The Wealth of Today and Tomorrow
Good education for all is the key to a better long-term future for the Sahel region. Education improves employability and incomes, narrows gender gaps, lifts families out of poverty, strengthens institutions, and yields benefits that echo to the ne...
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/undefined/099435212132112883/P17575207b1dce0580a677098f731b3625b http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36725 |
| Summary: | Good education for all is the key to
a better long-term future for the Sahel region. Education
improves employability and incomes, narrows gender gaps,
lifts families out of poverty, strengthens institutions, and
yields benefits that echo to the next generation. The good
news is that the region has taken the important first steps
toward building this future. Many more children have been
able to access education over the past 15 years: enrollment
in the region has nearly doubled in primary education and
tripled in secondary education. And governments have
launched numerous initiatives and announced high-level
commitments in support of education. Still, many children
remain out of school, and those who are in school learn far
less than they should. Of the region’s primary-school-age
children, 40 percent are out of school. Furthermore, the
region’s learning poverty rate is 88 per-cent—meaning that
only 12 percent of children are enrolled in school and able
to read and comprehend an age-appropriate passage by late
primary age. Access is lower at other levels of education:
enrollment is below 56 percent in lower secondary throughout
the Sahel G5 and between 2 and 10 percent in pre-primary and
tertiary. All these contributing factors result in low
education attainment in the Sahel region and therefore low
productivity. In Niger, for example, 72 percent of current
working-age adults have no education at all. In every Sahel
country, fewer than 50 percent of adult females are
literate, compared with 59 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa as
a whole and 80 percent in low- and middle-in-come countries.
This figure drops to 23 percent for females living in the
Sahel rural areas. Even among the youngest segment of the
labor force—youth aged 15-24, reading and writing
performance in the Sahel is relatively low, with literacy
rates ranging from 45 to 66 percent, while the average in
Sub-Saharan Africa is 77 percent. Additionally, the poorest
children and youth, and those affected by conflict, who most
need a good education to have a chance in life, suffer the
most from failings in education access and quality. The
upper secondary enrollment rate is only 5 percent for the
poorest rural girls, versus 100 percent for urban boys in
the wealthiest quintile. |
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