Bilingual Education in Africa.

Education Is an Inalienable Collective Good

“The mother of all reforms is education for virtuous economic development and the development of critical thinking.

A well-educated population will also make it possible to achieve better-controlled and desired birth rates, be better equipped to address health challenges, avoid the traps of obscurantism and, ultimately, strive for and live in a peaceful world.”

Education is an inalienable collective good.

A Schooling Gap Inherited from Colonization

And yet, in French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa, there remains a historical lag in school systems inherited from colonization, which continue to face two major challenges:

• Of the 244 million children aged 6 to 18 who are out of school worldwide, more than 40%, or 98 million, live in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• It is in Sub-Saharan Africa that learning poverty reaches the highest level in the world, at 86.3% (World Bank, UNESCO and others):

Learning poverty is defined as the inability to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10.

This indicator combines the share of primary school-age children who are out of school and therefore deprived of education, with the proportion of students who do not reach a minimum level of reading proficiency.

Civil Society Initiatives

Alongside the actions of national governments and private investment, African and non-African civil society organizations are developing initiatives to help address these two major challenges.

In several African countries, these initiatives have taken the form of pilot bilingual schools using both the child’s first language and the official language, providing education for children excluded from school systems.

Based on the positive results of these pilot projects, several African governments have launched experiments with this bilingual education model.

Most children are educated in a language they do not speak at home, more so in Africa than in any other region of the world.

This slows down, and sometimes even prevents, the early acquisition of reading and writing skills.

An Effective Method: Bilingualism

The use of a child’s first language or mother tongue for six to eight years, alongside the introduction of a second language, first as a subject and then as a parallel language of instruction, is generally considered the most effective method, despite the considerable practical difficulties involved in its implementation.

(UNESCO 2022 – Born to Learn: Spotlight on the Completion of Basic Education and Foundational Learning in Africa).

Numerous pilot experiences have already been carried out, sometimes over several decades, in various French-speaking African countries. Evaluations of bilingual education have shown that it produces better learning outcomes than traditional French-only instruction.

Despite these findings, no country has yet committed to large-scale implementation.

The obstacles are numerous and include political, financial and technical challenges:

• public support,
• language selection,
• teacher training,
• development and provision of teaching resources,
• the very high cost of scaling up.

Approches Coopératives devoted a special issue to this topic, produced by the Réseau Éducation Pour Tous en Afrique (REPTA), the Groupement Éducation sans Frontières (GREF), and ELAN Afrique (Francophonie).

Find this Special Issue in our Special Editions section: Bilingual Education in Africa.