Disturbing Lessons from Free Primary Education in Sub Saharan African: A Case of Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi & Mozambique

Abstract

A study on the progress of free primary education in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique was conducted via literature search. A critical analysis of statistics from local and international websites was done with the aim of assessing the progress of free primary education in Sub Saharan Africa. Several conclusions were made about the progress of free primary education in Sub Saharan Africa. The first observation was that, there has been a steady progress in education in relation to the out of primary school rates as well as dropout over the past three decades. The African governments failed to eradicate the out of primary school children’s exorbitant numbers since 1990. As at 1990, 38.8 million primary aged students were out of schools in Sub Saharan Africa. The figure dropped to 34.1 million as of 2016. The second observation was that the African governments have been reluctant to set the actual cost of primary education per student per year. An average cost of less than $14 per primary student per year paid as grant by the Sub Saharan governments is insufficient to promote quality. Finally, whereas education has been perceived to be a vehicle of dealing with inequality, free primary education was observed to be fueling inequality among the students within, between countries and globally. Therefore, African governments should set strong monitoring and evaluation departments with the aim of eradicating challenges of free primary education. The problems of teacher-students ratio, dropout and out of primary school children has been there three decades ago and even today. A strong monitoring and evaluation systems could have eliminated these challenges in 1990s.