The Politics of Education, Democracy & Poverty in Africa - Clive Harber

My academic area is the politics of education and education for democracy. I have a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa where I’ve been working and doing research for over 25 years. Given the agenda of this conference, which has sessions focusing on Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa and one called ‘A fresh look at Africa’, I want to put these two interests together and talk about education for democracy in Africa. The challenges this highlights are important to understanding Africa but they also raise questions for our own thinking in Tide~ about citizenship education and about education in this country.

In recent years an important theme of debates about aid and international development has been the need for poverty reduction. Education is seen [by DFID for example] to play a key role in poverty reduction:

“The elimination of poverty and progress towards sustainable development will only take place if there is increased and improved levels of education. Governments and international agencies have endorsed the force of this argument on many occasions” [DFID, 2000b:1]

However, two important arguments are not clearly developed in this documentation. I propose to address these in relation to Africa.

The first … concerns the political [as opposed to the economic] link between education and poverty reduction via democracy. This is the argument that authoritarian government has exacerbated poverty and that education can play an important role in supporting democratisation, sustainable democratic development and therefore poverty reduction.

The second … is that education per se does not necessarily contribute to democratisation and indeed much of contemporary schooling may do exactly the opposite. Only forms of education that are more consciously designed to foster democratic values and behaviours and peaceful conflict resolution can help to further democratic processes.

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Democratisation in Africa
Throughout the Cold War, Western and former Soviet bloc countries supported dictatorial regimes in Africa simply because they were pro-Western or pro-Soviet.

Internal pressures for democratisation grew in the early 1990s. A number of factors contributed, including the poor economic, social and human rights performance of authoritarian regimes in Africa, the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist alternative at the end of the 1980s and increasing hardship and poverty resulting from the loan conditions imposed by the World Bank.

Externally, democratisation or ‘good governance’ also became one of the conditions of loans and aid. This also stemmed partly from the end of the Cold War and the ‘victory’ of democracy, but also from the fact that the free market structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s had failed to produce much in the way of the predicted economic success in Africa. The World Bank explained this by the failure of public institutions in Africa – what was required for structural adjustment was not only less government but better and more democratic government [Abrahamsen, 2000].

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