Improving Education in Sierra Leone

Tim Senesi

ENC1102

IMPROVING THE EDUCATION IN SIERRA LEONE

Educating a country is one of the most important ways to boost a country’s economic growth. Economic growth refers to a country boosting its GDP. GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product, and it measures a country’s entire output for a given year. GDP growth is the leading factor for a countries economic growth.  When a country lacks good education, it is common that they enter what economists call a poverty trap, which in essence stunts economic growth and development. In the economic world, a poverty trap is one of the worst events for a country to experience because it is so difficult to get out of poverty traps. In Sierra Leone, most of the population is under the age of 15, with estimates putting a number at 41% of the population. On top of that, another 39% of the population is believed to be between the ages of 15 and 35. As you can tell from these numbers, Sierra Leone contains a large number of young people in its population.

Another interesting feature about the Sierra Leone population is that the country is surprisingly becoming more urban. While most people do live in rural areas, projections pin an urbanization rate of about 3%. This essentially means that each year, approximately 3% of the population is moving away from the rural areas, and instead moving to urban areas.(cities)This is significant because it means that Sierra Leone’s city services are going to be under a lot of heavy scrutiny in the upcoming years. When I say this, I am talking about the increased pressure of Sierra Leonean cities to have good public infrastructure to support all of the new people moving to cities.

Even though education in Sierra Leone is obligatory for every child and even comes free of charge, schooling is still lacking in many aspects. The norm for education in Sierra Leone is for the children to receive at least six years of primary level education, and then three years in junior secondary education. However, Sierra Leone has a very high shortage of schools and teachers, which makes these numbers extremely hard, if not impossible to achieve. On top of this, Sierra Leone lacks the resources needed to make this happen in the first place. Thus, this seems lack a disaster for improvements in human capital for this country.

In fact, it is estimated that around 2/3 of the adult population here is illiterate. In a recent Civil War that occurred in Sierra Leone, 1,270 primary schools were destroyed. As a result of this, as of 2001, 67% of all school-aged children were not able to attend a school. Since then, schools have been rebuilt, and children are definitely starting to receive more schooling, as of 2016 the Human Development Report estimates that only 48% of children finish their schooling. To make matters worse, due to cultural beliefs in Sierra Leone, the rate of completion for girls is way lower than this number.  Girls do not receive the same social standing as they do in Western Countries, so that is why it is even more imperative to fix this problem.

On top of the lack of education in the first place, the quality of education for those who do receive it is awful as well. Many of the teachers are not equipped with the proper resources they need to be successful, and even more of them do not even possess proper teaching skills needed to make an impact on the children. Because of these facts, the level of education received in Sierra Leone is far behind the level reached by children in the Western part of the world. As a result of this, the unemployment rate among the Sierra Leonean youth is extremely low.

People have reached out to help Sierra Leone in the past. In fact, University College Dublin piloted an innovative education program that targeted 105 communities in 5 chiefdoms of Sierra Leone. The program implements the safe learning model (SLM), which is basically an integrated and holistic approach to gender equality, while also improving education outcomes for all the children. The overall objective of the project is to increase access to, and completion of quality primary education in Sierra Leone. By looking at the results from this program, it was very obvious that this program was in fact effective at reaching both of its goals.

This education program signifies the need for the western world to get involved with aiding countries like Sierra Leone. By providing these education programs, hopefully we can get Sierra Leone and other countries like them out of these formidable poverty traps. By doing this, hopefully we can start to eradicate the strong inequality that exists around the globe.