The practices of adult education policy formulation and implementation in Ethiopia

Abstract

Although Ethiopia has been implementing adult education programmes over a long period, the illiteracy rate of the country remains high. This high illiteracy rate ranks the country as one of the lowest literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa countries. Thus, the purpose of the study was to investigate the practices of adult education strategic policy formulation and implementation in Ethiopia. Specifically, the study was targeted to explore whether this low level of literacy is because of the problem in the systems or approaches that the adult education programme follows, especially, in designing strategic policy documents or in the implementation process of the policy documents or both. The study used a qualitative research design. This design gives descriptive records focused to understand the real practices of adult education policy formulation and implementation from the data collected through in-depth interviews and document analysis. Two regions, Oromia Regional State and Addis Ababa City Administration were selected for the study by using the purposive sampling technique. From these two regions – 5 zones, 15 districts and 20 adult learning centres – were selected using purposive sampling. From the selected sites, a total of 46 sample participants were drawn for the study. Two theories anchored the study, namely, transformative and adult learning theories. The theme-based qualitative analysis method was used to analyse data and the following conclusions were drawn: that in Ethiopia, adult education policy documents are formulated centrally at federal level with the support and consultancy of different national and international NGOs and other stakeholders. Such an approach contradicts the principles of adult education stipulated by Knowles. The findings also revealed that due to lack of coordination, commitment, synergy and accountability among implementers, the quality of the adult education programme is compromised. Furthermore, the study revealed that there is limited participation of other stakeholders in critical aspects of the policy planning, organising and evaluating the programmes. It is also noted that the implementers of the programme have limited understanding of the key working policy and strategy documents of adult education sector. Finally, based on the findings, the study proposed a model for AE programme policy implementation in Ethiopia.