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	From 1998-2001 the aggregate percentage spend of African nations on public expenditure on education was only 5,2%.
	Fourteen of the 22 countries in the world with literacy rates below 60% are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
	Teacher shortage: the region needs to recruit an average of 6% more teachers each year.
	According to the Washington DC based Basic Education Coalition, more than 46 million children in Africa are not in school and this figure represents more than 40% of the world’s out of school children.
	Universal free education to all primary students is being adopted by several nations and efforts to close the gender gap in education are yielding increasing success.

General Education & Higher Education

Today education in Sub-Saharan Africa is for the most part moving sideways, as there has yet to be the level of investment in African school systems necessary to develop across the continent-globally competitive primary, secondary and tertiary education institutions. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimated that in 2018, on average, only 61% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa could read and write with understanding, which is one of the lowest adult literacy rates in the world. The absolute number of adult illiterates continues to rise because of high population growth, from 133 million in 1990 to around 144 million today. More than 60% are women. Adult literacy rates range from 19% in Mali to 90% in Seychelles. Fourteen of the 22 countries in the world with literacy rates below 60% are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

National and international learning assessments continue to underscore poor literacy and numeracy skills in some parts of the continent. Africa has a high incidence of grade repetition which is close to or above 20% in more than half the countries with data available and acute teacher shortages as the region needs to recruit an average of 6% more teachers each year. This, despite the fact that between 2004 and 2015 an additional 1.6 million teachers were recruited.

There are also significant infrastructural challenges on the continent (not enough school buildings, too few school buildings with electricity, and not enough books and available learning materials). The educational attainment profile in Africa is also not helped by the fact that roughly 60% of all Africans live in rural areas and are engaged in subsistence farming. School-age children in these environments are also part of the expected labour pool of rural African families and as such many do not complete primary school as they are required by their families to work their land.

While the age at which African girls and young women are giving birth across the continent is not as low as it once was, the expectation that young women should help their mothers and aunts at home and in the villages till persists across a large number of countries. The day-to-day requirements of rural ‘life’ are keeping a large majority of Africa’s school-age young people out of school. According to the Washington DC based Basic Education Coalition, more than 46 million children in Africa are not in school and this figure represents more than 40% of the world’s out of school children.

To address the myriad of challenges, African nations, through the African Union and the African Union Development Agency – NEPAD have re-doubled their efforts to strengthen the educational systems across the continent. Computer and internet assisted distance education has been identified as an important tool to support learning at all levels on the continent and stakeholders such as UNESCO, the World Bank and a number of bilateral donors have developed programmes to connect African primary and secondary schools to the internet. Distance learning has also been adopted at the tertiary educational level as well.

Universal free education to all primary students is being adopted by several nations and efforts to close the gender gap in education are yielding increasing success. The efforts by African nations to receive increased debt relief and accept creditors adhering to structural adjustment repayment prescriptions allows the countries to allocate more of their budgets to education. Yet for the foreseeable future, there will be a serious battle waged to educate in particular African youth.

Higher education in Africa has been under-developed over the past three decades. Access to higher education for the relevant age group remains at 5%, the lowest regional average in the world, just one-fifth of the global average of about 25%. Women are underrepresented in higher education particularly in the science and technology fields. While there are institutions of higher learning in East Africa and Southern Africa that are improving their standing in global academic rankings, not a single Western and Central African university features in the rankings of the world’s best 500 academic institutions.

Further, a backlog of reforms has accumulated over the last decades. A key consequence of underdeveloped higher education institutions is also high rates of migration of talent out of Africa in pursuit of training and research opportunities abroad. The contradiction of unemployed graduates and the lack of a highly skilled workforce continues to plague many African economies. Currently, most African countries face human resource shortages and limited capacity within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines as well as in the agriculture and health disciplines.

Higher education in Africa also faces severe constraints in terms of the attainment of a critical mass of quality faculty. The average percentage of staff with a Ph.D. in public higher education institutions in Africa is estimated to be less than 20%.

Many departments do not have more than 1 or 2 senior professors and many who are there are close to the retirement age. This prevents departments and universities from being able to provide relevant higher education training and to be able to establish vibrant research environments. Moreover, low salaries of faculty, lack of research funding and equipment, as well as limited autonomy provide disincentives for professors to stay in African universities. Academic disruptions due to strikes by staff and/or students arising from a number of factors including poor administrative leadership and lack of resources are other challenges confronting African higher education.

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According to a recent World Economic Forum ranking of Secondary Education systems in Africa, Seychelles, Tunisia, and Mauritius rank among the top educational systems on the continent. These rankings are based on skills development and the quality of instruction.

With respect to highest ranking tertiary institutions in Africa, Egypt and South Africa are the two-best represented countries. Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa all have universities in the top 500 of the global ranking.