Education in the 21st Century, What’s Up With Africa?

Education in the 21st Century has reached a very great height, and growing continuously with everyday advancement in technology. Nowadays, we have online learning and other platforms for trainings unlike in the previous centuries. The systems have gone so advance to the extent that one can learn and become an expert without formal education in the schools.

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What is education? It is the acquisition of knowledge, beliefs, skills and values. It can also be defined as the process of imparting or acquiring knowledge through study. Education can take place within a formal or an informal settings.

Formal education or formal learning is a classroom based system of education. It involves a kind of learning gained from trained teachers and spans from kindergarten, primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of schooling. On the other hand, we have the informal or non-formal type of education. Informal is a life outside the classroom. It involves self teaching, otherwise known as home schooling.

In the real world beyond education, it’s not all about what you know but what you can do with what you know. In the light of this, most of what we have as education in Africa is fast becoming irrelevant while the rest of the world has moved ahead. The best of education on this continent is both unaffordable to all and also not imparting the required skills to meet the demand of the 21st Century.




Education systems across the continent, with the exception of very few, churn out graduates who are job seekers instead of innovators and entrepreneurs. Many parents today see formal education as a waste of time and money, because their children come out only to have to retrain themselves in order to be relevant. After school, people have had to undergo informal training in service provision and trades like wood works, construction, fabrication, make-up artistry, fashion designing, masonry, acting, computing & ICT, photography, digital marketing, and so on.

It’s turning out to be, that people who engage in these kinds of service provision in addition to formal education are able to do better jobs than their counterparts who never go through formal education. They are able to add immense value to those services and products in a systemic business process. Through this, they are able to earn higher income.

Combining both formal and informal education has really helped a lot of people. Instances are Bill Gates who is known for founding Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey, known for her exploit in the media industry.

However, a solution to time wastage in formal education and the following career change is to review our education system in order to reflect the realities of the 21st Century. The prestige of formality and functionality of entrepreneurial trade should be combined together in an wholesome education. By doing so, we will still achieve the goals of eradication of illiteracy, enhanced reasoning, and increase in human productivity level. Consequently, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 of the United Nations will assume a meaningful pursuit.

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