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Oxfam Report: West Africa's Literacy Challenge "From Closed Books to Open Doors: West Africa's Literacy Challenge" calculates the scale of the literacy crisis in West Africa, and explores what should be done about it. West Africa has the lowest literacy rates in the world. The report is launched in the context of the 2009 Global Week of Action on education, which focuses on literacy and lifelong learning, and the UN international conference on adult education, taking place in 2009 for the first time in 12 years. In West Africa, there are 65 million young people and adults who cannot read and write - more than 40% of the population - and 14 million children aged 7 to 12 who are not in primary school. Illiteracy is shutting these people off from the jobs, economic opportunities, good health and engagement in democracy. The consequences for them, their communities and their countries, is devastating. But the literacy crisis can be dealt with, and the doors to these rights opened. In the formal education system, there must be an effort to fill the gap in trained teachers, calculated at over three quarters of a million trained teachers. At the same time, governments need to put much greater priority on providing real opportunities to learn to read and write outside school, such as in adult literacy classes and youth training centres.

Read the recommendations and download the report here: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/education/closed-books-open-doors-west-africa.html

As an economist, I am sometimes asked to justify how my current research on reading habits in rural Africa is related to economics. "How do they let you study that?" people ask. A quick definition of economics as the study of how to make choices in environments of scarcity, and an addendum of economics as a toolkit of methods for empirical analysis, quickly reveals the naiveté of the question. Schools in Africa are grossly under-equipped for the task of developing the skills of an educated person, and parents, often non-literate themselves, have little appreciation of the power of reading practice as a way to reinforce reading ability. The same parents who will have their children patiently walk a young ox back and forth several hundred times, to train the ox how to plow a furrow, will believe that a child reading the same book twice is a waste of time: "She already read it." In this environment of enormous potential for improvements in "human capital," encouraging reading is crucial. Economics would seem to play a critical role in helping to understand.

     But for all its vaunted capabilities, the contribution of economics to the discussion of how to improve education outcomes is modest. This is because the more interesting and serious core problems in education fall rather squarely in the domain of psychology. Education is, after all, the process by which minds with particular ways of understanding the world (teachers) impart that way of understanding to minds that have different ways of understanding the world (students). Improvements in education come from more careful attention and insight into how the minds of children work in these structured interpersonal situations. What words should a teacher utter to inspire a student to overcome the hesitation and inertia that are the hallmarks of the reluctant reader? What practices can students carry out that will enable them, through repetition, to master a skill? How can active learning be fostered in a classroom with no electricity, no desks or worktables, and 75 students per teacher? Education psychology brings innovations to the table; economists are more likely to be technicians testing whether new methods actually work.

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I love to think about my students being able to support their families like this if they can through the system. If it wasn't for this, and their enthusiasm I really don't know if I could have made it to this point in my service. It truly is inspirational to see them waking up at five in the morning to do chores, then walk to school for seven o'clock classes, back home for lunch, and then back to school in the afternoon. Then finding a way to study at night...if they're lucky and have electricity, then they can use a lightbulb until the power cuts out at 11 pm...if they can't then their parents buy kerosene for a lamp for them. I've even heard of students lighting small bonfires in the bush with remnants from the last millet harvests to have light to study. It makes everything that I did to get my education in America seem so much easier. I had a fantastic free public education through high school and then went to a university with libraries, laboratories and resources beyond imagination.

For the first time in recent years, primary school students started a new school year on October 6 in Togo without paying enrollment fees. The government has waived primary school fees as part of a more than US$80 million investment in the education system. While parents celebrated the savings, administrators taken aback by the surprise announcement worry how they will pay for school operations the fees had helped fund. Read the article at IRIN News online.