Low Economic Growth is One of The Reasons for Poor Education System in SA

TechInAfrica – According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), South Africa’s education system is considered as poor. Despite the significant improvements in basic and tertiary education enrollment, it has still faced challenges in terms of the quality of education, according to many international metrics.

IMF furthermore shows that enrolment at the secondary level of education has been expanding yet the completion rates are low. In fact, in 2015, around 50% of South Africans aged between 25 and 34 didn’t complete their upper secondary education.

However, IMF founds that this has nothing to do with funding. The SA’s government’s spending on education is on average the equivalent to over 6% of its GDP. As a comparison, there’s a high number of Sub-Saharan African countries that spend less per learner than SA which has better educational funding.

Speaking of who’s to blame for a poor educational system in SA, IMF said it is complex. Nevertheless, historical factors can play a significant role in this status. Even though the apartheid government had denied it, but the fact shows that the population groups have the poorest educational outcomes today.

Moreover, at a primary and secondary level, the educational system in South Africa is bimodal.

“The poorest 75–80% of learners depend on dysfunctional public schooling and achieve poor outcomes while wealthiest 20–25% of learners enroll in private schools and functional public schools, and achieve better academic outcomes.”

The bimodal educational system in South Africa had led to economic inequality, especially in employment rates and earnings channels. For the record, poverty incidence rates and unemployment rates are determined by education level and race, IMF said.

In the early 2000s, the highly-educated ones were the main advantages of the skill-intensive economic growth in the country.

“At a macro level, given the international evidence, it seems likely that the general low quality of South Africa’s education has partly contributed to the sluggish long-run economic growth,” it said.

 

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