Dr Obiageli Ezekwesili, former Vice President of the World Bank’s Africa Region, has stressed the importance of African leaders prioritising children’s learning.

She expressed concerns about the neglect of children’s education in some parts of Africa, noting that many politicians focus more on other social issues than education.

In an interview with Bernard Avle on The Point of View on Channel One TV, Dr Ezekwesili observed that African governments are often fixated on building educational facilities without evaluating their impact on the learning process.

She added that the elite tend to remain silent on the need for governments to prioritise children’s education because their children do not struggle with foundational learning issues.

“Why is it that all other issues seem to be gaining resonance more than the matter of our children’s learning? It’s simple, there are political incentives that drive political, and public leaders. You know what we have seen is that voice, income or social status are co-related. So, if a majority of the children who are stuck in not learning, are within a poorer segment of society, there’s not much of a constituency for that.

“They don’t have political weight and voice, see the difference between what the elite of society do when it has to do with tertiary education. They have very strong opinions on that. Why? Their children are not struggling with foundational learning issues.

“So, we’re abandoning the poor, and focusing on those with political capital and political currency. That’s part of it, then another aspect of the incentive is governments, politicians just want to do things that are visible. I built classrooms, I built a library, without sort of saying, how does this impact the learning process?

Dr. Ezekwesili also emphasised the need for teacher training to ensure effective learning in the classrooms.

“This problem is core and central to the matter of the teaching process. And so, the matter of crisis of teaching, but if you just said let’s train all the teachers, and ensure some standards. But the teachers have to constantly go through things that are refreshing programmes. They have to be coached on how to teach in order to ensure learning in the classrooms.

“Interventions that have solved this particular problem have been evidence-based. So, they have been observed for helping to achieve it at scale. For example, what I said about assessment, their school systems lack the kind of assessments that track the progress of children. If you gave me a bunch of children to teach them how to improve their learning as far as reading is concerned. We would have to go with how much number of words they can read today, as I continue to teach them and change my teaching processes, and my method of teaching.

“Do they go from being able to read a word to a sentence, by the following months would I have moved them from not just reading the sentence? But when they read it and give it back to me in terms of good comprehension…If I have a framework, an assessment system that captures that, then I can make progress, but we don’t in most cases. So, people are blind to the fact that these children are just nodding away in class, but they are not learning anything.”