A Brief Perspective of the Sustainable Development Goals

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WRITTEN BY: Asanya Boluwatife Ndidi The unanimous agreement of the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly to the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development in 2015 produced one of the most ambitious and inclusive global aspirations in history. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. Targeted at committing members states to ensure greater inclusivity, end poverty and push the world to a more sustainable path. The SDGs are broad and interdependent thus begetting the question as to how well these broad global aspirations are likely to result in implementable developments especially in developing countries. The inclusion of so many goals without a hierarchy of priority and without reference to inherent contradictions that are likely to result in conflict between the goals may have unintended negative consequences which may inhibit the timely/e
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The Challenges Associated with the Promotion of Literacy in Africa.

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The Challenges Associated with the Promotion of Literacy in Africa.
By Maame Ama Bainson

As the fourth Sustainable Development Goal, the drive to ensure that quality education is accessed by every single child in Africa and the world at large today remains a major priority.

Improving the literacy status in Africa is very crucial to the development of Africa because literacy transforms individuals and gives them the ability to actively participate in the improvement of both their social and personal environment. Although the quest to achieve higher literacy rates was started a while ago, there have been significant hurdles that have hampered its progress to date.

One of the earliest and most evident difficulties affecting the endeavor to enhance literacy in Africa is the situation of rapid demographic growth combined with economic decline. In the 1990s, the percentage of primary-school-aged children who were not in school began to climb. With a growing population, it had reached 21% in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2014, with about half of those affected not expected to ever attend school (UNESCO, 2017). In Zambia, for example, the net enrolment ratio for basic schooling remained high in 2014, with the World Bank estimating it at 95 percent (FHI, 2016). However, the percentage of enrolled students who achieved literacy decreased. Furthermore, in 2007, 44 percent of Zambian Grade 6 students were classified as functionally illiterate(Spaull, 2012). This means that while efforts were being made to improve literacy rates, demographic and economic factors such as increased population growth inadvertently negated these efforts, as for every child placed in school, more children remained out of school due to the lack of resources to meet their academic needs.

 
Another hindrance to improving literacy rates in Africa are the inadequate number of trained teachers and the high child-to-teacher ratios in the early grades of urban African schools. This situation makes it difficult to attend to each child’s needs and hence encourages the use of the one-size-fits-all approach unfortunately making certain children remain academically void, regardless of their daily presence in the school environment. Classes will often have 70 children to one teacher. Moreover, many African governments allocate less than 15% of their budgets to the education sector, which also needs massive expansion at secondary and tertiary levels. As a result, salaries paid to early-grade teachers in public schools are uncompetitive, and teaching conditions in the schools are relatively very poor.

Finally, the African literacy vision is lacking in several areas and fails to completely educate African adolescents with everything they need to know in order to become successful and responsible citizens. This vision should be made to include the ability to adapt to rapid change and new challenges, as well as the ability to meet all of learning's ideological, political, economic, and social requirements as this will not only positively affect literacy but will, in the long run, improve the quality of human capital produced by the African continent.

To conclude, there are a number of challenges negatively affecting the literacy campaign in Africa and the mentioned points above are only but a few. These issues must be catered for individually and as a whole to ensure that efforts being put into improving the literacy condition in Africa make more headway than they are doing currently.

References
Aro, M., & Wimmer, H. (2003). Learning to read: English in comparison to six more regular orthographies. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 621–634.

Lyytinen H.et al (2019). Challenges associated with Reading Acquisition in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Habou R. (2017). Improving Literacy in Africa. https://www.globalpartnership.org.


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