The Ministry of Education recently issued a report to the HPR regarding the sector’s performance over the last six months. One of the areas of focus was quality education. The author intended to highlight issues of quality education in Ethiopia and what needs to be done to improve it.
For over a century, the issue of education has been on the horizon in Ethiopia. Every government that has ruled this country has its area of focus on education. However, over the last fifty years of modern education in this country, several strategies, policies and roadmaps have been designed to make education the centre of life and work in Ethiopia. For more than 30 years, the focus in education was theoretically on quality but in fact, governments in this country focused on quantity rather than quality education showing a greater difference between rhetoric between what is on the ground in reality.
The author of this article has on many occasions heard people saying education in Ethiopia was far better than it is today. The author begs to differ with this view because even in those “good old days,” the education system in this country suffered from various shortfalls that still linger around even today. Today we have more than 40 public universities and almost half the same amount of universities and colleges in this country but still Ethiopian education system suffers from content, relevance, strategy and quality.
Over the last 60 years, education in Ethiopia was a centre of politics and rival imported ideologies that plagued the student movement. For more than three decades, the Ethiopian education system was infested with ethnic politics and the credo of “self-determination of nations up to session” which was officially and constitutionally enacted. Today we have close to 100 registered political parties in the country who were branded as “competing parties” although they are not actually competing but engaged in political hassling.
Education was constructed and framed based on the interest of the ruling political party which was tested and modelled on a single region of the country. The author thinks that the current crisis in Ethiopian education is not a standalone crisis but an element of the political crisis that overwhelmed the country.
Even then, we still need to confer and act on quality education. However, although there are general standards for quality education, we need to develop level-based quality education for preschool, primarily, secondary and university levels. The author does not intend to enumerate education quality standards for each level as this is the duty of professionals in the sector.
What were and are the challenges of quality education in Ethiopia? In the first place quality education requires a learning environment which is suited to a teacher-student relationship which is absent in many schools across the country.
Second, in the universities unlike the situation decades back in which students became centres of Ethiopian politics, today university students are staging riots on campuses due to lack of quality food and not quality education. Although food is very important for students to follow up on their lessons, this should not have been their issue but the concern of respective universities in all regions of the country.
Third, many schools and universities across the country have tried to put in place quality education improvement programs; they lack all the necessary facilities like computer laboratories, well-established libraries and other educational accessories.
Fourth, although the government has tried to improve the quality of teachers in STEM and other social science areas like the English language, quite a number of teachers and students interact in local languages to make the students grasp the most important points in each lesson or subject. The government has tried to launch special programs for teachers in the English language but the problem still persists.
Fifth, campus-based ethnic squabbling and tensions among students have often disrupted the normal educational program forcing students to flee their campuses to a safer environment.
Sixth, thousands of schools in the Amhara region as well as Oromia have been closed down at gunpoint while extremists killed hundreds of teachers and forced thousands of students to remain at home without education.
Seventh, corruption in some schools and universities in issuing fake diplomas and certificates upon payments for officials of the registrar offices and unit leaders in schools have made government offices filled with incompetent staff because they delivered counterfeit documents upon competition for employment.
Eighth, the national examinations, particularly the Ethiopian School Leaving Certificate examinations were sometimes stolen before the examinations and copying from fellow students has resulted in deploying thousands of students to public and private universities which results in withdrawals due to bad results on semester examinations. The Ministry of Education tried to organize national examinations in universities and this resulted in a very low percentage of students who qualified for entry into the universities.
Ninth, most of the lessons that were delivered to university students, even in physical and natural sciences focused on theory with very little practical training to cultivate a given level of innovation among students. Besides, students who are gifted with special natural talents are not properly encouraged to deliver their innovations in a systematic manner
Editor’s Note: The views entertained in this article do not necessarily reflect the stance of The Ethiopian Herald
BY SOLOMON DIBABA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 16 APRIL 2025
