This post is the fifth in a blog series published in 2019 in the context of collaboration between the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).
Many countries in Africa have pledged to guarantee equitable, inclusive, and quality education for all with a view to achieving universal primary education. To this end, formal and non-formal initiatives have been launched to ensure that no one is left out of the education system.
Africa’s education challenges
However, despite the great effort made in recent decades to achieve universal education, the challenge remains significant. Data published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in February 2018 indicate that approximately 260 million children, adolescents, and young people around the world (one in five) are not enrolled in school—a figure that has hardly budged in the past five years. Of all the regions, Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of exclusion from education.