Achieving Education for All: Dilemmas in System-Wide Reforms and Learning Outcomes in Africa ed. by Ishmael I. Munene, and: Education in West Africa ed. by Emefa J. Takyi-Amoako (review)

In Achieving Education for All: Dilemmas in System-Wide Reforms and Learning Outcomes in Africa, Ishmael I. Munene, a professor in the department of educational leadership at Northern Arizona University, and various contributors have utilized their deep knowledge of education, particularly in Africa, to produce a book that emphasizes universal primary education (UPE) for Africa and discusses aspects of "the dilemmas of access, equality, and quantity" (p. 1).

Confirming some of the destructive forces at play when it comes to implementation and the lack of it, Munene in his introduction quotes the 1971 presidential address of Philip Foster, president of the International Education Society: "Human beings are long on lofty goals and ideals but short on principles of implementing them" (p. 1). Sara Ruto, a graduate of Kenyatta University in Kenya and Heidelberg University in Germany, and Rukmini Banerji, a Rhodes Scholar educated at Oxford, do not mince words in their foreword, asserting: "Throughout history, change and innovation has [sic] been engineered, not by systems, but by individuals with purpose. The citizen-led assessment inspired by India's Pratham would fall in this category" (p. xi).

The nine chapters of this book offer impressive discussions of UPE in Africa in general (chapter one, as the introduction); UPE and the challenge of quality in sub-Saharan Africa (chapter two); the measurement of learning outcomes in Kenya (chapter three); the challenge of access, quality, and equity in Kenya, 1963–2015 (chapter four); schooling and learning in Tanzania (chapter five); UPE in Uganda since independence, 1962–2014 (chapter six); dilemmas of education for all in Mali (chapter seven); progress from elitism to the "massification" of education in Senegal (chapter eight); and "Questioning the UPE Paradigm, Reframing the UPE Strategy" (chapter nine), contributed as a crowning summary by Munene.

Achieving Education for All: Dilemmas in System-Wide Reforms and Learning Outcomes in Africa has a copious index (pp. 225–235) and a list of the contributors and their biographical achievements (pp. 237–243); hence it is unnecessary to repeat their names in this review.

In Education in West Africa, Emefa J. Takyi-Amoako, international education director and consultant in education, gender, and research at Oxford University, and her contributors to the thirty chapters aim "to provide an insight to the field of international and comparative education" (preface, p. vii). Series editor Colin Brock explains that the publication "looked at its history and development and then examined a number of major themes at scales from local to regional to global" (preface, p. vi).

In the book's overall introduction, Takyi-Amoako, who holds a doctoral degree from Oxford in comparative and international education, offers a rationale for the contents of the book: trends, "the missing link," "the confluence," and a discussion of the chapters and how they "explore and discuss education in all the 15 member countries of ECOWAS in addition to Chad, Mauritania, and Cameroon" (p. 11). Takyi-Amoako adds: "A productive way to this introductory chapter is to help advance the discourse and practice of knowledge and information networking by listing some relevant global/continental/regional databases" (p. 15).

Education in West Africa benefits tremendously from the exceptional intellectual expertise of the editor and the contributors, including such prominent scholars as N'Dri Therese Assie-Lumumba of Cornell University and the 2015–16 president of the Comparative and International Education Society; Ibro Chekaraou of the University Abdou Moumouni of Niamey, Niger; Martial Dembele of the University of Montreal; Mary Ogechi Esere of the University of Ilorin, Nigeria; Daniel Justice Eshun of the University of Roehampton, U.K.; Kossi Souley Gbeto of the University of Lome-Togo; Nana Aicha...