I have also just finished a detailed review of the MasterCard Foundation report on secondary education in Africa, which was published in August 2020. This is a major, high profile publication which lays out an ambitious strategy for attaining universal secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa over the next thirty years. The main message of the Report could not be clearer, namely that the need for all youth in SSA to acquire modern, 21st century work-related skills is both overwhelming and urgent. The current low levels of secondary education provision must, therefore, be expanded rapidly with the ultimate goal of attaining universal secondary education (USE) across the entire continent by 2050. The most critical reform proposed by the Report is the implementation of a new curriculum which imparts the requisite attitudes, knowledge and skills to be universally adopted by all secondary schools as soon as is practicable. With regard to access, the Report estimates that attaining USE will require a sevenfold increase in annual average expenditure – from US$25 billion in 2015 to US$175 billion in 2050.
The overall intention in commissioning the Report is commendable and reflects the MasterCard Foundation’s strong commitment to improving secondary education in SSA. The report itself is an impressive 275 page document with wide-ranging analysis of most aspects of secondary schooling provision. However, my review of the Report raises important concerns about its overall value in providing strategic guidance for the development of secondary education in SSA over the next 30 years. There are three main sets of issues. Firstly, the Report under-estimates the constraints that are preventing the expansion of secondary education in SSA. Secondly, for a variety of reasons, the proposed curriculum and some of the other ‘promising practices’ are quite problematic. And thirdly, the Report does not adequately situate its USE strategy in the broader context of other human resource development challenges in SSA that need to be immediately addressed.
Taken as whole, the main conclusion of my review is that the Report’s proposed USE strategy is overly ambitious, too simplistic and, in some key respects, substantively misconceived. As it stands, it should not, therefore form the basis for any renewed global effort to reform secondary education in SSA.
Read more my working paper 12