EDUCATION FOR BETTER HEALTH AND THE PLIGHT OF AFRICANS

Africans value education and all governments see improving educational access and quality as essential to national economic and political development. More than 40 percent of the African population cannot read or write, but African governments are well aware that an educated population is necessary for economic development. Literacy drives are given a high priority in many countries, and national budgets usually spend a lot more money to education than to military expenditures. The people, too, realize the importance of education in attaining better jobs and higher social status. Schools and colleges across the continent are crowded with students. Thousands of Africans also are enrolled in European, Asian, and North American colleges and universities. Most African governments support these overseas students. Despite scarce financial resources, many African countries have made noteworthy achievements in raising literacy rates in recent decades. It is documented that adult literacy rates of 70 percent or more are characteristic of East, Central, and southern Africa, except, notably, in Somalia, Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. Proportionately, Females have significantly lower literacy rates than males across most of Africa.

Even though literacy is still at a low level by Western standards, modern communications media such as television and, especially, radio have spread information about the rest of the world. Through them, Africans have learned about Europe, Japan, and North America where the standards of living for most people are higher. They hear about people whose lives are made easier through good health care, efficient transportation systems, well-equipped schools, and time-saving conveniences in their homes. Some scholars describe the resulting attitude as a 'revolution of rising expectations.' Compulsory school attendance, starting at either 6 or 7 years of age and lasting until the ages of 11 to 16, is now universal in Africa. In many instances, education is free.

A major obstacle to universal education is the problem of providing enough teachers, schools, and classroom materials to meet children's needs, especially in remote rural areas. Huge national debts, the economic austerity measures designed to eliminate them, and military expenditures have all limited the funds that most countries have available to devote to education. Another obstacle to ensuring that all children receive education is the fact that they are still an important part of the workforce across Africa. They provide childcare, work farms and herds, and perform a range of other menial jobs, such as drawing water and collecting firewood. Parents may also lack the financial means to send their children to school, or may be forced to choose which ones can go and which ones cannot. Boys are usually given preference over girls in access to education and they typically stay in school much longer. The rationale for this is based on future income-earning potential. As matters currently stand, males have access to more and better paying jobs than females. Deteriorating economic conditions have actually led the income-earning and literacy gaps between males and females to widen even more.

Universities have space for only a tiny fraction of secondary school graduates and competition to secure admittance is intense. Those who are admitted are not guaranteed a good education, however. University libraries are often poorly stocked and, most critically, lack up-to-date scientific journals. Computers are few and Internet access rare if not expensive to access. Most campuses were built in the 1950s and 1960s and have deteriorated, the more so because of limited funds for maintenance. The quality of higher education is also affected by frequent student protests over issues ranging from poor living conditions to politics. On many occasions governments have responded with force and closed campuses for considerable periods of time. While faculties are usually of high quality, with many members having been trained in Europe and North America, the conditions severely constrain what they can do. As a result, many look outside Africa for employment, which contributes significantly to Africa's brain drain. In addition, there is increasing demand for non-white collar jobs with lucrative salaries for a number of Africans for a quality of life that North Americans and Europeans enjoy.

Despite all the above mentioned challenges in African education, it also faces health challenges that significantly affect its economic emancipation. Africa has the highest death rate of any continent, reflecting the poor level of health care, sanitation, and, more basically, protein and caloric deficiencies in many African countries. According to some documentation, the United Nations estimates the death rates in some very poor African nations to be at more than 20 deaths per 1,000 populations, compared with approximately 9 for the world as a whole and 7 to 12 for most Western countries. An even more dramatic figure is the infant mortality rate, or number of deaths of infants under one year of age per 1,000 live births. In the early 21st century this was estimated at more than 100 for many less developed African nations, compared with less than 10 in the West. Expectation of life at birth in these countries ranges between about 40 and 50 years of age whilst in developed countries like the United States it is over 75 years. Even so, the population of Africa is growing rapidly because of extremely high birthrates and the introduction of modern medical treatment and techniques.

Furthermore, Africa still faces a combination of new diseases and reemerging old ones is putting the lives of millions of Africans in serious jeopardy. At the top of the list is HIV/AIDS, which is devastating much of sub-Saharan Africa. National health services are under serious stress as more and more funds and personnel have to be devoted to treating and caring for AIDS victims. This has drawn attention and resources away from other health problems, such as malaria and other infectious diseases. While various environmental and social issues can be identified as the cause of these afflictions, the real culprit is poverty. Until poverty is controlled, Africa's health situation will remain precarious, and doubly so for the most vulnerable.

To date, more than 70 percent of the victims of HIV/AIDS worldwide have been Africans. The world's first case on record is traceable to a plasma sample from a man who died in 1959 in the Belgian Congo (present-day DRC), but clinical identification of the disease was not possible until the early 1980s. By then it had already reached epidemic proportions, with Uganda and Rwanda as the epicenter of occurrence. In subsequent years, the epicenter moved progressively southward, and now Botswana and South Africa experiencing some the highest rates of infection. As yet, HIV/AIDS has progressed more slowly in West Africa, with the exception of Côte d'Ivoire, which has been hit hard. Rates are increasing, however, especially in Nigeria. West Africa also has cases of HIV-2, an apparently less virulent strain of HIV that seems to result in lower death rates. Few cases of HIV infection have as yet been reported in North Africa. The impacts of the HIV/AIDS epidemic are many and far-reaching.

Countries where rates are very high, such as Botswana, are likely to soon notice a 'missing' adult population, leaving the country numerically dominated by the elderly and young. Numbers of orphans are on the rise, an unusual situation in Africa, where extended families and communities traditionally provide childcare. The missing adult population has already begun to affect economic productivity across the board, whether on farms or in factories. The teaching profession has been especially hard hit. AIDS is now by far the leading cause of death among teachers and Zambia has found it cannot replace the number of teachers who have died or fallen ill.

Furthermore, since much of Africa is near the equator, large areas suffer from fatal or debilitating tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, schistosomiasis, and river blindness, or onchoceriasis. Many of these diseases are caused by parasites that are extremely difficult to eradicate. Malaria, for example, is caused by a protozoan that is transmitted to humans by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito. Despite a long and expensive World Health Organization campaign to exterminate the mosquito carrier, the disease has not been eliminated whilst in some areas it appears to be staging a comeback. It is documented that on a worldwide scale, the disease afflicts between 300 million and 500 million people annually, and 90 percent of the cases occur in tropical Africa. In terms of mortality, children under age five are the most vulnerable group, with some 700,000 dying in Africa each year. This death toll exceeds that from AIDS. Adults are less likely to die from malaria, but still suffer from the sickness. Infection often peaks during the rainy season, and higher rates of bedridden workers affect the agricultural productivity of families, communities, and nations. In other documentations, experts estimate that the annual costs of malaria treatment and lost productivity due to malaria total between $2 billion and $3 billion for the continent as a whole.

Tuberculosis is another age-old disease that has become more widespread since the early 1980s, largely because it is a common opportunistic infection in AIDS cases. Drug-resistant varieties of tuberculosis are making treatment more difficult for all sufferers. In addition, cholera once uncommon on the continent is now endemic in Africa. Outbreaks are associated with contaminated water supplies, and contamination has become ever more common in both rural and urban areas mostly due to unplanned settlements.

Malnutrition is another widespread health problem among infants and young children. Many babies are born underweight, often because their mothers suffer from malnutrition. Studies have shown that many African children experience a slowdown in growth following weaning, when their diet suddenly shifts from high-protein, high-energy mothers' milk to predominantly starchy foods. Malnourished children often develop protein-energy malnutrition conditions such as marasmus (essentially infantile starvation) and kwashiorkor, characterized by body swelling. Both conditions can be fatal, the latter often in association with infectious and parasitic diseases such as measles and malaria, as well as diarrhea.

A new world demands a new political science as anything that earnestly concerns the cultural health of a nation is political. Until knowledge is understood in human and political terms as something to be won to the service of coexistence and community, not of particular races, nations, or religions, the future augurs badly. Colonial rule might have dominated the African continent for some time but we surely have to derive some lessons from that experience than always debate on the negative aspect of this time in history. Years of intense and primarily European rule spread Western culture, government, industry, religion, and medicine across the continent. The relatively recent exodus of Western powers left the continent with artificially constructed nations and alien forms of government, still dominated by remote economic powers. As the source of human origin, Africa is also the oldest breeding ground of human diseases. Today, ancient diseases and new health problems associated with AIDS, famine, pollution, and social unrest flourish unchecked, demanding the attention of African health care providers and governments. It will take decades, if not centuries, for African people, nations, governments, economies, and ecosystems to establish new ways of living that deal successfully with these challenges. This effort requires the collaboration and cooperation of African traditional, Islamic, spiritual, and Western medical health care systems.

In summary, a vast continent like Africa that includes more than 50 nations, more than 3000 ethnic groups, over 1000 languages, and many different ecosystems has to find a symbiotic focal point to develop its communities. Human life and culture, as well as many religious and philosophical beliefs, have originated and flourished in Africa as have human social, psychological, physical, and spiritual illnesses. African traders, merchants, explorers, and travelers have wandered the continent and beyond, exchanging ideas and materials along their journeys. Consequently, African peoples have developed several health-care systems of these, indigenous, spiritual, Islamic, and Western biomedical as being the most important and influential. As distinctive systems of care, each has a network of parts, including a body of knowledge, specialized practitioners, practice sites, and equipment. Each has ways to attract patients, each has relationships to the social, political, and economic environment, and each has means of educating new practitioners. Many Africans seek services from two or more of these systems at the same time. Their choices are guided by what help they believe they need, how much money they have, and which of the different health-care resources are available. This practical approach, as well as the increasing role of governments in health-care services, sets the stage for collaboration among these systems in the coming political systems. If we are to develop to western standards then we would be just imitating that which is far-fetched but if we decide to use our resources to the best of our knowledge only then can we originate that which others can copy. Advancement of education can improve our health because of the many benefits it comes with like improvement in life support technology but our plight is not in enslaving ourselves to an environment that would be in controversy with nature as we cannot have development in the same perceptual view or version. Most of the challenges we face as Africa in the 21st century is not that we don't have enough educated people but the fact that we have not learnt to use the western technology without economic implications.

JONES. H. MUNANG'ANDU (author)
Motivational speaker, health commentator &
Health practitioner
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