Document details

Africa Prospect: Progress in Education

Paris: UNESCO (1966), 111 pp.

Contains illustrations

Other editions: also published in French

"Africa Prospect, in the opening chapter, summarizes the progress made and indicates the problems encountered and those that remain unsolved. Primary school enrolment has overshot the Addis Ababa targets. So, in many a country, has the proportion of the national budget available for financing education. Numbers of students in secondary schools and higher educational institutions have increased. But school attendance in primary schools is still low compared with enrolment, and there is the continuing fearful waste of intellectual energy in millions of illiterates. Nevertheless, the balance is on the credit side; and this needs to be widely known, not least in Africa itself. In the following chapters the author gives accounts of projects and programmes in different fields of education being carried out in nine countries which he visited in 1965. These pictures of action are illustrative of what is happening throughout Africa. The booklet, as a whole, can be seen as a sequel to the author’s previous booklet, Africa Calls, which was written following a visit to Africa at the time of the Addis Ababa Conference, to give a wide public a general idea of the problems of educational development in Africa, of how the countries of Africa proposed to face them, and of the ways in which the international community under the leadership of Unesco could help the African countries." (Preface)
"In this work which is concerned with progress in education, a monograph is devoted to audio-visual education in Ghana — It seems to indicate that the cinema is an ideal weapon in the campaign against illiteracy and that it is all too often neglected in favour of the written word." (Jean-Marie Van Bol, Abdelfattah Fakhfakh: The use of mass media in the developing countries. Brussels: CIDESA, 1971 Nr. 944, topic code 510, 310.320)
Introduction: Five years after Addis Ababa, 13
Primary education: Madagascar takes a new approach, 35
Secondary education: Teacher training in Nigeria, 43
Higher education: East Africa's new university, 52
Literacy campaign: Mali's war on illiteracy, 65
Adult education: Senegal launches a pilot project, 74
Audio-visual education: Fetishes and forts in Ghana, 83
Textbooks: Printing plant in Cameroon, 89
School buildings: Regional Bureau in Sudan, 96
News services: Yaoundé gets its daily news, 104
Conclusion, 111