Page 380 - Volume 2_CHANGES_merged_with links

African Solutions for African Problems

Their country. Their people. Their culture.

(cont.)
World Life expectancy at birth (in years)
Ranking Overall Female Male

177 Mali 58.9 59.6 58.1
178 Eq. Guinea 58.4 59.6 57.4
179 Guinea-Bissau 58.0 59.9 56.0
180 South Sudan 57.6 59.1 56.1
181 Côte d'Ivoire 57.4 58.7 56.3
182 Nigeria 54.3 55.2 53.5
183 Sierra Leone 54.3 55.1 53.5
184 Chad 54.0 55.4 52.6
185 Lesotho 53.7 57.0 50.6
186 CAR 52.8 55.0 50.6

Source: Human Development Report 2019"; United Nations Development Programme.
*****

Educational infrastructure and levels of attendance in schools in Africa’s least developed
nations are still developing.

In these countries the proportion of the population that have completed secondary

school education, let alone university level, is well below that we experience in highly
developed m’zungu economies.

These less educationally developed people can be overly concerned with 'concrete'

issues. Those matters that they feel have an immediate impact on their lives.
Abstract reasoning is something that we acquire and develop as we progress through

secondary education.

There is a reason(s) why nations such as Singapore have adopted the ambition of
being a ‘graduate’ state. There is a reason(s) why the UK adopted a strategy to radically

increase the percent of the population who graduate from university.
It takes a long time, perhaps several generations to first build up the educational

infrastructure and after that the graduate population. Its less than 20 years since Ethiopia

increased the number of its universities from 5 to something like 25.
In any of Africa’s least developed nations, it will take many years to build up the

density of the graduate part of the population.
It should chasten all m’zungu that in the DRC at the time of independence there were

only 30 university graduates. This for a country whose area is marginally larger than the

combined total of Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.