Introduction
Distance education is not new in Africa. Several countries have had national distance education programmes for over twenty years. In this article I attempt to assess the contribution that such institutions have already made to national development, and go on to consider developments that are desirable and likely for the future. Distance education in Africa (discussion of which, in this paper, is restricted to the 39 countries in sub-Saharan Africa) cannot sensibly be discussed separately from the rest of education. From the 1960s, as countries achieved independence, education was seen as a crucial means for national development. Efforts were made to develop national systems of formal education, which had remained underdeveloped under the colonial powers. Achievements have been remarkable, with access to education at all levels increasing many times over almost everywhere, and the literacy rate for the region as a whole rising from 9% in 1960 to 42% in the early eighties (World Bank, 1988:14). In many count
ries, government correspondence schools have provided back up for these achievements. The value of investment in school as a priority has been demonstrated by changes in basic indicators of development. Schooling results in, for example, greater agricultural productivity and reduced mortality of children of educated parents (Jamison and Lau, 1982, and Cochrane et al, 1980).
Despite these achievements, education in Africa is now in crisis. Recent analysis reveals stagnation and decline, along with falling investment in the region since 1980. The pattern of school enrolments is the main indicator of stagnation. First within the continent there are considerable variations between countries. By 1983, 11 of the 39 countries could accommodate 100% of the age group in primary schools; on the same count, 28 had not reached this stage, and 9 were still below the half-way mark. Similar disparities occur at secondary and tertiary levels, with only a relatively small proportion of the age group—20% and 1.4% respectively—passing on to these levels. Thus, despite considerable achievements, Africa has far to go before access to education is universal.
Second, and more alarming, the rate of increase of school enrolments is dramatically slower than in the 1970s. The school-age population is growing faster than the schools. Relative or actual decline in enrolment can be attributed to the economic situation, both the decline in national investment in education and the economic squeeze on families which may result in the withdrawal of children from school, or non-continuation to the next stage. This affects girls particularly, who form only one third of the secondary school population (World Bank 1988:31).
In many countries, the education provided is of poor quality. Partly, this is because there is not enough money to cover the basics: teachers, buildings, materials; partly, it is a consequence of earlier rapid expansion: large numbers of teachers are untrained or undertrained. How else could children be accommodated in school, but by recruiting more and more people to teach them? And as a result those children who complete school are unlikely to have a better grasp of the subjects they have studied than had the teachers who taught them. In-service training for these teachers can have a substantial effect on quality.
The crisis in education is serious:
because of the invidious combination of rapid population growth and economic stagnation, the gap between Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world appears to be widening...unless steps are taken to address the serious problems in education, this gap will in time become a gulf.
(World Bank. 1988:28)
Educational expansion and adjustment takes place today in this climate of economic austerity. Education is in competition for resources with other sectors, and with the extra demands made in so many countries as a result of natural disaster and political instability. In every country, the improvement of efficiency of the formal system has to have priority. No country can, however, entirely neglect its leftouts, dropouts and—as Kenneth Kaunda defined them in 1973—its squeeze-outs—the millions of adolescents and adults who are illiterate or half educated, who form the present workforce and electorate, and who are the parents of the growing generation.
It is in this context that distance education has assumed importance. It is seen not only as a complement to the formal education system, but also as a low cost alternative to expanding conventional education. Ministries of education see it as an important or even necessary tool for national development—very different from its position in richer countries as a useful adjunct to conventional education. In the rich world everyone has access to formal school, both at primary and secondary level. Distance education provides supplementary opportunities to adults to continue their education, or a means for helping people learn new skills for changing work. In the poorer countries, distance education is of more fundamental value. Its main function is to expand and extend formal education.
In seeking to identify ways of improving education in Africa, the World Bank has identified distance education as a crucial tool, for providing primary teachers with in-service education in the subjects that they teach, for giving them support through radio programmes, and for expanding secondary education more cheaply than by conventional means. In each case these recommendations are derived from experience, sometimes long, in Africa and elsewhere. If that experience is so long and extensive, why has distance education not already had the effects on the formal system that it is expected to have in the future? And why is distance education only now taking up a prominent position?
In fact, in some countries distance education has made a substantial contribution to educational improvement. Let us now consider that experience.
Distance education since independence: an overview
Correspondence education has had some significance in Africa since early in the century. Many of independent Africa's first generation of intellectuals and leaders had acquired their education partly through such colleges as Wolsey Hall and Rapid Results. In southern Africa the University of South Africa became the world's first dedicated correspondence university in 1951. (It had been founded in 1873 as the University of the Cape of Good Hope, changed its name in 1916 but until 1951 taught as well by conventional means.) UNISA was particularly important in enabling Africans from all over the region to obtain degrees.
As the former colonies became independent, the new ministries of education saw the potential of correspondence study as a means both of expanding educational opportunity and of providing trained manpower. The largest immediately obvious demand for distance education was at secondary level, particularly for unqualified primary teachers, and it was here that governments first took action. The Zambian National Correspondence College was set up in 1964, with the Malawi Correspondence College following suit in 1965. Around the same time some of the francophone countries began to develop training programmes for civil servants or teachers, modelled on French programmes. Since that beginning the main developments have been in anglophone Africa, and have concentrated on supplementing the school system. Today, most anglophone countries have public distance education institutions. Typically, they provide correspondence courses for adults in a range of subjects at secondary level. Usually there are some radio programm
es which accompany the courses. Few science subjects are offered. Often, these courses have been started for the benefit of untrained teachers, as well as for the general public. Primary school teachers receive a general education by correspondence in subjects at secondary level and may also receive some training in teaching methodology.
Public institutions, university departments, and specialist institutions have all been responsible for various initiatives in nonformal education at a distance. One of the most significant has been the work of INADES—Formation (Institut Africain pour le Developpement Economique et Social) which from its headquarters in Abidjan has since 1962 been providing correspondence courses to several francophone and some anglophone countries in agriculture and agricultural economics. In a few countries—Tanzania, Botswana and Zambia—nationwide radio study campaigns have been used to educate the public on development issues. In such campaigns the three main media of distance education—print, broadcast and face-to-face—are used together in study groups. This method has been used for political education, for health education, for a tree planting campaign, and for educating members of cooperatives. Universities, such as Nairobi and Botswana, have contributed to literacy work and adult education by
using distance education to train adult educators. Overall, however, non-formal distance education has remained small-scale, sporadic and weak. The discussion from this point on is restricted to distance teaching for formal education.
University level education at a distance in anglophone Africa has also remained weak, even though the university sector has expanded at a faster rate than any other. The universities of Zambia and Lagos were both established with a commitment to provide correspondence degrees written into their constitutions, and both have launched degree programmes some years ago, in 1967 and 1975 respectively. Since then only the University of Nairobi has followed suit with an external degree programme in 1986.
Several of Africa's programmes have been innovative. Tanzania used distance education to train the teachers needed for universal primary education. Over a five year period, 45,534 new teachers were recruited and 35,028 successfully completed their training (Chale, 1983). Zimbabwe has used distance teaching to help replace the old colonial curriculum without interrupting or disrupting schooling. Malawi and Zambia have developed the supervised study group system, a way of providing alternative schooling to thousands of adolescents who cannot be admitted in secondary schools. Countries in crisis such as Somalia and Sudan have shown how to use distance education to provide education in an emergency for displaced people. These are the more spectacular developments. Others are rather smaller scale, but none the less significant, such as the multi-purpose national distance teaching organizations, like the Lesotho Distance Teaching Centre and the Mauritius College of the Air.
The underdevelopment of distance education
Despite these achievements, distance education on the continent remains underdeveloped and undervalued.
The main reason is underfunding. Governments intended their public institutions to be low cost, and most planned to use combinations of print, radio and face-to-face, modelled variously on programmes in Australia, France, Britain, New Zealand and the USA. Often institutions were established as a protection against foreign commercial colleges, but some, coming under pressure from lack of funding, slipped towards providing courses of a similar low standard. The greatest disservice that commercial correspondence colleges have done for distance education is to set a standard for distance education on the cheap. In an environment where second rate correspondence education was the norm, it has been exceedingly difficult for distance educators to persuade their governments to finance their institutions to a level where they can provide courses of a high standard. Good intentions resulted in, all too often, boring and sketchy correspondence courses and teaching systems which showed little awareness of the need for
good tuition and face-to-face support. This has worsened over the years; governments have given even less to their distance teaching sector, rather than seeing this as a cost effective way of providing education that could help them respond to the economic pressures. Many institutions have been progressively starved of money.
At the same time it has often been difficult to identify and train suitable personnel to prepare courses and to teach by correspondence, and to provide and maintain the infrastructure to produce and deliver the courses. Some institutions have from time to time stopped working for periods of months on end, due to a shortage of paper or lack of a spare part for a printing press or typewriter. A shared government print shop may be requisitioned by the ministry of information, or a petrol shortage may bring all but essential communications to a standstill.
There are cases where effective programmes have been terminated. One notable example was the in-service primary teacher training project run at William Pitcher College in Swaziland in the 1970s. Six hundred teachers began the course, and almost all worked their way through to the end. This had a considerable impact on schooling all over the country:
Because of ... two things—the amount of accompanying teaching materials (schemes of work, supplementary worksheets, etc,) supplied to teachers undergoing the course work, and the amount of tutor contact, there is a very high degree of enthusiasm amongst these teachers and a high rate of curriculum activity. With teachers from the programme in every school in the country (most average 2) the 'ripple effect' on the curriculum of the schools has enormous potential. (Aarons and Hawes, 1977)
This programme had been set up for a finite task, to train a particular cohort of teachers, as had an earlier similar programme in Botswana. By the time the programme finished, however, other teachers were ready to be trained. Why were the programmes not adapted and continued? Was it lack of imagination about how to use the resources created for the original programmed? Or was it concern about costs or lack of conviction of the value of distance education?
This last point is critical to almost all distance education in Africa. Until now, few politicians and ministry of education officials have demonstrated any strong commitment to distance education. Despite its extensive use, in most countries it has low status and remains on the periphery. Solid but unadventurous, reflecting the formal system in both its good and bad points—that is the main picture. Opportunities for innovative developments have been missed, although it is hard to make such a criticism when resources of all kinds have been so scarce. Underresourced and sluggish, it has nevertheless persisted.
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