Education In West Africa Research Articles

Gender discrimination and education in West Africa: strategies for maintaining girls in school

Girls’ enrolment in primary schools has achieved significant increase and parity with male enrolment in many countries in Africa since the 1960s. Some of these countries include Botswana, Namibia and Tanzania. However, in most Sub‐Saharan African countries, female enrolment still lags behind male enrolment. This paper examines some of the reasons for the persistent gender gap between females and males in the three African countries of Ghana, Nigeria and Togo within the West Africa sub‐region. It discusses gender relations, cultural practices such as early marriage, child slavery, and child fostering/trafficking, poverty and multiple household duties for girls as some of the contributing factors. It is argued that unless these cultural beliefs and attitudes are changed and mandatory measures such as holding parents accountable and responsible are put in place, gender parity and quality education for all, especially for females, will not be achieved in Africa. A number of additional strategies for improvement in school attendance and retention for females are also discussed.

Teacher Trainees in Ghana in the Early 1960s: Women and the Teaching of Home Science

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 8 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 103 TEACHER TRAINEES IN GHANA IN THE EARLY 1960s Women and the Teaching of Home Science RICHARD GLOTZER LILA ENGBERG I was happy I could impress Ghanaian illiterate women ... these women are old and will die away soon, giving way to the young folk; ... why not help the young girls to develop in one way or another? I therefore concluded to try and have a Housecraft course ... Prologue1 Young women were presented with unprecedented opportunities and challenges in the newly independent Ghana of the early 1960s. In their own words, a small group of teacher trainees reflect on how their upbringings and early education prepared them for the challenge of making a place for themselves in a society where rapid transition to western style modernity and resilient traditional values coexisted in uneasy rivalry, often mediated by vestiges of colonialism. Relying on interviews with their former teachers, archival sources, and autobiographies, this article examines three aspects of these women’s lives: their use of critical thinking skills—developed in a school curriculum discouraging critical thought; the influence of families on school achievement; and their assessment of future life and career aspirations. 1. Drafts this paper were presented at the Canadian Association for African Studies Annual Meeting, Sherbrooke, Quebec (May, 1999), and the Midwest Alliance for African Studies, University of Kansas at Lawrence (October, 1999). Grants from the Rockefeller Archives Center, North Tarrytown, N.Y. to the first author for a larger project on Anglo-American relations in post-war Africa, supported portions of this research. 104 Ghana Studies • volume 8 • 2005 Introduction In 1943 Fred Clarke, one of Britain’s foremost educators, prepared a typescript memorandum, Mass Education of African Peoples, recommending greatly expanded opportunities for girls and women in education and society . Looking ahead to the post war period, Clarke sought a gradual inclusion of women into an expanded educational system leading to broader roles in African societies. Writing for colleagues on a Colonial Office Subcommittee , his ideas were subsumed in Mass Education in African Society (1944), a report largely silent about women. Tampering with African family roles and social structure at a time when large numbers of young African men would be demobilizing after war service seemed inadvisable.2 Within a few short years Britain’s post-war African development plans would be in disarray. The Gold Coast Colony, believed to be the most advanced and stable of Britain’ s West African territories achieved home rule in 1951 and independence as Ghana in 1957. Gone were the gradualist notions of infrastructure development.3 In its place was the scramble to develop national institutions, embracing Ghanaian aspirations and western style modernity while preserving African authenticity. The government’s rapid expansion of places in primary education led to increased competition for scarce places at the secondary level.4 With elementary education now compulsory, just over 500,000 children were 2. CO 879/148, CO No. 186., 1944, Colonial Office Archives, Kew, London, U. K., also Timothy Parsons, “Dangerous Education? The Army as School in Colonial East Africa”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 28, 1 2000, pp. 112–134. 3. In the 1940s the Elliot Commission on Higher Education in West Africa recommended establishing one English speaking University for the whole of British West Africa to serve Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria. By the l950s, popular sentiment, symbolized by the 1958 All Africa People’s Party Conference in Accra, dashed plans for a single university (to be based in Ibadan, Nigeria) in favor of national institutions. Clive Whitehead (1987) “The ‘Two-way Pull’ and the Establishment of University Education in British West Africa”, History of Education, 16, 2, pp. 119–133. 4. Foster, Philip (1965), Education and Social Change in Ghana. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 179–219. Glotzer and Engberg • Teacher Trainees in Ghana in the Early 1960s 105 in school, with many expecting to go on for post-primary education, also slated to become compulsory. While twice as many boys were at primary and middle school as girls, this represented a marked improvement over the...

Bilingual Education in West Africa: Does It Work?

This paper focuses on experimental bilingual programmes in Guinea-Bissau and Niger, West Africa. Both countries introduced transitional bilingual programmes in pilot schools and compared test results and teacher–pupil interaction between bilingual and monolingual (ex-colonial language) schools. Test results in Niger demonstrated that pupils who started in their mother tongues could read and write better even in the second language. Observations in both countries indicated that bilingual classrooms were more stimulating, interactive, and relaxed. Those who gained the most from participating in bilingual programmes in both countries were rural children and girls. The majority of parents surveyed were in favor of early schooling in the mother tongue and wished to see national languages used in other public contexts. Despite such positive results, the political will for bilingual reforms is still missing in both countries.

Action research in West African schools: problems and prospects

This paper investigates the claims of action research as an appropriate research methodology for investigating West African education. It suggests that since action research is sensitive to context and is directly relevant to practitioners, it might avoid some of the criticisms that have been levelled at some other methodologies. However, data from Ghana are used to problematize this position. The paper concludes with a discussion of ways in which collaboration between academics and teachers, based on action research, might develop so that both useful knowledge about education in West Africa is derived and practice is improved.

The Gold Coast Nationalist Reaction to the Controversy over Higher Education in Anglophone West Africa and its Impact on Decision Making in the Colonial Office, 1945-47

It has been widely assumed that African nationalism had no significant impact on educational policy making by the British Colonial Office until very late inthe colonial period. present articla refutes this generalistic and rather Eucoventric assumption, deriving its evidence largely from declassified primary official records. It demonstrates that nationalist pressure, especially from the Gold Coast (Ghana), was the crucial force behind the Colonial Office's decision to further higher education in Anglophone West Africa. Moreover, it reveals that the issue of establishing universities in Afriva was conceded within a wider context of the evolving colonial policy of planned neocolonialism. INTRODUCTION Passionately advocated by pan-Africanists as early as the 1870s and increasingly after the first World War, proposed by the National Congress of British West Africa in 1920, and championed by such revolutionary nationalists as Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, the idea of a West African university was generally resisted by colonial governors, who saw an educated African elite as a threat to European control. Eventually, however, the upheavals of the late 1930s and World War II forced Britain, which was then led by the Conservative Party, to reconsider its alliances with supposedly traditional African authorities and turn instead to the task of creating a Western-oriented buffer class to which administrative and political power could be incrementally transferred. As a result, institutions of higher education in West Africa became a possibility and a reality only within a strategy of decolonization-or, as Kwame Nkrumah (1968) has called it, neocolonialism. Moreover, the divergent reports of the Colonial Office's (hereafter CO) Elliot Commission sparked an acute two-year controversy between 1945 and 1947 over the future of higher education in Anglophone West Africa. That Commission's Majority Report, backed by three African and five British commissioners, called for the establishment of university colleges at Ibadan in Nigeria and Achimota in the Gold Coast (the nation presently known as Ghana) and for the reorganization of Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. Commission's Minority Report, backed by the opposition Labour Party's colonial expert, Arthur Creech-Jones, and four other commissioners, proposed the establishment of a single university college at Ibadan, along with the creation of territorial colleges that would serve as extramural centers in Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone. Nevertheless, as this article argues, the system of higher education that was eventually established in this region reflected, in important aspects, the wishes and interests of the West African elite, especially those of the Gold Coast. Historians of West African education have generally ignored the role of nationalist pressure upon colonial education policy and have tended to concetrate on other British universities, concentrates more on the phenomenon of educational adaptation fron one culture to another than on the political aspects of the subject. Hence, the relegates the nationalist events between 1945 and 1947 to a mere footnote. Other scholars illuminate the panAfricanist roots of the agitation for a West African university but neglect events between 1945 and 1947, when agitation became a matter of practical politics (King, 1971; Langley, 1973). Ajayi and Tamuno (1973) focus on the divelopment of the University of Ibadan after its founding in 1947, peripherizing the influence of the West African elite to a brief section titled The Anecedents. Eluwa's (1967) unpublished doctoral dissertatioin is closely related to the theme of the present study, but it does not go beyond 1930. Howard (1982) attempts to deal with the critical events between 1945 and 1947. He analyzes the impact of African educational models introduced by Africans returning from America, especially Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937-1969, 1961, 1970), whose radical journalism in the 1930s and 1940s sheds light on West African nationalism during its maturation stages. …

The ‘Germanophone’ elite of Douala under the French mandate

The centres of early Western education in West Africa, from whom came the junior staff of the Europeans in the early and middle colonial periods, included Douala, whose people provided most of such staff in German Kamerun and then in French Mandated Cameroun. The development of these coastal elites, insufficiently studied generally, has a particular historical interest in Douala because of the change of colonial regime.The influences of Christianity and German education on the Dualas was extensive by 1914. Duala clerks, however, adapted readily to work under French rule. The Dualas generally profited as owners of urban land and of cash crop plantations under the French, until the 1930s, as under the Germans.Continual anti-colonial protests were made under both regimes. But those against the French were attributed to the German culture or pro-German feelings of the protest leaders, or even active German intrigue among them. In fact former staff of the Germans who lived in the French period off plantation and other self-employment income were the hard core of protest leaders behind such acts as the 1929 self-government petition. Notable among them was Ferdinand Edinguele Meetom. But other ‘Germanophones’ were loyal to the French and helped to form their indispensable clerical staff. Generally, they continued to develop on the same lines under both regimes, with little change.

A comparative study of education for librarianship in West Africa

Formal library education was first organized in West Africa in 1944 when a library school was opened at Achimota College, Gold Coast. This school was established as a result of a survey conducted by Miss Ethel Fegan whose report was submitted to the British Colonial Office in 1944.1 The school was headed by Miss Fegan and financed jointly by the British Council and the Governments of the three colonies of Nigeria, Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. There were 14 students in all, made up of six from Nigeria, four from the Gold Coast, three from Sierra Leone and one from French Togo. Ten of these successfully sat for the entrance examination of the British Library Association.2 But the school was closed down after one year because, as Miss Evelyn Evans* pointed out, it was felt that more libraries were not likely to be established in the near future and therefore it was pointless to continue to train librarians for whom there would be no jobs. Harold Lancour4 later summed up the situation thus: “At that time there were no properly conceived or operated libraries to serve as examples of what could be accomplished. There was no cadre of trained and experienced people to conduct a training program. There was in no sense a library profession or tradition.” With the closure of this school came the end of the first experiment in formal library education in West Africa and it was several years after that before any such venture was attempted again. In the interval, however, some form of training was going on in the few libraries that then existed in the different countries. The British

Reception to Prison

Jonathan Bradshaw graduated in 1967 from Trinity College, Dublin, and took a Master's degree in Social Administration at York in 1971. Since 1970 he has been a lecturer in Social Administration in the Department of Social Administration and Social Work at the University of York. David Emerson was engaged for a number of years in Adult Education in West Africa and the Far East. In 1970 he completed a Diploma in Social Administration at York, and then worked as a Research Fellow on a child care project in the Institute for Social and Economic Research at York. He is currently Tutor in Health Service Admini stration at the University of York. David Haxby read classics at Cambridge, and after completing the Bristol applied social studies course in 1961, worked in the Bristol probation service. In 1965 he began working for the National Association of Probation Officers, later becoming the General Secretary. Since 1969 he has been a lecturer in Social Administration in the Department of Social Administration and Social Work at the University of York.

Archaeology in Nigeria

A quarter of a century ago Antiquity carried an article by A. J. Arkell (194.4) on 'Archaeological Research in West Africa'. This was the text of a memorandum submitted by request to the Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (the Elliott Commission), which recommended that in the then Gold Coast, now Ghana, the existing Achimota College should continue its originally envisaged development into a full university college and that the University College of Ibadan should be founded in Nigeria. Not only did these developments take place, but both institutions have since become autonomous degree-granting universities ; in addition two more universities have come into being in Ghana and four in Nigeria. Three of the universities in Nigeria and one of those in Ghana concern themselves with archaeology.

The re‐planning of junior science education in West Africa

The re‐planning of junior science education in West Africa

A Layman's View of Adult Education in West Africa

A Layman's View of Adult Education in West Africa

Education in West Africa

Education in West Africa

Adult Education in West Africa

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Higher Education in West Africa

Higher Education in West Africa

Indirect Rule—a Means to an End

Dr. Korsah is now working in this country as one of the three African members of the Elliot Commission on Higher Education in West Africa. He is a barrister, a former member of the Legislative Council of the Gold Coast, and a present member of the Governor's Executive Council. This article is a reprint of an address he gave, under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Galway, at a combined meeting of the Royal African and Royal Empire Societies on July 26. Although Dr. Korsah confined himself to the fundamentals of political organisation, which may be known to most members of the Society, it is thought that his views are worth preserving in permanent form. An abstract of the discussion that followed is also annexed.