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Literacy in French-Speaking Africa: A Situational Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Adama Ouane  and
Yvette Amon-Tanoh
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Extract

This paper addresses the issue of the state of education today in French-speaking Africa, with specific reference to literacy, post-literacy, and their perspectives for the year 2000. While a very pessimistic overall picture is presented in the literature, both by educational researchers and development and funding agencies, new approaches to the matter are emerging. First, from the previous linear relationship of education to other economic, social, and environmental factors, more and more authors now perceive education as an interdependent variable which mutually reinforces other economic, social, and cultural development factors. Education, it is realized, should not be restricted to the achievement of objectives such as employability and isolated from the global evolution of economic sectors (Hugon, 1988; Dave, Ouane, and Sutton, 1989). Hence, a new sort of applied economics of education is needed (Easton, 1989: 440). Linked to this notion, and no less important, is the perception that education should be constructed as a global system which offers combinations of approaches of equal potential value—formal, nonformal and even informal.

Second, the notion of development itself is questioned as well as its impact on education. The call is for humanization of development. The concept of development has long departed from narrow economic growth to include both a more equitable distribution of the wealth generated by and access to the supporting political structures. The failure of development policies in developing countries, and specifically in Africa, has aroused new interest in culture as an essential dimension for social change if not as the central dimension of development (Amin, 1989; Thompson, 1981, UNESCO, 1982).

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , December 1990 , pp. 21 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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