The Learning Crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa
This episode continues our mini-series showcasing recent special issues of the Journal of International Cooperation in Education. This time, the focus falls on a 2025 special issue, "Addressing the 'learning crisis' in sub-Saharan Africa: Critical factors and potential solutions", edited by Nozomi Sakata and Moses Oketch. Nozomi Sakata and Hannah Edjah join Ed to talk about this issue, and especially Hannah's co-authored article examining a recent initiative to reform teacher education in Ghana.
Hannah, Nozomi and Ed begin by discussing what is meant by talk of educational 'crisis' in the societies of sub-Saharan Africa. Who defines the nature of the 'crisis', and how are related narratives used to justify particular policies? This connects to the discussion in the previous episode of the podcast, which looked at the JICE special issue dealing with the politics of crisis narratives in education.
The discussion then turns to the recent reforms to college-level, pre-service teacher education programmes in Ghana. In their article, Hannah and her co-authors gathered reflections from various stakeholders involved in designing and implementing these reforms, which aimed to standardise and centralise public provision of teacher education in Ghana. In their conversation for the pod, Hannah, Nozomi and Ed seek especially to probe the politics behind the reform process. They ask why a reform of this nature was proposed at this particular time, and by whom. Since the reform was largely funded by foreign aid, they reflect on the role of local voices vis-à-vis those of donors in the policy's design. And in so far as local voices were involved, whose voices were loudest, and why? Here they touch on the composition of the sample of stakeholders interviewed for this study, noting the preponderance of men over women - despite the fact that the majority of schoolteachers in Ghana are female.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Ed, Hannah and Nozomi raise a number of difficult issues of relevance not just for our understanding of teacher education in Ghana, but to debates over the politics of educational reform in developing societies across Africa and beyond.
Further reading: Oketch M, Sakata N (2025), "Guest editorial: Addressing the “learning crisis” in sub-Saharan Africa: critical factors and potential solutions". Journal of International Cooperation in Education, Vol. 27 No. 1 pp. 1–2, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/JICE-05-2025-063
Edjah H, Adu Henaku E, Okrah AK, Sakata N, Yates C (2025), "Collaboration between stakeholders in the design of a context-based curriculum in Ghana". Journal of International Cooperation in Education, Vol. 27 No. 1 pp. 58–76, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/JICE-03-2024-0014
Nozomi Sakata, Chris Yates, Hannah Edjah & Abraham Kwadwo Okrah (2024), "Exploring postcolonial relationships within policy transfer: the case of learner-centred pedagogy in Ghana", Comparative Education, 60:4, 519-536, DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2023.2258681
