1951Creation of the Basic Education Centre, Klay, Liberia
1957
South Africa withdraws from UNESCO (returns in 1994)
1960
- Meeting of Ministers and Directors of Education of Tropical African Countries, Addis Ababa
- Meeting on Women’s Access to Education in Tropical African Countries, Cotonou
- Emergency Programme in the Congo-Léopoldville begins
1961
First regional Conference of Ministers of Education
and Addis Ababa Plan*
1961-1965
- Establishment of training colleges for secondary-school teachers (in 1965: 18 institutions, 3,300 students, 145 experts)
- Establishment of specialized centres**
1962
- Conference on the Development of Higher Education in Africa, Tananarive
- Meeting of Ministers of Education of African countries participating in the implementation of the Addis Ababa Plan, UNESCO, Paris
On the eve of their independence, the education systems of the African countries were in an embryonic state. Secondary and higher education institutions had to be created, sometimes from scratch, and tens of millions of men and women needed to be made literate. In no other region has education seen such rapid growth. UNESCO has always supported such efforts by endeavouring both to provide training to those involved in development and to help set up the structures needed to promote development. Now more than ever, as we stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century, the development of Africa, for which education is a sine qua non, has top priority in the Organization’s programme.
STARTING WITH BASIC EDUCATION
UNESCO’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa go back to the beginning of the 1950s, when, after Liberia had joined the Organization (1947), the Gold Coast (Ghana), Sierra Leone and Nigeria became Associate Members and received assistance for educational projects. (1)
Fully fledged Members of UNESCO,
the colonial powers were not inactive, as was demonstrated by the
Cambridge Conference on African Education (1951) and the Programme
for Basic Education in Black Africa launched under the auspices of the
French National Commission and the French Board of Planning. (2)
In 1956, UNESCO participated in a United Nations initiative to
promote community development in Africa.
The Addis Ababa Plan set the education objectives for the whole region,
taking into account those demographic, economic and social factors for
which statistics were available. The following year, the Tananarive
Conference underscored the crucial role of higher education in the
economic and social development of the new states. (4) Numerous activities
were undertaken at the regional and subregional levels in support of
national efforts to implement the recommendations of those conferences:
specialized centres and institutes were set up (teacher-training,
school buildings, planning, educational documentation and research),
and a large number of training colleges were established for
secondary-school teachers, which were a hub of educational action
and research. In the French-speaking states, several of these
institutions subsequently became universities. (5)
In 1959, on the eve of independence for many
countries, UNESCO compiled an inventory of needs in primary and secondary
education in tropical Africa - with special emphasis on the access of
women to education (3) - for submission to the Conference of Ministers and
Directors of Education of Tropical African Countries held in 1960 at Addis
Ababa,
thus paving the way for the 1961 Conference, which was to adopt the Addis
Ababa Plan for African Educational Development.
At the country level,
many pilot projects were funded from extra-budgetary resources, in
particular projects on science and technology teaching (6) and the
advancement of rural women, (7) and, from 1965 onwards, literacy
projects under the Experimental World Literacy Programme (EWLP) (8).
In view of their scope, two initiatives were to have a particularly
resounding international impact: one was carried out between 1960 and
1965 when, as part of the United Nations operation in the Congo,
UNESCO took charge of that country’s education system; the other was
the Programme for Educational Television (9) in the Côte d’Ivoire
(1968-1981).
After the expatriate teachers left the Congo in July 1960, there was not a
single Congolese secondary-school teacher, no more than a dozen university
graduates and barely 150 high school graduates. Along with the other
specialized agencies, in pursuance of a Security Council resolution,
UNESCO launched a daring programme cover-ing a fundamental reform of
primary education, a considerable increase in the number of secondary
schools, the setting up of new higher educational institutions and the
training of educational
administrators.
H.E. Mr Félix Houphouët-Boigny
