The Implications of Socio-Politics and Political Economy on Education Policy in Sudan: 1900 to 2000

This paper chronicles the education policies which Sudan has implemented during colonial, post-colonial, and modern era, particularly in the period between 1900 to 2000. The government strategy of the Condominium rule that divided Sudan into two regions with different administrations, engendered substantial repercussions on the education policy in the North and the South. Also, since the independence of Sudan in 1956, education was consistently used as a conduit for conveying the ideological preferences of people in political leadership. The Northerners’ elites used educational establishments as normalizing institutions to promulgate a specific set of norms and values in a way that relegated the cultures and the values of other ethnicities. This paper explores the socio-politics and the economic policies that were implemented in the post-colonial Sudan and thereafter, and questions their implications on education policies. The paper concludes that the direction and the outcomes of education policy, whether negative or positive, depends on the orthodoxy of the political leadership as well as the political economy of the state.