Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2016 An Analysis of Education Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa Katharine Eger Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Eger, Katharine, "An Analysis of Education Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa" (2016). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 1419. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1419 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLEGE AN ANALYSIS OF EDUCATION REFORM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA SUBMITTED TO PROFESSOR WILLIAM ASCHER AND DEAN PETER UVIN WRITTEN BY KATHARINE MIRANDA EGER FOR SENIOR THESIS SPRING APRIL 25, 2016 Abstract Sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall behind other developing regions regarding educational attainment, despite recent progress in enrollment. This thesis examines a variety of external conditional factors that could contribute to a country’s relative success, in terms of years spent in school using a prediction model that compares years enrolled in secondary education as a foundation to determine over- and under-performing countries in sub-Saharan Africa. By exploring various educational policies, historical patterns, and projects executed in Rwanda, South Africa, Ghana, and Botswana, this thesis sheds light on four main challenges that can impact educational attainment: ethnic and racial tensions, an acute shortage of learning materials and trained teachers, inappropriate curricula, and high costs of education. Some of these challenges have been met with an array of policies, with mixed results in terms of the soundness and fairness of policies as well as the effectiveness of implementation.