A Study On The Primary Education Development Of Ethiopia Under The Dakar Action Commitments

Ethiopia’s education is deeply influenced by religious thought and the traditional "elite" education. The history of modern educational system in Ethiopia is just over a hundred years, and its development is very slow, even during this period it almost stopped for times. After World War II, Ethiopia began to attach great importance to education, a more mature education system has been established and schools at all levels were built by the country. However, due to the war chaos and natural disasters, the development of education has been very slow, and the vast majorities of school-aged population still do not have the opportunity or do not have the ability to accept formal schooling. Since1990s, Ethiopia’s political situation has been stabilized, and the government continued to increase investment in education, education at all levels has been developed rapidly due to the accelerated pace of education reform. With no exception, primary education has been greatly improved in the aspects such as the capacity of basic building, the increase of gross enrollment rate and the equity of education; especially since the beginning of this century, in the guide of Dakar’s promised goal, the government of Ethiopian have done a lot of work to comprehensively improve the quality of primary education. For example, the government has made a series of development plans and has implemented a number of reform measures to ensure the realization of the strategic goals of universal primary education by2015.The method of historical analysis and comparative study will be applied in this thesis. First, by literature review, this thesis briefly analyzes the historical development of primary education in Ethiopia since the modern times. Second, there will be an in-depth study of the reform and development of primary education in Ethiopia since2000of Dakar’s commitment to action, including funds, equity and quality, the change of enrollment rate, the teaching environment and other factors. Then, this thesis examines the implementation of the primary educational in Ethiopia, and discusses the effectiveness of education policy. Conclusions from the study: Ethiopia’s primary education development is still not balanced between urban and rural areas; there are also other issues such as gender imbalance, insufficient capital investment and so on. At last, on the basis of analyzed causes of the problem, this thesis will do trend forecasting and strategic suggestions on whether Ethiopia’s primary education can achieve the promised objectives of the Dakar Framework for Action.