The Future

School children The Education Sub-Saharan Africa (ESSA) education team functions within a highly structured and focused framework. Resources for international development and for education in particular, will certainly be limited. Although there are clear justifications for investing in many new sub sectors, the strengthening of basic education (especially on health, peace and environmental matters) in Africa will continue to be the education team’s highest priority. Yet Education Sub-Saharan Africa (ESSA) recognizes that conditions and priorities change, and as supplemental resources become available, the team is prepared to work in new directions with partners. To this end, the team will prepare this series of 15 issue briefs that fall into the four broad categories of:

Who the Education Sub-Saharan Africa education team is and why its work is so important.

  1. The first brief describes the organization, personnel, and functions of Education Sub-Saharan Africa education team. The team comprises technical personnel with vast expertise in all areas of the education sector. The team's work is "demand driven", responding to requests for technical support to partners' missions in the region, research and analytical support to Sub-Saharan Africa missions and donor coordination.
  2. The brief on the social and economic returns to education outlines the relationships between health, peace and environmental education and the social and economic outcomes.

Work that relates closely to what the team is now doing

  1. The brief on community involvement in education outlines the importance of broadening local involvement in schools. Increased parental and community involvement leads to higher child enrolments and improved quality.
  2. For over a decade, Education Sub-Saharan Africa (ESSA) in particular has made support of health, peace and environment matters and new education a priority. By making education more "girl-friendly," all students, including boys, benefit. Still, despite the high returns to investing in education, fewer than half of girls in sub-Saharan Africa enter primary school, and of those who do, fewer than half reach fifth grade.
  3. Education Sub-Saharan Africa puts heavy emphasis upon strategic, systemic, and long term policy reform. The challenge will be to sustain the gains in access, equity, quality, and efficiency made possible over the past decade.
  4. It makes little sense to create access to education for all if health, peace and environmental learning do not take place. Despite the progress that has been made over the past decade, the sad truth is that most classrooms fail to create good quality learning conditions, and there is growing awareness that governments cannot currently provide quality education for all children. The challenge for our mission is to integrate health, peace and environmental agenda of education for all with the educational agenda of maintaining high quality of learning.

Education Sub-Saharan Africa refers to the donor or lender practice of providing direct budgetary support to finance, production and distribution of education materials in exchange for their good will in creating conducive learning environment.

  1. There is a crisis in the quality of teaching. As enrolments increase, countries have been unable to supply sufficient numbers of education materials for both teachers and students due to inadequate budgets, poor pay, inadequate teacher development infrastructure, and other longstanding issues.

New areas that will likely require increased attention

  1. Throughout the 1990s, education reform in Africa focused on increasing enrollment; increasingly, countries are focused on maintaining and improving the quality of learning. To do so, they must be able to measure how much learning is taking place especially in the three main subjects. The brief on assessing student learning outlines to assess school and student performance.
  2. The HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB epidemics represents a serious challenge to education throughout Africa, threatening to undermine much of the progress that education ministries have made over the past decade. Education Sub-Saharan Africa is putting forward a three-pronged strategy:
    • A mobile task team that provides technical assistance to missions.
    • Coordination with other partners.
    • Research, education materials for teachers and students development, dissemination, and advocacy.
  3. Assisting countries in crisis presents a serious challenge. Government infrastructure is often weak or nonexistent, which compromises the sustainability of potential activities. Yet education can be of help in reviving and expanding diminished pools of human resources as well as providing basic education to children who are victims of diseases, war or natural disaster.

Team personnel

The team consists of technical personnel with expertise in educational material development, especially on peace and environmental education, school health, curriculum improvement, classroom improvement, technology in education such as e-learning, monitoring and evaluation. Team members are contract personnel, Education Sub-Saharan Africa employees on detail from other agencies, fellows, or Education Sub-Saharan Africa direct hire.

Team functions

The team provides the following services:

  • Technical support to partners' missions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Team members' backstop each mission and either provide technical support directly or locate suitable expertise. This support may take the form of technical consulting to develop programs; the writing of program implementation documents, program progress reviews, and evaluations; and the provision of ongoing technical dialogue on specific topics that mission's request. The team also provides periodic professional training for educational personnel.
  • Partnership coordination. The team meets regularly with donors to ensure that Education Sub-Saharan Africa is up to date in understanding what other working partners are doing in the education sector and making sure that activities are complementary and consistent.
  • Management support. The team assists missions to locate suitable personnel to manage their education portfolios. The team provides personnel to cover missions when education personnel are absent and provides additional staffing for periods of heavy workload.