Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Learning from Within

After the political independence in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the 1960s and 1970s, most of the countries chose to retain their colonial languages as their official language despite the fact there are many African languages spoken in each country. If a language is standardized and normalized as an official language in a society, particularly when the language is believed to connect people with economic opportunities, no one would argue the use of the language as a Medium of Instruction (MOI) in school. Some sociologists, linguists, and educationalists in SSA have advocated the right to use children's native language as a MOI in the classroom. The advocates see the connection between the educational challenges that the students have been experiencing and the official languages, which are not familiar to them, taught at schools. To respond to the needs of the people, there have been attempts to introduce multilingual education.