LearnAsOne

It’s just two weeks now until our first trip to Zambia gets underway. To prepare you for the blitz of stories we’ll be posting once we get there, we’re going to be posting a series of articles which make clear our aims and objectives, the need for our work and our long term plans.

First up is the question of why education?

When you break down all the problems that Africa faces today – poverty, water shortages, civil war, corrupt government, food scarcity, out of control inflation, HIV/AIDS – you might think that education is fairly low on the list of priorities for the continent. It’s not a headline grabbing subject: children aren’t exactly dying in the streets because they can’t get to school.

Yet access to good schooling is absolutely vital if communities are to break the cycle of poverty and dependence that much of sub-Saharan Africa is locked into.

Why?

Here are just a few facts from the 2009 Education For All (EFA) Monitoring Report about the current state of schooling in Africa, and the implications it has for public health and well being. The report argues that general education should be at the centre of strategies for meeting all health-related Millennium Development Goals.

• Improving access to schooling directly correlates to a significant drop in the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, particularly by empowering young women with knowledge of the disease.
• In Zambia, AIDS spreads twice as fast among populations of uneducated girls, and rural Ugandans with a secondary education are three times less likely to be HIV positive than those with no schooling.
• A primary education is essential for childcare in future generations. Stunted growth due to malnutrition in the under fives drops by up to 25% among households of equal income, location and size, where mothers have had a primary education.
• Infant mortality rates can fall by over 50% where mothers have had a secondary education.
• In Zambia, the infant mortality rate for children born to mothers with no education is 200 children per thousand born, or one in five.
• In Mozabique, only 40% of children born to mothers with no formal education are vaccinated against TB, measles and polio. 100% of children born to mothers educated to secondary level in the same country are vaccinated.
• More than half the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have yet to achieve gender parity in education.
• Nearly one third of children of primary school age in Sub-Saharan have no access to school.

It shouldn’t need saying, but the underlying truth is that a well schooled child has a better chance of finding work or starting a business later in life, and a properly trained community can sustain itself in the long term. As the authors of the EFA report put it, “The educational deficits of today will result in the human costs of the future”.

Knowledge isn’t just power. It’s an essential for survival.