To improve education, Africa must first slay the debt dragon

Africa's education needs to move past speaking truth to power, to speaking truth that empowers. [iStockphoto] The positioning of the African Union Summit at the front of the calendar year serves well as a platform to sound the clarion call for the continent. As delegates begin to trickle into Addis Ababa ahead of the Heads of State Summit that will take place between February 17 and 18, every African will be keen to see what they will prioritise and articulate at the end of it. The theme of the Summit, 'Educate an African fit for the 21st Century - Building resilient education systems for increased access to inclusive, lifelong, quality, and relevant learning in Africa' brings to mind the recently adopted Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) in our education system. The conversation on the new curriculum has been around its impact on the nature of the labour force that we generate as well as the psyche of the general Kenyan populace. It is a conversation that will not go away soon but hopefully one that will be enriched further in light of this AU Summit's theme. This conversation has to be juxtaposed with the most compelling matter of our national debt. The rise in cost of living has been linked to Kenya's debt and the attendant conditions of repayment alongside other factors such as the globally impacting wars elsewhere. And that debt burden is debilitating. Statistics show that for every one shilling the government raises, 56.03 per cent goes into lining pockets of its creditors. More specifically, Kenya's investment in education was 4.3 per cent of GDP in 2023 compared to what was spent on debt repayment at 64.3 per cent as of September 2023. The situation is not unique to Kenya. On average, for every dollar raised by an African government in revenue, 53 cents go to debt repayment. This leaves our governments with very limited fiscal space to build resilient education systems for increased access to inclusive, lifelong, quality, and relevant learning that better equips learners in Africa to deal with today's real-world challenges and career demands. The negative impacts of debt can be felt not just in the high cost of living but also in the indignity that it causes. When basic needs are not met, both by government nationally and individuals, the God-given dignity of people is diminished. The self-appropriation of value by individuals suffers significantly by the effects of their neediness. The high rates and high risks of migration to the perceived greener pastures of European or Western economies attest to this. If we do not have dignity and value, we can educate ourselves to the pinnacle of academia and still be stooped in subservient posture and unable to compete or contribute effectively at the global level. As leaders and key stakeholders deliberate on the AU theme, it is imperative to also recognise that the foundations of Africa's formal education were established to suit the British Empire and align to the three Cs of Commerce, Colonialism and Christianity, intended to make the African a servant to the empire and annex her resources. Having gone past that, our education next became a tool of the post-colonial indigenous leadership by keeping the masses in ignorance and suppressing the educated so that the citizenry could not speak truth to power. Now with a greater awareness of her rights, and more bandwidth of expression, Africa's education needs to move past speaking truth to power, to speaking truth that empowers. Our education should aim at producing an independent, confident and agile labour force with critical thinking and problem solving at its core. If our debt is a limitation to achieving that goal, the AU Summit can ill afford to turn a blind eye to the matter in its deliberations. It should call for the common good in its appeal to the international community and its international debtors in considering the harmful impact of debt to global development. Mr. Kikuyu is a senior theology advisor at Christian Aid

To improve education, Africa must first slay the debt dragon

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