Impact of Education Quality on Sustainable Development in Africa
This chapter investigates the role of education in achieving sustainable development and whether it can reasonably be expected to improve the state of underdevelopment from which Africa suffers. The chapter uses Sudan as a case study for a typical African
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ion Africa is a continent in crisis. Despite being rich in natural resources, it is blighted by widespread poverty, corruption, bad governance and a very low standard of living in many countries. The contribution of Africa to global research and the global economy is very low, as is evident in all statistics coming from reputable international organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the World Economic Forum. In Dafa’Alla et al. (2015, 2016), we presented the meaning, goals and objectives of education as a human right and argued that, realistically, the existing or prevailing social, political and economic conditions of life
A.A. Dafa’Alla (*) • E.S. Hussein AIRBUS, Bristol, UK M.A.A. Adam Sudanese Knowledge Society, Khartoum, Sudan © The Author(s) 2017 A. Ahmed (ed.), Managing Knowledge and Innovation for Business Sustainability in Africa, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41090-6_6
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are taken into consideration and largely determine the aims of pragmatic education. This is particularly true for developing countries, which need to optimise their resources in order to serve their national development plans and goals as best as they can. Our aim in this chapter is to investigate the role of education in achieving sustainable development, and whether it can reasonably be expected to improve the state of underdevelopment from which Africa suffers. Sudan is considered as representative of many African countries that have emerged from the colonial phase and are still trying to find their footing in the modern world, with varying degrees of success. Like many African countries, Sudan also inherited a British colonial education system that was designed to prepare the Sudanese only for taking up certain subordinate positions in government offices (Mohamed 2005). It was not intended to develop among the people capacities to take leadership and initiative in different walks of life. Hence, the aims and objectives of the education system were adjusted after independence to put more emphasis on promoting education to serve the development needs of the country economically, technologically, culturally as well as socially. Accordingly, in this chapter we will review the performance of the education system in post-independence Sudan in order to understand and relate major reforms that took place during this period and assess their impact on the economic performance of the country. We will then generalise and apply lessons learned from the Sudanese experience to the problem of underdevelopment in the whole continent of Africa.
Literature Review It is not the intention of this section to cover the literature on education in general. Rather, it will review three important themes central to the objectives of the chapter, namely the evolution of the concept of education as a human right, the importance of the link between education aims and objectives and the national development plan (NDP), and modelling education as a ‘system’
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