Education for Development: Relevance and Implications for the African Context

Abstract

ABSTRACT This theoretical paper discusses the challenges of promoting genuine educational reforms and options in Africa. The author presents a discursive critique of the conventional processes for the delivery of education in calling for a re-examination of the fundamental ways in which the structures for teaching, learning and administration of education can serve the needs of local people and communities. Part of the problem of African development is the failure of so-called development initiatives to speak to African realities and conditionalities. Educational change in Africa must connect academic and research scholarship with practical local engagement for a genuinely African-centred development. Specifically, an African-centred development would require that formal and informal educational systems interrogate and use the positive (solution-oriented) aspects of the local cultural resource base of African people fo their contributions to the development process. The task of educational transformation is not only to reform existing curriculum and school pedagogical practices, but also to address the internal problems of gender discrimination, as well as ethnic, regional and class prejudice and alienation that afflict schooling and education in many African communities.