Contribution of schooling to community development in African countries

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore how schooling contributes to community development in African countries. Seventy years after independence, the village school still resembles a foreign culture and functions as a method for extracting a minority of talented children from their communities while failing to equip the majority of youth with the appropriate knowledge to make a difference in their lives and communities. In the first part of the article, we discuss the weakness of basic education to be locally relevant. The cultural and linguistic distance between school and communities and families is given special attention. In the second part, we analyze the links between schooling and improvement in health and gender equality. This aspect seems to us one of the most indisputable achievements of schooling. In the last part of the article, we explore the prospects of an African school model for contributing to community development.