Human right education in sub-Saharan Africa: An overview of some challenges and prospects

Abstract

This analysis takes up the issue of human rights education in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that human rights education is necessary for shifting the status of sub-Saharan Africans from subjects-mostly to local and international power relations-to citizens: with rights and responsibilities. The feasibility of this process is analyzed by looking at the challenges to its materialization, mainly those factors that have denied human right awareness to a majority of persons in the region. These include the question of culture, entrenched power structures including socioeconomic hierarchies, and some matters arising from the transfer of knowledge from one to another in the process of human rights education.