Africa is the mother of civilization. It is the center and origin of modern technology, but today Africa has been at the back and far behind in development. Poverty is a major problem of African development, because money has a very important role to play. acim is an all-round process by which an individual’s mental and physical faculties are developed, making him aware of the circumstances in which he lives and from awareness, enable him to make the most out of those circumstances. In whichever way one acquires education, it is not free or cheap – money is involved.
Poverty has created a wide gap such that illiteracy is preferred by people, and it is succeeding in caging the African child to be incapable of many things. Poverty has caused many people today to heard their children, especially the males, into trades rather than send them to school. Some parents also prefer to send their children to farm and the female children into marriages because they see these as more beneficial than the education they may acquire.
An educated person is expected to acquire such skills as literacy and numeracy and abilities to pursue various vocations using his hands. He is also expected to be useful to himself and to his society and to particularly contribute positively to the growth of that society.
With the current trend of formal school system, the number of African children that are out of school is alarming. The few rich among us have seized the system to be their status symbol, and where they sense a challenge from a simple help, private schools become the most preferred thereby subjecting public schools to perpetual decay.
The bulk of the African child population falls within the ages of 0 and 22 years. As a matter of fact, the child has to move from pre-school age through the various levels of the formal educational system until he completes the first level of his tertiary education. By the time he completes his first level of tertiary education, the person has developed into a full grown adult and it will thus not be appropriate to refer to him as a child anymore.
In Nigeria, for example, the government has made different moves to bring about balance and empower the children through mass literacy, yet the effort has yielded no fruit. However, the imbalance in the development of the country’s educational system between the northern and the southern parts, contribute a considerable debate in Nigerian educational system. While one part of the geographical constituents believes that education is needful and could go any length to train up their children, the other part depends solely and heavily on the government for their children’s education, thus compounding the chances of educating the children as expected.
Although, funding is a crucial factor in providing the necessary facilities needed in our quest for educating our teeming children, it is not the only factor, or even the most basic one. Below are some other factors that militate against the African child education.
