Nevertheless, the belief that education would bring economic and social benefits to newly independent African countries validated both African governments' and citizens' investments in schooling. Many people viewed education as the means to a better life - a perception supported by the rise of educated Africans to leadership positions at independence. Education was viewed as a basic right of citizenship and the fruit of independence. Governments saw education as necessary not only for building modern, productive economies but also for building national unity. Campaigns to "Africanize" national civil services by replacing Europeans with newly educated citizens served both economic goals and popular demands.

Quite apart from the promised economic and political returns, education became internationally recognized as a "basic human right" along with food, shelter, and health (see Human Rights in Africa). As development strategies emphasizing "basic needs" gained currency in the 1970s, governments looked to mass education to help fight poverty.

Western-modeled education has received strong criticism in parts of Africa for assuming the centrality of "modern" Western values. It has been called elitist and neocolonial. Some countries have experimented with alternatives, such as "Education for Self-Reliance" in Tanzania, and the mass adult literacy programs in Mozambique. Still, there have been remarkably few efforts to radically restructure educational systems in Africa. Attention has centered on "reform" rather than restructuring, with the focus on particular elements of the system, such as curriculum, pedagogy, or teacher training.

Postindependence Expansion
In independent Africa, ministries of education became responsible for the provision, management, inspection, and support of preprimary, primary, and secondary schools, universities, and colleges, including teacher training colleges as well as vocational, technical, and other training institutions. The education systems inherited from the colonial era were highly centralized, and African governments kept them centralized in order to develop a sense of national identity and to ensure control over resource allocation. In line with the centralized model, many governments made education compulsory. The duration of compulsory education varies across countries, from five years in Madagascar to ten years in Gabon. Between six and eight years is most common.

African educational systems expanded tremendously in the first years of independence. Primary enrollment rose from 11.8 million in 1960 to 20.9 million in 1970 (not including South Africa and Namibia). Secondary enrollment increased from 793,000 in 1960 to 2.5 million in 1970. This expansion was buoyed by popular demand for education, and by governments' and international organizations' faith in education as a prerequisite to economic development. Yet while the expansion opened school doors to segments of the population who had no previous access to formal education, it was not egalitarian. Most national educational systems served only about 50 percent of the school-age population and, like colonial educational systems, typically favored urban populations.

Overall, Africa's adult literacy rates have improved significantly: approximately 56 percent of all adults were considered literate in 1994, compared to only 27 percent in 1970. When looking at female adults, however, only about 46 percent are literate, and that figure masks a huge range, from a 7 percent female literacy rate in Niger to a rate of 72 percent in South Africa.

The function and structure of African countries' educational systems continue to reflect their colonial heritage, particularly in their examination and certification systems, medium of instruction, and school inspection systems. Generally, Francophone African countries have lower participation rates than Anglophone countries at both primary and secondary levels. While former British colonies approached universal entry to primary schooling in the 1980s, in former French colonies only 70 percent of children received at least one year of primary schooling. Differences in human resources are also evident. Anglophone African countries have fewer pupils per teacher (less than 40 at primary level) compared to more than 48 pupils per teacher in Francophone Africa.

Research indicating that educated women had fewer children focused considerable attention on improving female access to education in the 1970s and 1980s, a period when both male and female enrollments increased in Anglophone and Francophone African countries. However, even in 1980 there was still a 23 percent "gender gap" between male and female enrollment, only slightly better than the figure of 24 percent in 1960. Female enrollment rates in 1980 were the worst in the former Portuguese colonies and in Italy's former colonies in the Horn of Africa, where on average only 38 percent of the female age group were in school.

The Sahelian countries (Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, the Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad), most of which are former French colonies, perform less well than the rest of the continent on many education indicators. These indicators include public expenditure on education as a percentage of either gross national product (GNP) or government expenditure, female gross enrollment rates, and male and female literacy rates.

Education Reform Under Fiscal Crisis: Quality and Quantity Concerns
In the 1980s economic crisis struck much of Africa. Most countries suffered a decline in real per capita income, and living standards fell back to (or below) 1960 levels. The impact of the crisis continues to be felt in education, where many African governments have been unable to sustain previous levels of funding. Although they have continued to build schools in order to meet the demand of growing populations, inadequate resources have led to a decline in the quality of education offered.

African governments have turned to external funding to help finance the recurrent as well as the capital costs of education. Today it is taken for granted in most African countries that any type of education reform will require external support. Now that most countries have undertaken structural adjustment reform programs that limit government spending on social services such as education, the influence of foreign funding agencies has grown. Increased external control over the planning and running of Africa's education systems perpetuates the continent's dependence and poverty.

While per capita expenditure in education has declined seriously since the 1980s, relative government investment in education remains significant. African governments today allocate between 12 and 20 percent of the recurrent budget to education; Nigeria spends only 7 percent of its budget, while Namibia spends 27 percent. For sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, this equates to 5.5 percent of the GNP - comparable to public expenditures on education in industrialized countries. Most African governments in recent years have allocated an increasing proportion of their education budgets to primary and secondary education, and a decreasing amount to tertiary education. Public expenditure figures for adult literacy are difficult to ascertain. In most African countries, between 80 and 90 percent of the recurrent education budget goes toward teachers' salaries, leaving very little for teaching and learning materials. The lack of materials has contributed to the declining quality of schooling.

The World Conference on Education for All in 1990 resulted in an agreement to increase participation in quality primary schooling and adult literacy training. Among the African countries that drew up educational Plans of Action, most are unlikely to reach the Education for All goals by the year 2000. In fact, since 1980 there has been a decline in primary education participation rates. For boys of primary school age, 78 percent were in school in 1993 compared to 90 percent in 1980. Female participation declined less sharply, with 65 percent of primary-school-age girls in school, compared to 68 percent in 1980. High annual population growth rates (averaging 2.8 percent per year for sub-Saharan Africa) account for some of the drop.

Despite the decreased rate of participation and the decline in per capita expenditure on education, the gender gap at the primary school level in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has been halved in the period since the economic crises began, dropping from 23 percent in 1980 to 12 percent in 1993. At the secondary level, growth in enrollment rates has continued, especially for females. While in 1980 only 10 percent of the female age group were in secondary school, by 1993 the figure had risen to 22 percent. For males, the figures increased for the same period from 20 percent to 27 percent. The gender gap at the secondary level therefore was also halved from 10 percent to 5 percent.

The Evolution of Planning and Policy Formulation Approaches
Approaches to education planning have evolved since the early years of independence, when planning was in principle guided by an approach referred to as "social demand." This term became meaningless once governments made education compulsory, and thus created a legal demand for schooling. In the 1970s African governments experimented with "manpower planning," reflecting their view that the future was predictable, and that an education system could be designed to fulfill labor market needs. As development economists as well as international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have come to exercise greater influence over African governments' overall economic planning, investment analyses for education have gained saliency. In addition, educational policymaking in Africa draws increasingly on the findings of educational research.

Since the economic crises of the 1980s, critics have reflected on how African education systems, while expanding quantitatively, have failed to bring about higher employment rates, more equitable societies, or more accountable governments. The narrowing of education reform agendas in Africa, and the tailoring of these agendas to fit the neoliberal economic policies prescribed by foreign assistance agencies, has generated increasing dissatisfaction. The emphasis on efficiency, critics argue, comes at the expense of equity and accountability to internal constituencies - in other words, the citizens, including students.

This critique has in turn generated greater appreciation for the complexity of educational problems. Poor retention and low achievement in African education systems - as indicated by high repetition and school drop-out rates - are no longer seen strictly as "internal efficiency" problems but as symptoms of deeper problems that must be better understood if education in Africa is to improve.

In recent years a number of African countries have made changes in their historically top-down, centralized education policy and planning processes. Some of these efforts have been stimulated by the introduction of multiparty democracy, such as in Benin and Ghana, or by the transition to majority rule, as in Namibia and South Africa. In addition, structural adjustment and education sector support programs have placed greater emphasis on "getting policy right," stimulating greater internal reflection on approaches to education policymaking.

There is a growing recognition of the need for a more participatory policy formulation process, involving a broad range of stakeholders. Under the old approaches, education planners tended to be divorced from school conditions. Indeed, it was considered desirable, for the sake of objectivity, to avoid close links between planners and the schools where plans were implemented. Participatory planning, on the other hand, requires that planners play a more pragmatic role and keep in mind the reality of schooling processes when they formulate policy. This is proving challenging as Africa's government education planning units struggle to move from crisis management to long-term strategic planning. This process involves the setting and weighing of priorities and ongoing consultation with stakeholders.

As part of this search for alternative policy processes, relationships between governments and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are changing. In some situations, governments have solicited the assistance of NGOs to provide services once provided by the governments themselves, such as preschool education. In other cases, relations between governments and NGOs have been more contentious.

Opportunities
Exploration of the relationship between education and social-economic change in Africa is ongoing. This is good news, provided the exploration looks for answers to the questions "Education for whom?" and "Education for what?"