, only 22% of households have a computer and 10% have access to the internet. Data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study of 2015 shows that for no-fee schools (the poorest 75%), less than half of children in a class have a computer with internet access. Only in the wealthiest 5% of schools do at least 90% of learners have access to a computer and the internet at home.

If we’ll agree to use the above as a proxy, it will be evident that most children and teenagers from poorer African communities have little prospects to participate in online learning. And their parents or wards are usually not in a position to homeschool them. Even the support being provided to learners via television and radio is plagued with limitations when it comes to measuring grades and the number of hours covered.

Furthermore, research by Amnesty International and others show that even as schools reopen across Africa, many schools – particularly those serving poorer communities – have very poor infrastructure and are ill-equipped to become Covid-19 safe. It is impossible to maintain hygiene and handwashing measures at schools where there is no running water or adequate sanitation. It is also impossible to be socially distant in class when classrooms are already severely overcrowded.

In order to ensure that all schools can comply with the Covid-19 guidelines, African governments need to prioritize the pupils and students’ rights to life and to dignity by addressing the infrastructural and decadence of the African educational landscape.

African governments would be wise to prioritize schools that continue to fall below the minimum government standards for educational facilities whilst ensuring that all schools have sufficient supplies of PPE. Providing facilities to allow remote or blended learning when schools are closed should also be prioritized.

Finally…

Africa needs to put human rights at the heart of its policies, plans and response to Covid-19  in order to ensure that all students and pupils, regardless of their status and circumstances, can benefit from a decent education and the life opportunities it might bring.