An African Perspective on Development

In this insightful book, the distinguished South African academic Akpovire Oduaran examines the challenges presented by the changing landscape of socio-economic transformations and strategic learning in the twenty-first century, especially in the context of Anglophone Africa. UNESCO has indicated that as at September, 2009, the world is still home to 776 million adults - one in every - who could not read, write, or compute to an appreciable level of understanding. The majority of these people, mostly adults, live in the so-called developing world. Added to the teeming millions of illiterate youths, this is a major crisis. The scenario presents even greater concerns for scholars in Africa. For years after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Education for All (EFA) program were put in place as the major foci of development in Africa, the continent is still grappling with many difficult problems. Nearly three-quarters of the world's poorest people live in Sub-Saharan Africa. The number of people living on less than one US dollar was 389 million in 2013. Africa's share of world poverty is said to have risen from 19% in 1990 to 31% by 2004, and was still rising. The health challenges presented by HIV and AIDS present another huge need for African leaders to sit up and confront the limiting factors that have confronted their people for so long. These challenges obviously require everyone to learn to live and live to learn on a continuous basis. The book further considers the effects of the revolution in Information and Communication Technologies (hereinafter, ICTs), illiteracy, unemployment, climate change, poverty and HIV and AIDS on the learning process. But this book is not about how to deal with all of those challenges. Rather, it presents relevant information that might be of great value to those committed to the creation of "learning societies" in light of the context of the rapid development in ICTs, globalization, and their requirements of efficiency and effectiveness in every facet of socio-economic development. Because relationships among learning, socio-economic performance and development grow over one's lifetime, the author has used data that includes observations of individual and group learning situations. These observations are based on his interaction and engagement with learning events in Botswana, Nigeria, and South Africa, where he spent over 35 years preparing different categories of lifelong learning practitioners and educators for service.