By Dereje Wordofa, President, SOS Children’s Villages International and Elhadj As Sy, Board Chair, African Child Policy Forum
Sub-Saharan Africa hosts more than half of the world’s out-of-school children. The risk this poses to Africa’s future prosperity, economic growth and sustainable development are considerable, in addition to perpetuating intergenerational poverty. Combined with multiple economic, climate and conflict crises, in many African nations the debt burden is a significant obstacle to investing in education. On this Day of the African Child, we call on everyone with the best interests of children at heart to commit to removing all barriers to quality, free and relevant education for Africa’s children.
UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report says that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest education exclusion rates in the world. The figures are truly alarming – around one fifth of all primary school-age children, and more than half of upper secondary school-age youngsters, do not attend school. The latest figures show the out-of-school population in sub-Saharan Africa reached 98 million in 2021. But shocking though these statistics are, on top of the sheer scale of school exclusion from, the quality of education in Africa leaves much to be desired – around 89 percent of African children are said to be “learning poor” – meaning they are unable to read and understand a basic text at age 10, or when they complete third grade.
Low investment in education is a major factor behind this grim picture. For example, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for half of all low- and lower-middle-income nations but faces the largest share of the education financing gap, averaging US$70 billion a year. Education spending in many countries has stagnated at around four percent of GDP over the last five years, far below the Dakar commitment of ten percent. It has also declined in several other African countries. Given that millions of children are already deprived of education, this stagnation or decline in education budgets risks pushing even more children into being deprived of their basic right to education.
The political will to invest in education is lukewarm at best. But underlying this political indifference is the economic realities faced by many African countries. Stagnant or declining economic growth, high inflation, supply chain disruptions exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, elevated borrowing costs, exchange rate pressures, conflicts and political instability have all added to their financial woe. This gloomy economic outlook is further strained by substantial debt burdens, making it increasingly challenging to meet the educational needs of their ever-growing child populations. In 2024, African governments are projected to spend over a quarter of their public revenues on interest payments. Countries such as Angola, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Zambia are particularly affected, with fiscal deficits ranging from 4.6 percent of GDP in Egypt to 8.6 percent in Algeria.
According to the Global Campaign for Education, more than half of Africa’s sub-Saharan countries have doubled their external debt since the 2008 financial crisis, with Ethiopia, Zambia and Uganda among the worst hit. Servicing this debt diverts funds from essential services – including education.
Research indicates that the debt crisis in many African countries is exacerbated by high interest rates. In 2022 alone, low- and middle-income countries globally paid a record US$443.5 billion to service their external public and publicly guaranteed debt.
The double-whammy of high external debt and high interest rates disproportionately harms the most vulnerable children, whose families lack the resources to pay for private education. Children growing up without parental care are some of the most affected. One recent study commissioned by the African Union revealed that 35 million African children grow up without parental care, increasing their risks and vulnerabilities, including limited access to education.
Schools also often provide critical services such as feeding programmes, which can increase household income by up to 15 percent in low-income areas. Yet as a recent example from Kenya shows, school feeding programmes also face budget cuts as cash-strapped governments ‘reprioritise’ their spending plans.
This grim state of affairs underscores the need for a new approach to education funding and a heightened sense of political commitment at the national level. Such an approach must include reducing external debt and enhancing national capacity – in financing and managing finances – to ensure that policies and resources specifically benefit the most marginalised. Lessons from structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s highlight the damaging impact of debt on education and social development.
A robust national fiscal environment is also essential for sustainable government spending on social services, but will only be achieved by reducing trade deficits, increasing tax revenue, transitioning out of the informal economy, and taxing foreign investments.
We applaud the African Union’s designation of 2024 as the year of education under the theme Educate an African fit for the 21st century: Building resilient education systems for increased access to inclusive, lifelong, quality, and relevant learning in Africa. But as we commemorate the Day of the African Child, we call on all African countries to:
- improve both access to, and the quality of, education for their children
- significantly increase public investment in education
- strengthen the resilience of their education system to cope with multiple crises
But our challenge is not solely to African nations: we also call on the international community to find ways of providing debt relief and reducing the high debt-servicing burdens of African countries. Debt relief programmes are vital to alleviate the pressure that debt servicing has on education spending.