Ethiopia
Barely 3% of Ethiopian high school students have passed the university entrance exam, the education minister has announced, a score similar to that of last year.
"Of the 845,188 students who took part in the entrance exam, only 27,000 obtained the average required to be admitted to university", explained Berhanu Nega, quoted by the national news agency ENA.
"This means that only 3.2% passed the exam, a drop of 0.01 percentage points compared to the previous school year", he continued, adding that in almost half of the schools that presented candidates, not a single student passed the exam.
According to Dr Meseret Assefa, a lecturer at the Faculty of Educational and Behavioural Sciences at Addis Ababa University, this low score was due in particular to "a lack of teaching tools and poor learning and teaching methods".
He welcomed "recent efforts to reduce cheating in examinations". "But there is a lack of interest in tackling the real teaching and learning problems that affect student performance", he added.
According to UNICEF, Ethiopia has made "enormous progress towards universal primary education" in recent years, with 88.7% of the country's children enrolled in primary school by 2021-2022.
However, only 33.1% of the age group is enrolled in secondary education, according to the UN Children's Agency.
In Ethiopia, "the quality of learning is a major challenge, with 90% of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand a sentence from a simple text", it explains.
Only 10% of the age group was in higher education in Ethiopia in 2018, according to the World Bank.
Go to video
Top 10 richest people in the world as of May 1, 2024
Go to video
Guinness World Records: Nigerian woman attempts record by painting nails for three days
Go to video
Global Citizen NOW urges investment in Sub-Saharan Africa
Go to video
Kenya appoints first woman air force head
Go to video
US says it will return to Chad for talks to keep troops in the country
Go to video
New form of mpox that may spread more easily found in Congo's biggest outbreak