articles about education in africa

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Article Contents

1. introduction, 2. a brief review of the current state of education in africa, 3. what do earlier syntheses say about education in africa, 6. discussion.

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Education in Africa: What Are We Learning?

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• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

David K Evans, Amina Mendez Acosta, Education in Africa: What Are We Learning?, Journal of African Economies , Volume 30, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 13–54, https://doi.org/10.1093/jae/ejaa009

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Countries across Africa continue to face major challenges in education. In this review, we examine 145 recent empirical studies (from 2014 onward) on how to increase access to and improve the quality of education across the continent, specifically examining how these studies update previous research findings. We find that 64% of the studies evaluate government-implemented programs, 36% include detailed cost analysis and 35% evaluate multiple treatment arms. We identify several areas where new studies provide rigorous evidence on topics that do not figure prominently in earlier evidence syntheses. New evidence shows promising impacts of structured pedagogy interventions (which typically provide a variety of inputs, such as lesson plans and training for teachers together with new materials for students) and of mother tongue instruction interventions, as well as from a range of teacher programs, including both remunerative (pay-for-performance of various designs) and non-remunerative (coaching and certain types of training) programs. School feeding delivers gains in both access and learning. New studies also show long-term positive impacts of eliminating school fees for primary school and positive impacts of eliminating fees in secondary school. Education technology interventions have decidedly mixed impacts, as do school grant programs and programs providing individual learning inputs (e.g., uniforms or textbooks).

Education has expanded dramatically in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past half century. From 1970 to 2010, the percentage of children across the region who complete primary school rose by almost 50% (from 46% of children to 68%). The proportion of children completing lower secondary school nearly doubled (from 22% to 40%). 1 Despite these massive gains, nearly one in three children still does not complete primary school. Efforts to measure the quality of that schooling have revealed high numbers of students who have limited literacy or numeracy skills even after several years of school ( Bold et al. , 2017 ; Adeniran et al. , 2020 ). The international community has characterised this situation as a ‘learning crisis’ ( World Bank, 2018a ). The past two decades have seen a large rise in evidence on how to most effectively expand access and increase learning, 2 but actual changes in access and learning in that period have not shown dramatic improvements. 3

In this paper, we synthesise recent research on how to expand access to education and improve the quality of learning in Africa. 4 Our analysis reveals two trends. First, we observe growing sophistication in evaluating education programs in Africa. An increasing number of studies not only examine whether a given intervention is effective but also test multiple permutations. For example, Mbiti et al. (2019b) test two alternative teacher incentive programs and Duflo et al. (2020) report on four alternative programs to target instruction to students’ learning levels. Evaluations are also testing alternative combinations of interventions, such as teacher incentives, school grants or the combination of the two in Tanzania ( Mbiti et al. , 2019a ). Other studies compare alternative programs to achieve a common goal, as in education subsidies versus the government HIV curriculum to reduce sexually transmitted infections in Duflo et al. (2015b ). Testing multiple treatments is certainly not unprecedented in African countries, but it is growing more common. 5 Second, we observe growth in evidence that previously was largely confined to other regions of the world, including early child development, mother tongue instruction and public–private partnerships.

In terms of substantive findings, we identify that certain multi-faceted programs deliver large gains in education quality: a program that includes teacher training, teacher coaching, semi-scripted lessons, learning materials and mother tongue instruction delivered sizeable gains in literacy both as a pilot and at-scale ( Piper et al. , 2018a , 2018b ); the average impacts for second-grade students in Kiswahili and English are both above the 99th percentile of education interventions ( Evans and Yuan, 2020 ; Kraft, 2020 ). A literacy program providing a similar array of supports delivered literacy gains in Uganda ( Brunette et al. , 2019 ). The combination of teacher incentives and school grants delivered higher learning gains than either on its own in Tanzania ( Mbiti et al. , 2019a ).

We also observe consistent gains across various other types of programs: mother tongue instruction seems to provide consistent learning gains across programs, eliminating school fees offers consistent gains in access, and school feeding offers consistent gains in access and learning. There are relatively few school construction studies, but they also tend to yield gains in both access and learning. Other inputs are inconsistent: cash transfers are reasonably consistent in increasing access to school but not at improving learning, which may be unsurprising given that the programs may relax an economic constraint to access for the children but do not directly affect the learning process beyond that. Similarly, eliminating school fees has inconsistent impacts on the quality of education.

Our collection of evidence does not offer a single solution that will apply in every school system. Programs adapted to new contexts will often yield distinct impacts. In our discussion section, we elaborate on factors to consider when translating a program from one setting to another. Still, this accumulation of recent evidence offers promising areas for investment and wide avenues for further study.

This review updates findings from earlier reviews with results from new research. Evans and Popova (2016b) synthesise evidence from six reviews on how to improve learning outcomes from low- and middle-income countries, only one of which— Conn (2017) —focuses exclusively on evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, while others include significant research from the region. 6 This review focuses on how research in Africa from the past 5 years updates our ideas on making education effective and accessible.

In Section 2 , we briefly review the current state of education in Africa. In Section 3 , we summarise earlier evidence on how to expand access to and improve the quality of education on the continent. In Section 4 , we discuss our strategy for collecting and analysing new research. In Section 5 , we synthesise the findings. In Section 6 , we draw conclusions from our findings, highlight areas for needed future research and discuss implications for policy.

Primary Completion Rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1971–2015 Source: Author tabulations using data from World Development Indicators (2020) .

Lower Secondary Completion Rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1971–2015 Source: Author tabulations using data from World Development Indicators (2020) .

Education in Africa has expanded dramatically in recent years ( Figures 1 and 2 ). The median proportion of children completing primary school across countries has risen from 27% to 67% between 1971 and 2015 ( World Bank, 2020 ). The median proportion of children completing lower secondary school across countries has also risen dramatically, from a mere 5% in 1971 to 40% in 2015. 7 These are enormous increases; they also demonstrate just how far there is to go. Nearly one in three children in the median country does not complete primary school, and three in five fail to complete lower secondary. Africa is the lowest performing region in the world in terms of school access by a significant margin ( Figure 3 ): for primary completion, all other countries achieve higher than 90%. For lower secondary, the next lowest performing region has a completion rate of 75%, more than 70% higher than Africa’s numbers. Median completion rates at both levels of education have been increasing at a roughly consistent rate between 2000 and 2015, between 1.2 (primary) and 1.1 (lower secondary) percentage points a year. With linear improvements at that same rate, Africa would achieve universal primary education in 28 years and universal lower secondary education in 56 years. Yet, access will likely not increase at a linear rate, given the increasing marginal cost of enroling the most difficult-to-reach children (the ‘last mile’ challenge), leading these to be underestimates.

Primary and Lower Secondary Completion Rates across Regions in 2015 Source: Author tabulations using data from World Development Indicators (2020) .

At the same time, the education quality in Africa also suffers. Recent evidence across seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa found that in third grade, less than two in three children could read a letter and only about half of the children could read a word or put numbers in order ( Bold et al. , 2017 ; Table 1 ). 8 The harmonised learning outcomes, an effort by Patrinos and Angrist (2018) to combine data from different tests across regions, finds that learning outcomes for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa concentrated in the bottom half of the learning spectrum; although they are not substantively lower than what would be expected for Africa’s income levels ( Figure 4 ). A combined measure of schooling quantity and quality—the learning-adjusted years of schooling ( Filmer et al. , 2020 )—shows more African countries performing below what their income level would predict ( Figure 5 ). Further, the quality of learning outcomes does not appear to be rising in recent years. Le Nestour et al. (2020 ) document steady increases in adult literacy rates between 1940 and 2000, mostly linked to increases in enrollment. However, the test score data from the World Bank’s Human Capital Project show that for 35 African countries with two data points between 2000 and 2017, scores fell for 18 countries and rose for 17 countries ( Table 1 ; Angrist et al. , 2019 ). Some of the inconsistent gains in learning may result from expanding access: as children with less preparation gain access to school and participate in tests, average scores could fall even while learning is rising. Despite weaknesses in education quality, recent studies demonstrate significant returns to education in Africa ( Appendix Section 1, Supplementary Material ).

Change in Learning Outcomes in African Countries for Two Time Periods between 2000 and 2017

Source: Authors’ construction, using all African countries with at least two data points. For countries with more than two data points, we used the first and last data point. Data provided by Angrist et al. (2019) .

Test Scores for Countries at All Income Levels around the World Relative to Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa Source: Authors’ construction using the harmonised test scores from the Human Capital Project ( World Bank, 2018b,c ).

Learning-adjusted Years of Schooling for 158 Countries around the World Relative to Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa Source: Authors’ construction using the data from the Human Capital Project ( World Bank, 2018b,c ).

This is not the first study to synthesise evidence on education, even in Africa. Bashir et al. (2018) provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the current state of education across the continent, highlighting that many children remain out of school, that learning levels are low for those in school and that ‘the problem of low learning emerges in the early grades’. In terms of priorities for improvement, Evans and Popova (2016b) review the following six syntheses of evidence on how to improve the quality of education in low- and middle-income countries: Conn (2017) , Glewwe et al. (2014) , Kremer et al. (2013) , Krishnaratne et al. (2013) , McEwan (2015) and Ganimian and Murnane (2016) . Another review focused on learning, released slightly later, was Masino and Niño-Zarazúa (2016) . Across the reviews that focused on boosting learning, the authors recommend many different interventions, but Evans and Popova (2016b) identify two classes of interventions that are recommended with some consistency: pedagogical interventions that help teachers to tailor instruction to student learning levels and individualised, repeated efforts to improve teacher’s ability and practice.

Of these reviews, only Conn (2017) focuses exclusively on Sub-Saharan Africa, although several others draw heavily on evidence from the region. Based on a meta-analysis of 56 studies available through 2013, Conn finds the largest learning impacts for programs that ‘alter teacher pedagogy or classroom instructional techniques’. Snilstveit et al. (2015) is the most comprehensive review, examining 238 studies focused on both access and learning across low- and middle-income countries (not exclusive to Sub-Saharan Africa). 9 They find the strongest, most consistent gains in access from cash transfer programs and the best gains to quality from ‘structured pedagogy’ programs; those that provide a variety of inputs to improve teaching, such as lesson plans and training for teachers together with new materials for students (similarly to Conn, 2017 ). They also find promising evidence that school feeding programs can increase both access and learning. Glewwe and Muralidharan (2016) also examine both access and learning, finding strong gains from improved pedagogy—especially for foundational literacy and numeracy skills, improved governance—including teacher accountability and cost reductions.

In this review, we complement this previous work with evidence published in 2014 or later, most of which came out later than the scope of the searches conducted by previous reviews.

4.1. Inclusion criteria

For this paper, we limited our focus to research studies that (i) were published in 2014 or later, either as a journal article, a conference paper or a working paper; (ii) were conducted in or used data from at least one African country; and (iii) report on outcomes from education-related interventions. We included interventions that may not focus exclusively on education outcomes but do report them, such as cash transfers and school feeding programs. We also limited our search to papers that include a quantitative analysis of results that seeks to establish a counterfactual including a variety of estimation designs such as randomised controlled trial, difference-in-differences, matching, regression discontinuity and instrumental variable analysis. As a result, studies that report purely descriptive data or carried out a case study were not included in our primary analysis. Some descriptive studies are used to provide context to our discussion of results.

4.2. Search strategy

We began by compiling a database of papers that complied with the above criteria from published systematic reviews such as Conn (2014) , Glewwe et al. (2014) , Snilsveit et al. (2015) , Evans and Popova (2016b) and Evans and Yuan (2019) . We also reviewed papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series, the World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series, the Centre for the Study of African Economies 2017–2020 conference papers and the North East Universities Development Consortium conference papers 2017–2019. We included papers identified in the African Education Research Database ( Education Sub Saharan Africa, 2020 ). Finally, we searched Google Scholar and journal databases using variations of the search terms ‘education’, ‘learning’ and ‘students’ and confirmed the location of the intervention or the source of the data used. The journal databases searched included the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of African Economies, World Development, the Economics of Education Review, the Journal of Development Effectiveness, the International Journal of Educational Development and the International Journal of Educational Research. We included studies from other journals as turned up by our database searches. We also added studies known to the authors that are eligible but did not come up in the original search. We conducted the search between September 2019 and May 2020 and compiled a list of 195 papers eligible for review. See Appendix Table 2 for the breakdown of the papers by provenance. In this study, we review 145 of those papers on topics of current interest in education (excluding, for example, a study on the historical impact of Christian missions on education performance in later generations).

4.3. Analytical strategy

The purpose of this review is to understand the direction and scope of recent education research in Africa, including the choice of topics and interventions studied, the countries where these studies are being conducted and the key trends and messages in their findings.

In order to answer these questions, we reviewed the title, abstract and full text of the papers to extract and code the following data: country of intervention, year of publication, type of intervention (if there is one), type of intervention target (student, teacher, household, school or system), type of outcomes reported (learning, access or both), education level of intervention (pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary, vocational or adult learning), education level of outcomes reported, research method, scale (i.e., number of treatment arms and the size of the treatment sample) and key findings. We also encoded the choice of implementation partner (government agencies, non-government organisations, other partners or researchers only) and any cost-effectiveness data provided in the paper.

We grouped the studies according to common themes and interventions and present a narrative review of the findings. We avoid the other two main types of review (meta-analysis and vote counting) because of large variation in the design of interventions within categories: an average effect of a teacher training intervention—for example—is not informative when one is averaging across programs as varied as a one-time half-day lecture for teachers and a full-year program of classroom observations with feedback. 10 This narrative approach is more helpful for solving some problems and less helpful for solving others. Our approach is intended to help readers to update their prior beliefs within key classes of educational interventions that are commonly—and in many cases—increasingly used across the continent. It can guide the design of educational interventions within categories: for example, many countries have cash transfer programs or school feeding programs and this analysis can guide decisions about the optimal design of those programs. On the other hand, not providing meta-analytic results means that this review will not answer the question, should a given country implement a cash transfer program or a school feeding program (i.e., is the expected impact of one class of program greater than the other)? While there is certainly insight to be gleaned from that approach (and other reviews have used it, including McEwan, 2015 ; Snilstveit et al. , 2015 ; and Conn, 2017 ), the wide variety of designs and effect sizes within categories incline us—in this review—to focus on characterising the range of evidence within groups and encouraging researchers and policymakers to dig deeper into individual studies that may be most relevant to a context and class of program that they are considering.

4.4. The studies

The collection of studies reveals interesting findings on what is studied and where. We identify a high concentration of studies in Kenya (41) and Uganda (21) with fewer but still significant numbers of studies in Ethiopia (17), Ghana (15), Nigeria (13) and Tanzania (13) ( Figure 6 ). Most studies we identify focus on primary education (61%) and almost a quarter of studies examine secondary education (24%). Fewer studies examine pre-primary (8%), with just a handful examining tertiary, adult education or technical-vocational training (6% and under each) ( Figure 7 ).

Distribution of Identified Education Studies (2014–2020) across Countries in Africa. The countries with the most studies are Kenya (41), Uganda (21), Ethiopia (17), Ghana (15), Nigeria (13) and Tanzania (13). This figure includes the 195 studies that passed the eligibility criteria of our search. In the Results section, we restrict the sample to 145 studies on topics that are of current interest in education

Distribution of Identified Education Studies (2014–2020) across Levels of Education and Classes of Outcomes. Access includes all outcomes related to students staying in school such as rates of enrollment, attendance and drop-out. Sum of values may exceed 100% since interventions can be implemented in more than one phase of education. Other outcomes include labour market outcomes and other life outcomes. This figure includes the 195 studies that passed the eligibility criteria of our search. In the Results section, we restrict the sample to 145 studies on topics that are of current interest in education

The majority of the interventions (72%) evaluated by the studies are administered through the school system, including interventions targeting teachers, school management and students, while only about 38% of the studies are targeted at the household level ( Figure 8 ). School-system interventions usually aim to increase students’ enrollment and retention and improve the quality of the learning environment. These interventions are (i) teacher- and teaching-targeted programs such as pedagogy, mother tongue instruction, education technology, teacher incentives and trainings and hiring practices; (ii) student-level interventions including health and nutrition programs (e.g., school feeding), incentives for students and individual inputs such as uniforms, solar lamps or bicycles; and (iii) school-level interventions such as school construction, school grants, public–private partnerships and other non-government school provision and community-based monitoring. The household-level interventions usually aim to reduce the economic and social barriers that keep households from sending their children to school—providing cash transfers, low-cost early child development care centres and learning and attendance information to parents.

Distribution of the Studies by Targeting the Level and Class of Intervention. Our sample includes household-targeted interventions (75 studies, 38%), teacher-targeted (81 studies, 42%), student-targeted (38 studies, 19%) and school-targeted (22 studies, 11%). The sum of the percentages is more than 100 since each intervention may target more than one group. This figure includes the 195 studies that passed the eligibility criteria of our search. In the Results section, we restrict the sample to 145 studies on topics that are of current interest in education.

A significant number of studies were implemented through government channels ( Table 2 ). In addition to the 19% of the studies that examined national policy reforms (such as free primary education), 46% of the 145 studies partnered with government agencies, most often the ministry of education for school construction, teacher trainings or incentive policies; the ministry of health for school feeding; or the relevant government agency for cash transfers. In total, 40% of the studies in our sample worked with non-government organisations such as the BRAC, the World Food Programme, the Aga Khan Foundation or the Twaweza. A smaller number (17 studies) worked with private partners such as for-profit schools, clinics or educational companies. About 15% of the studies did not employ any implementing partner aside from the research teams themselves. Some of these researcher-only studies evaluated smaller, less intensive interventions (e.g., a specific pedagogical technique). More than half of the interventions were evaluated using randomised controlled trials (58% of the studies); the next most common empirical method was difference-in-differences (25%), which was the most common method for evaluating national policies.

Studies According to the Implementing Partner. Private partners include for-profit schools, clinics and educational companies. Some studies have multiple implementing partners (e.g., public–private partnerships that are implemented by both government and private partners)

Source: Authors’ calculations based on underlying studies.

A limited number of studies offer cost information ( Table 3 ). Two out of five studies in our sample have no cost analysis at all. About one-quarter provide a full cost-effectiveness analysis, and the others provide limited information on costs, usually only the cost of one specific input, such as a stipend for the trainer or the value of a voucher provided to students. A handful of studies make claims such as an intervention being a ‘cost-effective measure’ or ‘scalable (low-cost)’ without providing any cost details.

Distribution of Cost Analyses within Studies

In terms of scale, 27 of our 145 studies evaluate national reform policies. For studies that are not national in scale and that report schools as treatment units, we find an average treatment group size of 96 schools (median: 66 schools). There are some larger studies: the 90th percentile includes 211 treated schools ( Carneiro et al. , 2020 ). Table 4 shows the average treatment group size for studies reporting other treatment units such as districts, communities or individuals.

Studies Reporting the Size of the Treatment Group. Other treatment units reported are households (two studies) and classrooms (one study)

Source: Author calculations based on underlying studies.

In addition to the 19% of the studies that evaluate national policies, almost half of the studies evaluate the impact of a single treatment. The other 35% have multiple treatment arms ( Table 5 ). Twenty-eight studies evaluate two treatment arms, seventeen studies test three treatment arms and six studies test four or more treatment arms. One outlier, Haushofer and Shapiro (2016) , randomised cash transfers to gender of the recipient, frequency of instalment and size of instalment, in addition to the spill-over group (nine treatment arms in total).

Studies Reporting the Number of Treatment Arms

We review the studies in four broad categories. Studies in the first group focus on what happens in the classroom and on policies around the person who manages the classroom—the teacher. These include studies on mother tongue instruction, structured pedagogy and policies around teacher pay and teacher professional development and accountability. Studies in the second group focus on a variety of inputs: school feeding, education technology, school construction and other inputs. Studies in the third group focus on financing: cash transfers, school grants and the elimination of school fees. Studies in the fourth and final group focus on three other topics: early child education, for which there has been little experimental or quasi-experimental evidence in Africa in the past, but for which that literature is growing; girls’ education; and public–private partnerships.

5.1. Teachers and pedagogy

5.1.1. mother tongue instruction.

Mother tongue instruction usually refers to teaching students basic skills in a language that they already know when they arrive at school. In many African countries, the historical norm has been to teach children in a colonial language (e.g., English, French or Portuguese), even though most children arrive at school with little or no ability in that language. 11 Most earlier syntheses have little or nothing to say about mother tongue instruction, but evidence has grown dramatically in recent years ( Appendix Table 3 ). Teaching children to read in a language they speak at home increased the rate at which children learn to read in Cameroon ( Laitin et al. , 2019 ), Kenya ( Piper et al. , 2016c ) and Uganda ( Brunette et al. , 2019 ; Kerwin and Thornton, 2020 ). 12

While impacts on initial reading ability in the mother tongue are promising, the objective of many parents is for their children to be literate in the colonial language, which may explain some of the resistance that parents have posed to mother tongue instruction reforms, as in Kenya ( Piper et al. , 2016c ). Several recent studies suggest that mother tongue instruction has positive impacts on children’s ability to subsequently learn a second language in Cameroon ( Laitin et al. , 2019 ), Ethiopia ( Seid, 2019 ) and South Africa ( Taylor and von Fintel, 2016 ). However, Piper et al. (2018c) find the effect is not as strong: students taught in mother tongue do not perform any better in English and perform worse in mathematics compared with students taught in a non-mother tongue.

Finally, there is some evidence of impact beyond literacy. In Ethiopia, where mother tongue instruction reforms took place in 1994, researchers have identified long-term impacts on educational attainment and civic engagement ( Ramachandran, 2017 ; Seid, 2017 ).

5.1.2. Structured pedagogy

Recent years have also shown growing rigorous evidence for approaches to improve literacy that incorporate a range of elements ( Appendix Table 4 ). Piper et al. (2014 , 2015) used a randomised controlled trial to evaluate a literacy program in Kenya that included teacher professional development, the provision of textbooks for students (including textbooks in Kiswahili), the provision of structured teacher guides for teachers and classroom observation and feedback to teachers, among other elements. The program led to sizeable literacy gains. Seeking to isolate the most important elements of the program, Piper et al. (2018b) find that structured teacher guides are the most cost-effective element of the program. The program was effective at boosting literacy for low-income students ( Piper et al. , 2015 ). The program was subsequently scaled up nationally and continued to demonstrate literacy gains ( Piper et al. , 2018a ). Similarly, a mathematics-focused version of the program provided teacher guides and teacher professional development training and yielded statistically significant improvements in test scores ( Piper et al. , 2016a ).

A combination of training principals and teachers as well as mentoring for teachers and new instructional materials was effective in boosting literacy in Uganda but not in Kenya, potentially because the language of testing was different from the language used in instruction in Kenya, despite national policy ( Lucas et al. , 2014 ). Brunette et al. (2019 ), already discussed in the section on mother tongue instruction, evaluated a program that not only encouraged mother tongue instruction in 12 different mother tongue languages but also provided teacher training, detailed teachers’ guides, textbooks for pupils and feedback from school leaders, resulting in sizeable literacy gains.

Beyond these literacy interventions, many interventions seek to improve the quality of teaching particular skills using a particular method, such as using graphics (e.g., Venn diagrams) in teaching to improve prose comprehension among secondary school students in Nigeria ( Uba et al. , 2017 ). These studies are of value mostly to those seeking to improve the teaching of these specific skills; as such, they are summarised in the appendix but not discussed at length here.

5.1.3. Teacher policies

Teacher remuneration and accountability Because teachers play such an instrumental role in students’ education, recent evidence on high rates of absenteeism and low levels of pedagogical and content knowledge suggests that better teacher policies may be useful to boost education outcomes ( Mbiti, 2016 ; Bold et al. , 2017 ). There is no general pattern in the level of teacher pay relative to comparable professions across Africa ( Evans et al. , 2020 ). There is evidence of a premium to civil service teachers relative to private school teachers ( Barton et al. , 2017 ). A new generation of evidence has arisen on bonus payments for teachers based on student performance. Earlier evidence on performance pay for teachers in Africa was limited and mixed: a randomised trial in Kenya showed that performance bonuses for students increased test scores on the exams directly linked to the incentives, but not on general exams ( Glewwe et al. , 2010 ).

A new generation of studies adds much more to our knowledge base ( Appendix Table 5 ). All these new pay-for-performance programs take place in primary schools. In one study in Tanzania, performance-based bonuses to teachers had positive impacts on student learning in only one of the two tests administered, but when those bonuses were coupled with school grants, students performed consistently better in both tests and across all subjects ( Mbiti et al. , 2019a ). Schools that received grants alone showed no performance gains. Teachers also support these programs in Tanzania, both in theory and in practice, reporting higher levels of satisfaction in schools that have performance pay ( Mbiti and Schipper, this issue ). In Rwanda, a novel experimental design separates the impact of performance pay on recruitment and on effort and finds favourable effects on both, with a significant net increase in student test scores ( Leaver et al. , 2019 ). A pay-for-performance program in Uganda had test score impacts only for the subset of students who attended schools that had books; although it did reduce dropout rates, which were not directly incentivized by the program ( Gilligan et al. , 2019 ). In Kenya, using contracts that are renewable based on performance to hire teachers also boosted student learning ( Duflo et al. , 2015a ); although an effort to scale up those contracts nationwide did not result in learning gains, potentially due to a combination of political opposition, reduced monitoring and delayed salaries ( Bold et al. , 2018 ).

New studies are exploring the nuances of how to implement these programs. In Tanzania, researchers tested two alternative incentive designs: one, a pay-for-percentile system where a teacher’s bonus is based on students’ ranks against other students with similar baseline scores; and the other program, where a teacher’s bonus is based on students achieving benchmark proficiency levels, which the authors argue is easier to implement and gives teachers clearer targets. Both designs boosted test scores, but the latter program had larger impacts at a lower cost ( Mbiti et al. , 2019b ).

Recent evaluations have also shown impacts from non-remunerative accountability interventions. In Côte d’Ivoire, providing twice-a-week text messages to either parents or teachers reduced dropout by between 2 and 2.5 percentage points (about 50% of the dropout rate in control schools). Texting both parents and teachers resulted in a much smaller, statistically insignificant impact. For low-attendance teachers, all three treatments had positive impacts ( Lichand and Wolf, 2020 ). In Tanzania, a nationwide program that simply published school performance on primary school leaving exams led to more students passing the exam among schools that initially performed poorly. However, in an example of how even a low-stakes intervention can also adversely affect behaviours, the program also increased dropouts ( Cilliers et al. , 2020c ). In Niger, a low-stakes, randomised intervention that complemented regular class inspections with phone calls to the village chief, the teacher and two randomly selected students to check on whether adult education classes were being held and how they were going led to improved student learning ( Aker and Ksoll, 2019 ).

Beyond improving performance and accountability, dozens of countries have designed incentive programs to recruit and retain teachers in less attractive teaching posts, and these have had little rigourous evaluation in the past ( Pugatch and Schroeder, 2014 ). Teacher turnover is high in Africa, especially in low-performing schools (Zeitlin, this issue), making teacher retention a policy priority. In Zambia, salary increases of 20% for rural teachers show at least some impact on an increased stock of teachers in beneficiary areas, albeit no impacts on student test scores ( Chelwa et al. , 2019 ). In the Gambia, a salary premium of 30%–40% significantly increased the share of trained teachers in remote areas ( Pugatch and Schroeder, 2014 ). 13 Ultimately, the impact of all of these teacher remuneration interventions—and their relevance to other settings—likely hinge both on existing teacher remuneration relative to other professions and on other aspects of the labour market.

Teacher professional development Another class of teacher intervention seeks to boost their content and pedagogical skills. Earlier reviews showed promising evidence on pedagogical interventions ( Conn, 2017 ), but that is not to say that most teacher professional development programs are effective. On the contrary, the vast majority of at-scale teacher professional development programs in Africa (and elsewhere) go unevaluated in any serious way and many among those do not have the characteristics common to programs that have been shown to be effective ( Popova et al. , 2018 ). Still, recent evidence bolsters the view that teacher professional development—particularly coaching programs—can be effective at boosting student learning outcomes. 14 Importantly, most multi-faceted literacy programs highlighted earlier include teacher training as one aspect of the intervention.

In Ghana, training teachers to target instruction to children’s learning levels by dividing the class by ability group for part of the day increased student learning ( Duflo et al. , 2020 ). In another study in Ghana, training teachers to do targeted instruction (including by dividing students by learning level rather than grade level) increased student scores on a combined Math and English test ( Beg et al. , 2020 ). Adding training for school principals and school inspectors had no additional impact. In South Africa, the government tested traditional, centralised training for teachers versus in-class coaching, with the impact of coaching more than double of that of the centralised training ( Cilliers et al. , 2019 ). In the subsequent cohort of students, only those with teachers who benefitted from coaching show learning gains, although even those are half the size of effects for the first cohort ( Cilliers et al. , 2020a ).

Another teacher training program, combined with partially scripted lesson plans and weekly text message support for teachers, improved teacher practice and children’s literacy ( Jukes et al. , 2017 ). Four trials invested in boosting teacher skills focus on pre-primary education. In Ghana, teacher training for preschool teachers led to small increases in children’s school readiness. When that training was coupled with parental awareness meetings, the outcomes were reversed, potentially because parents preferred traditional teaching over age-appropriate play-based learning in preschool ( Wolf et al. , 2019 ). Attanasio et al. (2019 ) evaluate a program—also in Ghana—that trained volunteer mothers and kindergarten teachers in stimulation and play curriculum; the intervention improved kindergarten children’s cognitive and socio-emotional skills. In Kenya, a combined package of teacher coaching and training, along with instructional materials, boosted learning in early child education centres ( Donfouet et al. , 2018 ). In Malawi, teacher training only boosted outcomes in informal preschools when combined with parent training ( Özler et al. , 2018 ). Finally, a teacher training program in Rwanda designed to complement a new entrepreneurship curriculum in secondary schools did not improve student test scores, although it did boost student participation in school business clubs ( Blimpo and Pugatch, 2020 ).

An alternative strategy is to train teaching assistants to assist teachers. In Ghana, schools were randomly assigned to hire teaching assistants from among the country’s youth employment program to either work with students who had fallen behind during school, work with students who had fallen behind after school or just work with half of the class, thereby reducing class size ( Duflo et al. , 2020 ). All three interventions improved student learning, although the first two had the largest impacts. Interestingly, relative to the Ghana-based, teacher-led targeted instruction intervention mentioned above, the remedially targeted teaching assistant interventions not only doubled the impact on student test scores but also doubled the cost, so cost-effectiveness was comparable.

5.2. Inputs

5.2.1. school feeding.

Just one earlier review highlights school feeding as a possibility for boosting both access and learning ( Snilstveit et al. , 2015 ), and most of the evidence behind that recommendation stems from other regions in the world. Recent evidence from Africa supports that finding ( Appendix Table 6 ). From a randomised evaluation of Ghana’s nationwide school feeding program, Aurino et al. (2019) find gains in test scores as a result of school feeding, with particularly large gains for girls and for children from the poorest households. In rural Senegal, Azomahou et al. (2019) use a randomised design to find gains in both enrollment and test scores from the provision of school meals, as do Diagne et al. (2014) in an earlier evaluation of the same program. Mensah and Nsabimana (2020) exploit staggered implementation of a school feeding program in Rwanda and find small (less than 0.03 standard deviations) but significant impacts on student test scores. Nikiema (2019) uses a difference-in-differences strategy to show that providing take-home rations in Burkina Faso increases school attendance for both boys and girls and increases enrollment for girls in particular. Parker et al. (2015) measure only health outcomes (haemoglobin and anaemia) in a cluster randomised trial of school feeding in rural Burundi and find no clear impacts.

In addition to evaluating the impact of providing school meals, studies are venturing into the details of the meals themselves. Hulett et al. (2014) examine the impact of introducing animal protein into school meals in Kenya with a randomised trial and find that the ‘meat group’ showed higher test score gains than other groups.

These results greatly strengthen earlier global evidence that school feeding is a promising strategy for boosting cognitive outcomes as well as access to school, particularly in food-insecure areas and especially for girls.

5.2.2. Education technology

A previous synthesis that highlighted the promise of education technology ( McEwan 2015 ) draws on evidence from 32 different treatments in five different countries, none of them on the African continent. Recent years have shown a rapid increase in evidence in this area with a mixed track record ( Appendix Table 7 ). 15 In some cases, technology complements existing inputs. In Kenya, researchers experimented with different technology complements (e-readers for students, tablets for teachers or tablets for instructional supervisors): none boosted literacy scores significantly relative to a non-technology-based intervention ( Piper et al. , 2016b ). In South Africa, a randomised trial comparing on-site teacher coaches with virtual teacher coaches (i.e., coaches who communicated with teachers by tablet) led to comparable outcomes in the first year, but over time, the gains from in-person coaches translated to other skills, whereas the gains from virtual coaches did not ( Kotze et al. , 2019 ; Cilliers et al. , 2020b ). A quasi-experimental evaluation of the impact of introducing interactive whiteboards—a complement to teachers—found higher test scores for urban students in Senegal ( Lehrer et al. , 2019 ). De Hoop et al. (2020 ) evaluate a program in Zambia where teachers receive tablets (and projectors) with lesson plans for teachers and interactive lessons for students. Complemented with weekly teacher professional development, the program shows gains for first graders in both reading and math.

In Angola, a randomised controlled trial of learning software together with the technological equipment needed to use the software had no consistent impact on primary school student learning, although it did boost teacher and student familiarity with technology ( Cardim et al. , 2019 ). An experimental evaluation that provided secondary school students in Malawi with access to Wikipedia—the students otherwise had little to no internet access—had small, positive impacts in two subjects but not in others ( Derksen et al. , 2020 ). Also in Zambia, a phone-based literacy game provided to a few hundred randomly selected first-grade students boosted their spelling ability relative to a control group ( Jere-Folotiya et al. , 2014 ). In Kenyan primary schools, interactive literacy software coupled with a library of digital books and stories boosted reading scores ( Lysenko et al. , 2019 ).

In other cases, technology seeks to substitute for other inputs. Providing e-readers to secondary school students in urban Nigeria only increased learning if they included curricular content and were distributed in areas with limited textbook access, essentially substituting e-readers for traditional textbooks ( Habyarimana and Sabarwal, 2018 ). In Ghana, broadcasting live instruction—where students can interact with the instructors—from teachers in the capital to students in rural areas improved literacy and numeracy scores, essentially substituting for teacher ability ( Johnston and Ksoll, 2017 ). Alternatively, technology can fill an input gap in terms of role models: Riley (2019) finds that showing secondary students in Uganda a film featuring a low-income adolescent Ugandan girl succeeding at chess improved student test scores and closed the gender gap in enrollment in subsequent years.

While the findings are certainly not universally positive, they suggest that technology in education can effectively complement or substitute for existing inputs when the infrastructure is in place to support it. This pattern is consistent with earlier evidence ( Bulman and Fairlie, 2016 ). However, most of the technologies evaluated in the studies are used in school settings, with more stable access to electricity and internet connectivity (with the exception of e-readers that students can take home). There is still limited evidence for technology that allows for distance learning where access to school is not available.

5.2.3. School construction

School construction rarely features in reviews of the best investments, but when there are few schools, construction is essential to achieve the last mile (or last 20 miles) of enrollment. Recent studies bolster this ( Appendix Table 8 ). In Burkina Faso, a program to construct schools improved enrollment, attendance and student learning both 7 and 10 years after the program ( Ingwersen et al. , 2019 ; Kazianga et al. , 2019 ). 16 A similar program in Niger also boosted enrollment and learning ( Bagby et al. , 2016 ). These programs of course will be most effective when there are few schools: a school construction program in Benin boosted enrollment principally in rural areas ( Deschênes and Hotte, 2019 ). Furthermore, the Burkina Faso program led young women to put off marriage and childbearing ( Ingwersen et al. , 2019 ) and the Benin program reduced tolerance of domestic violence ( Deschênes and Hotte, 2019 ). Ashraf et al. (2020b) find that school construction benefitted girls’ education in Zambia only among ethnic groups with a bride price tradition. Ultimately, construction is likely a necessary condition for other interventions to work when there are insufficient schools.

5.2.4. Other inputs

Fewer recent studies evaluate the impact of providing simple, non-technological in-kind inputs for schooling (although a previous generation of evaluations yielded several of those), but recent studies still provide some insight into this area ( Appendix Table 9 ). Two studies in Kenya provided free school uniforms: one provided them to girls in upper primary grades and found reductions in school dropout, pregnancy and marriage; another provided them to children in lower primary grades and found significant reductions in absenteeism in early years, but no evidence of enduring effects several years later ( Duflo et al. , 2015b ; Evans and Ngatia, 2020 )

Previous studies examining the simple provision of additional textbooks to schools found either no impacts or selective impacts in Kenya and Sierra Leone ( Glewwe et al. , 2009 ; Sabarwal et al. , 2014 ), but a new randomised trial providing textbooks together with a combination of financial and non-financial incentives to simply take the books home increased both language scores and the likelihood of students taking the end-of-year exam in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ( Falisse et al. , 2019 ).

In Kenya, randomly selected seventh-grade students who lived in rural areas off the electrical grid received solar-powered lamps. In some classes, a higher proportion of students received solar lamps and the authors use that variation to estimate the externalities on non-recipient students. The program found significant gains in math scores for students who received lamps and smaller additional gains for students who did not receive lamps in classrooms where many students did ( Hassan and Lucchino, 2016 )

5.3. Financing

5.3.1. cash transfers.

Cash transfers are a richly studied area of analysis, with the first generation of evidence coming out of Latin America and the Caribbean ( Fiszbein et al. , 2009 ). Early evidence from Africa showed promising results in that setting as well ( Davis et al. , 2016 ). The most recent evidence shows impacts not only of giving transfers but also of testing a variety of designs ( Appendix Table 10 ). In terms of simple impacts, a randomised trial of unconditional transfers in Malawi showed an increase in school enrollment and reduced dropout rates ( Kilburn et al. , 2017 ). In Kenya, unconditional transfers did not translate to improved educational outcomes after 9 months ( Haushofer and Shapiro, 2016 ). In Lesotho, unconditional child grants boosted primary enrollment but not completion or the transition to secondary ( Pellerano et al. , 2014 ). Conditional cash transfers in Tanzania boosted primary school completion ( Evans et al. , 2014 ). Baird et al. (2016a) compare conditional cash transfers for already enrolled and unenrolled adolescent girls in Malawi: they find enrollment gains for both groups and mixed effects on test scores. Eyal and Woodard (2014) find that expanding a child support grant in South Africa increased educational enrollment in South Africa but that higher enrollment does not translate into higher levels of attained education. An unconditional cash transfer program in Rwanda increased educational investments (more children had school uniforms) but did not affect school attendance ( Sabates et al. , 2019 ).

Other evaluations inform the design of cash transfer programs. De Walque and Valente (2019) compare cash transfers directly to children and to parents as well as simply providing information (with no cash) about their children’s attendance to parents. Providing attendance information delivered 75% of the gains of cash in terms of children’s attendance. Transfers to children and to parents performed comparably. Akresh et al. (2016) compare a variety of transfer designs and find positive impacts on children’s education outcomes across designs in Burkina Faso, with larger impacts on school attendance for older children from conditional transfers relative to unconditional transfers. Benhassine et al. (2015) found that unconditional transfers labelled as education support in Morocco increased both school participation and parent views of the value of education investments; adding explicit conditions and targeting a particular parent (mothers versus fathers) had no additional impact. In Malawi, conditional cash transfers had larger impacts on school attainment, but unconditional cash transfers had larger gains on other outcomes ( Baird et al. , 2019 ).

On the whole, these findings are consistent with earlier work that suggests that cash transfers—especially, but not limited to, conditional transfers—can be an effective way to boost school enrollment but may not by themselves translate into broader educational gains. We also observe significant variation in cash transfer performance. 17 Evaluations on this topic, among others, signal a maturing literature in testing alternative designs.

5.3.2. School grants

Grants to schools can be an effective way to distribute resources, and there is evidence from other regions of the world that they can boost enrollment: in Haiti, grants to schools conditional on not charging fees to students boosted enrollment and reduced grade repetition ( Adelman et al. , 2017 ). Recent evidence in Africa confirms that grants are not a silver bullet but can yield benefits, mostly when complemented with other programs ( Appendix Table 11 ). In Senegal, school grants led to improved test scores for younger students, particularly in schools that used the grants for training teachers and school administrators ( Carneiro et al. , 2020 ). Grants to school committees in Niger increased enrollment for young children but did not affect learning ( Beasley and Huillery, 2017 ).

School grants alone had no impact on student learning in Tanzania; although when they were coupled with teacher incentives, outcomes improved ( Mbiti et al. , 2019a ). School grants alone in the Gambia had no impact on student attendance or on learning outcomes, but in concert with management training, the program did boost attendance and—in some communities—even learning ( Blimpo et al. , 2015 ). Grants alone do not consistently solve access or learning problems, but when attached to conditions or complementary programs that relax other constraints, they can boost both access and learning.

5.3.3. Eliminating school fees

An obvious constraint to education is the cost, including both formal school fees and myriad other fees that schools charge ( Williams et al. , 2015 ). An array of recent papers seeks to quantify the impact of reducing those costs, mostly at the primary level ( Appendix Table 12 ). İşcan et al. (2015) use regression analysis to show that the introduction of school fees reduced enrollment and subsequent completion of primary school across seven African countries. Moussa and Omoeva (2020) use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to examine the impact of universal primary education policies in Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda: they find an increase in educational attainment, as well as a decrease in adolescent pregnancy and marriage. They do not observe impacts on labour force participation or employment. In Kenya, free primary education—rolled out in 2003—increased educational attainment as well as subsequent employment and income ( Ajayi and Ross, 2020 ). There is some evidence that the expansion of access led to a fall in quality ( Atuhurra, 2016 ). Free basic education increased girls’ attainment and reduced adolescent fertility and marriage in Ghana and Uganda ( Boahen and Yamauchi, 2018 ; Masuda and Yamauchi, 2018 ). The elimination of primary school fees in Ethiopia led to more schooling for men and women, along with reduced fertility ( Chicoine, 2019 , 2020 ). In Tanzania, free primary education increased access and had positive returns across sectors, even in the agricultural sector ( Delesalle, 2019 ; Valente, 2019 ). Lesotho also saw dramatic gains in access with the elimination of fees ( Moshoeshoe et al. , 2019 ). Informal fees in public primary schools continue to keep students—especially poor, rural students—away from school ( Sakaue, 2018 ).

As countries expand secondary education, more studies examine impacts at that level. In Uganda, free secondary education significantly but not completely reduced expenditures ( Omoeva and Gale, 2016 ), consistent with earlier work showing that school fees are not the only out-of-pocket expense. In the Gambia, eliminating secondary school fees for girls increased the number of girls taking the high school exit exam by more than 50%. Test scores also rose, despite the increase in access coming mostly from poorer areas ( Blimpo et al. , 2019b ). An earlier evaluation found increased female enrollment for both secondary and primary schools ( Gajigo, 2016 ). Similarly, a study in Kenya found that the abolition of tuition in public secondary schools increased access, delayed childbirth and did not reduce test scores ( Brudevold-Newman, 2019 ). In Uganda, eliminating secondary school fees via public funds to private schools increased the number of students taking the exit exam by 16%, with no fall in test scores ( Masuda and Yamauchi, 2018 ). Finally, a randomised controlled trial of scholarships for students in Ghana who had already passed the entrance exam but lacked financing increased secondary and tertiary attainment and—10 years later—reduced fertility and improved labour market outcomes ( Duflo et al. , 2019 ).

5.4. Other topics

5.4.1. early child education.

Earlier syntheses have little to say about early child education in Africa, largely because of a paucity of studies. Martinez et al. (2017) highlight that most evidence from low- and middle-income countries stems from Latin America and do not identify a single paper that predates 2015 in Africa. Since then, several studies have come out, most of which examine the impact of access to early child education ( Appendix Table 13 ). Martinez et al. (2017) use a randomised controlled trial to estimate the impact of community-based preschools in Mozambique and find that enroled children are much more likely to be in primary school at the right age and that their test scores are higher, with larger effects for children from poorer households. Bietenbeck et al. (2019) take advantage of the expansion of pre-primary education in Kenya and Tanzania to compare siblings with access with siblings without; they find that children with access to preschool education are more likely to be in primary school, more likely to have advanced, and have moderately higher scores on cognitive tests (0.10 standard deviations). Aunio et al. (2019) —with a simple cross-sectional regression approach and the selection challenges that entails—find a significant, positive correlation between kindergarten attendance and later numeracy skill in South Africa, even when controlling for other current skills (language and executive function). Krafft (2015) compares siblings with and without access to early child education in Egypt and finds that access translates to an additional year of total schooling. Woldehanna and Araya (2017) use an instrumental variables approach with Young Lives data in Ethiopia and find that preschool attendees in urban areas are 25% more likely to have completed secondary education than non-attendees. Finally, Blimpo et al. (2019a) evaluate random assignment of community-based early child development centres in the Gambia and find that children from less-disadvantaged families do worse, consistent with some evidence from high-income countries ( Baker et al. , 2019 ).

Five studies examine the quality of early child education services. Blimpo et al. (2019a) find that children who attended preschools that were randomly assigned to receive intensive teacher training had much higher language skills than children who attended other preschools. Morabito et al. (2018) evaluate children randomly assigned to high-quality versus low-quality preschools: they find no average effect on test scores, although there is evidence that high-quality preschool has a positive impact for children with poorly educated fathers (compensating for inequality) and a negative impact for children with poorly educated mothers (reinforcing inequality). Four other interventions trained early child education providers—in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi—and were discussed in Section 5.1 .

Finally, at least one study examines a home-based program to strengthen children’s emergent literacy skills before they even begin school. In Kenya, randomly selected parents of young children received either children’s storybooks or storybooks with training on how to read the storybooks with children ( Knauer et al. , 2020 ). Children whose parents received both books and training demonstrated increased vocabulary.

This new generation of early child education evidence suggests that there is value in these investments and capacity of governments and others to provide them on the African continent.

5.4.2. Education for girls

Education for girls has long been cited as a potential high-value investment, by both researchers and policy makers ( Evans et al. , 2020 ). Discussing girls’ education as a separate category can be problematic, since earlier sections covered studies that reported impacts on girls. For example, the elimination of school fees for secondary school has shown consistent impacts in reducing adolescent marriage and fertility, and school construction in several countries has focused on ensuring that girls’ needs are met and have improved outcomes for girls. In this section, we discuss work on girls’ education that does not fit naturally into our other categories. A recent synthesis, not restricted to Africa but drawing heavily on research from the continent, suggests that the most effective investments to improve girls’ educational outcomes may be a mix of targeted and non-targeted investments ( Evans and Yuan, 2019 ). Recent work in Africa backs that up: Duflo et al. (2020) , in their evaluation of targeted instruction interventions in Ghana, find larger impacts for girls despite the fact that girls are not specifically targeted by the intervention.

Among targeted interventions not discussed earlier, providing negotiation training to secondary school girls in Zambia—including teaching them to advocate for their own education—improved educational outcomes over the subsequent several years ( Ashraf et al. , 2020a ). Providing sanitary pads to schoolgirls in Kenya reduced absenteeism significantly ( Benshaul-Tolonen et al. , 2019 ). A program that provided bicycles to schoolgirls in Zambia reduced girls’ commute time and their absenteeism from school, with modest impacts on mathematics learning ( Fiala et al. , 2020 ). Unlike a similar program in India, the program had no impact on dropout rates or grade advancement ( Muralidharan and Prakash, 2017 ).

Several recent studies look beyond educational outcomes to examine the impact of school-based programs to improve other outcomes for girls ( Appendix Table 14 ). Bandiera et al. (2020) find—using a randomised controlled trial in Uganda—that simultaneously providing vocational training as well as information about reproductive health to adolescent girls increased self-employment and reduced adolescent pregnancy and sexual violence 4 years later. A similar program in Tanzania had no impacts ( Buehren et al. , 2017 ). In Sierra Leone, a program provided similar services in the context of girls-only after-school clubs but was interrupted by the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Girls in participating communities were protected from the significant school dropout and adolescent pregnancy effects of the outbreak ( Bandiera et al. , 2019 ). A mentoring program intended to develop social and emotional life skills in Liberia increased primary school completion and the transition to secondary school ( Koroknay-Palicz and Montalvao, 2019 ). Another girls-only safe space program—this one in Ethiopia—used longitudinal analysis and found gains in both literacy and the likelihood of accessing health services ( Medhin and Erulkar, 2017 ). The findings demonstrate significant variation in impacts across settings.

5.4.3. Private schools and other non-government school provision

Private schools are an important part of the education landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa. On average across countries, 14% of primary school students and 19% of secondary school students were enroled in secondary schools as of 2014, and that number had grown since the year 2000 ( Baum et al. , 2018 ). Private schools are perceived by many parents to be of higher quality: in Kenya, even poor families were willing to undergo financial hardship to pay for so-called low-cost private schools ( Zuilkowski et al. , 2018 ). Distinguishing the impact of private schools on student learning is generally difficult because of student selection effects: often, students with better off parents or parents more invested in education may be more likely to attend private schools. Beyond purely private schools, many African governments are entering into agreements with private school chains where they receive public resources to educate students at no charge. These public–private partnerships often seek to leverage the physical and human capital of private schools to increase access and learning. The past several years have seen some new work on private schools and public–private partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa ( Appendix Table 15 ). Most previous work on private schools has taken place in other regions, and to our knowledge, this topic is not covered in previous reviews focused on Africa.

Recent studies seek to compare student outcomes in private and public schools in African countries. Wamalwa and Burns (2018) compare public school versus private school attending siblings within the same household (i.e., household fixed effects) in Kenya and identify literacy and numeracy gains in attending private schools. Despite efforts to gauge the potential extent of bias, the challenge remains of unobserved child characteristics determining whether a child is sent to private or public school. Also in Kenya, Zuilkowski et al. (2020) compare student scores over two academic years in low-cost private schools and government schools in Nairobi and find that, in general, the low-cost private schools do not produce better student outcomes over time. However, private schools yielded more learning gains when they received an instructional improvement intervention than did public schools. Lipcan et al. (2018) compare test scores, costs and management practices across public and private schools in Lagos, Nigeria, and find that one international chain of private schools has higher student test scores relative to other private schools and public schools in literacy and relative to public schools only in mathematics. Adjusting for a set of observed student characteristics reduces the gains by a small amount. The authors make no claim to causality, as unobserved characteristics of students may still play a role in the results. A third study does not find any differences in management practices between public and private schools in Uganda; although it does find a significant association between the quality of management and student performance overall ( Crawfurd, 2017 ).

Two randomised controlled trials examine the impact of public–private partnerships, one for primary schools in Liberia and another for secondary schools in Uganda. In Liberia, the management of 93 randomly selected schools was delegated to one of eight different private organisations ( Romero et al. , 2020 ). Government teachers taught in both publicly and privately managed schools, but privately managed schools received more funding, and some raised additional funding independently. Ultimately, the privately managed schools achieved significantly higher test scores but at a significantly higher cost per student. In general, management of teachers was better at privately managed schools, but one chain kicked out students when their enrollment cap was reached and transferred less effective teachers to non-evaluated schools. Three years after implementation, the learning gains in privately managed schools failed to compound over time ( Romero and Sandefur, 2019 ). Ultimately, private management of public schools proved to be a mixed bag.

In Uganda, a program randomised which private secondary schools participated in the public–private partnership and so documented the impact on private school performance ( Barrera-Osorio et al. , 2020 ). Participation in the partnerships boosted both enrollment and student performance. There is evidence of both an increase in inputs at the partnership schools and changes in student composition, favouring students with more educational advantage. The evaluation did not measure the impact relative to public schools.

Non-profit school providers are another option, especially in the context of extreme poverty and poor state provision of schooling. In Guinea-Bissau, a non-profit organisation randomly selected villages to provide 4-year primary schools to substitute for existing government education ( Fazzio et al. 2020 ). The schools had a custom-made structured pedagogy program and frequent monitoring and assessment of teachers and students. Students in intervention schools performed dramatically better on early grade reading and math tests.

The private school and other non-government school evaluation literature is still nascent in Africa. While there is no compelling evidence that private schools or private management of schools deliver more learning than public schools, the revealed preference of many parents and demonstrated improvement in private schools suggests merit in continuing to examine the issue.

6.1. What we learn

The past several years of education and economics research in Africa demonstrate that there is a range of promising ways to continue to expand access to schools and to improve their quality. Earlier reviews of the evidence had little examination of mother tongue instruction programs and limited coverage of structured pedagogy programs, both of which show sizeable impacts on learning. Likewise, a range of teacher policies shows promising results, including both teacher pay-for-performance programs at the primary level and non-remunerative interventions, such as teacher coaching and training teaching assistants. School feeding programs appear to be beneficial for both access and learning outcomes.

As evidence on inputs—including education technology inputs—grows on the continent, its track record is decidedly mixed. Technology proves effective in some cases and not in others, paralleling the education technology findings in high-income countries and the fact that technology is a means to an end rather than an end in itself ( Bulman and Fairlie, 2016 ). Public–private partnerships likewise are proving no panacea to education systems in Africa.

The past few years have provided several long-term studies on the elimination of primary school fees, showing positive results on later life outcomes. Likewise, a new generation of studies on reducing fees for secondary school shows gains in access, increased employment and reduced early fertility. Of course, the first step of constructing schools in places where there are no schools is likely an essential condition for further educational investments.

6.2. What we still need to learn

The weaknesses of this evidence base are the same weaknesses of economics of education research throughout low- and middle-income countries. The first is the duration of impacts. The vast majority of interventions measure outcomes within 12 months of the onset of the intervention, with little information on the longer run time path of impacts ( McEwan, 2015 ). There are recent exceptions to that in the region, with studies studying impacts of experimental interventions 2 years after implementation ( Cilliers et al. , 2020a ), 3 years after implementation ( Bagby et al. , 2016 ), 7 years after implementation ( Evans and Ngatia, 2020 ) and even 10 years after implementation ( Baird et al. , 2016b ; Ingwersen et al. , 2019 ). But most interventions still lack any long-term follow-up. Quasi-experimental studies that examine policy changes are showing much longer-term impacts, as in several of the fee elimination studies.

The second is scale. Many evaluations of interventions are at relatively small scale. Outside of the interventions evaluating national policies, the median number of treated schools is just 66 ( Table 4 ), often implemented under the careful eye of a cautious researcher. Obviously, going to scale entails a host of challenges—both political and implementation—and sometimes those challenges ultimately undermine whatever worked well in the original evaluation ( Bold et al. , 2018 ). Design elements in pilots can facilitate moving to scale by, for example, testing a variety of elements to increase confidence in the optimal policy design, drawing on government systems when possible and providing cost analysis ( Gove et al. , 2017 ).

Interventions where scale requires a large increase in financial resources but not a proportional increase in human resources (e.g., cash transfers or fee elimination) present a distinct set of challenges than those where scale requires a corresponding increase in human resources (a structured pedagogy program, for example). In some ways, the financial resources are easier to come by at large scale than the human resources, especially in education systems that historically have had difficulty recruiting and training qualified workers.

A third challenge is cost-effectiveness. A natural response to the array of evidence we have presented would be to point out that the benefit is just half of the investment decision. Unfortunately, less than 30% of the studies report cost-effectiveness ( Table 3 ), which may be an increase from a few years ago ( McEwan, 2015 ). 18 Programs that provide consistent benefits in boosting access—including fee elimination, school construction and school meals—also tend to have high fixed or recurrent costs (or both). Cost-effectiveness analysis is essential for better policy decisions, and hopefully the new generation of studies will do more of that.

6.3. Applying research findings to policy

These findings can help policymakers to update their existing beliefs as to the best starting points for discussions about education policy. Every place and time is different, and so synthesising effective results is not intended to promote wholesale adoption of one program to another context. Achieving high-quality education in Africa will require a host of interventions at each education level—early child education, primary education, secondary education, etc. As a result, policymakers and the researchers who advise them can learn from successful interventions in two key ways. First, most simply, successful interventions in one context provide a starting point for discussions in another context ( World Bank, 2018a ). 19 Would that work here? Why or why not? Second, we can examine the principles behind the success of interventions rather than focusing on specific point estimates ( Muralidharan, 2017 ). Specifically, we can ask what the theory behind the program is: whether the required conditions in a new context hold for that theory to apply; whether the same behaviour change would be expected in the new context, based on existing evidence; and whether the program could be well implemented ( Bates and Glennerster, 2017 ). In some cases, a different program design may be more effective at achieving the same change in teacher or student behaviour in a new country because of different contextual factors. Certain classes of programs that have been successful across several contexts—such as structured pedagogy programs, school feeding programs, school fee elimination programs or mother tongue instruction programs—may provide starting points for policy discussions in other areas.

The education impact evaluation evidence in Africa is shifting from simple tests of what works and what does not to what implementation design is the most effective in a given context. As Duflo (2017) writes, ‘Our models give us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter.’ But the growing array of evidence can guide us in the path forward.

The authors are grateful for contributions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of this work.

These initial numbers are regional aggregates provided in the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. One challenge in tracking and reporting these statistics is the availability of data: in 2010, only about two-thirds of the countries in the region reported primary completion rates. Figures 1 and 2 provide a more detailed distribution.

The number of impact evaluations on the topic of education in development settings rose more in absolute numbers than in any other sector except health, both from 2000 to 2009 and from 2010 to 2015 ( Sabet and Brown, 2018 ).

Section 2 provides evidence for these claims.

Most of our studies are from Sub-Saharan Africa, but a handful is from northern African countries.

Two earlier examples include Kremer and Miguel (2007) and Baird et al. , (2011) .

Lacking access to time travel technology, Evans and Popova (2016b) actually review an earlier version of the work of Conn (2014) but the results of Conn’s analysis do not change across the two versions.

We use the median rate across countries because education policy decisions are made at the country level. The World Development Indicators also provide a regional aggregate number with population weighting, which yields slightly higher completion rates (68% for primary and 43% for lower secondary).

An assessment of student test scores in Nigeria reports that only 17% of the students meet the minimum literacy competency benchmark and 31% meet the numeracy benchmark. Students from poor households, in rural areas and in government-owned schools are particularly worse off ( Adeniran et al. , 2020 ).

Snilstveit et al. (2016) provide a manageable summary of Snilstveit et al. (2015) , which comes in at more than 850 pages.

Evans and Popova (2016b) provide a detailed description of the advantages and disadvantages of different review methodologies.

Mother tongue instruction can also be used to refer to teaching children their mother tongue (e.g., formalising knowledge of a language spoken from childhood). That is not how we use the term here.

Brunette et al. (2019) examined interventions in 12 different mother tongues and found positive, significant impacts for three quarters of them.

The Gambian program also had no clear impact on student test scores ( Pugatch and Schroeder, 2018 ).

Many teacher professional development interventions report impacts on participant knowledge and even practice—as do McDermott and Allen (2015) in Sierra Leone—but it cannot be assumed that teachers will be able to translate that knowledge into increased student learning.

Some studies provide proof of concept of technological interventions in very small samples. These studies should not inform large-scale policies yet, but they can point to promising directions for future testing. In a very small pilot study in Kenya, primary school teachers and students had access to an ‘interactive, multimedia literacy software’ for 90 minutes per week, resulting in gains in end-of-year subject exams ( Abrami et al. , 2016 ). Another small pilot provided electronic career guidance for secondary school students in Nigeria, with promising results ( John et al. , 2016 ).

That program also seems to have increased children’s participation in household chores ( de Hoop and Rosati, 2014 ).

Evans and Yuan (2019) find cash transfers among both the most and the least effective interventions to increase girls’ access to schooling worldwide.

Even if one had those data, comparing costs across settings entails many of the same challenges that comparing effect sizes entails ( Evans and Popova, 2016a ).

Most immediately, evaluations can inform policy decisions in the same context, as demonstrated by the multifaceted use of evaluations by the Department of Basic Education in South Africa ( Pophiwa et al. , 2020 ). This is less relevant to the present synthesis of evidence from many countries.

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Education in Africa: What Are We Learning?

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Too Little Access, Not Enough Learning: Africa’s Twin Deficit in Education

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, kevin watkins kevin watkins former brookings expert, ceo - save the children uk.

January 16, 2013

• 13 min read

  Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the This Is Africa Special Report, Access +: Towards a post-MDG development agenda on education.

Africa’s education crisis seldom makes media headlines or summit agendas and analysis by the Brookings Center for Universal Education (CUE) explains why this needs to change. With one-in-three children still out of school, progress towards universal primary education has stalled. Meanwhile, learning levels among children who are in school are abysmal. Using a newly developed Learning Barometer , CUE estimates that 61 million African children will reach adolescence lacking even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills. Failure to tackle the learning deficit will deprive a whole generation of opportunities to develop their potential and escape poverty. And it will undermine prospect for dynamic growth with shared prosperity.

If you want a glimpse into Africa’s education crisis there is no better vantage point than the town of Bodinga, located in the impoverished Savannah region of Sokoto state in northwestern Nigeria. Drop into one of the local primary schools and you’ll typically find more than 50 students crammed into a class. Just a few will have textbooks. If the teacher is there, and they are often absent, the children will be on the receiving end of a monotone recitation geared towards rote learning.

Not that there is much learning going on. One recent survey found that 80 percent of Sokoto’s Grade 3 pupils cannot read a single word. They have gone through three years of zero value-added schooling. Mind you, the kids in the classrooms are the lucky ones, especially if they are girls. Over half of the state’s primary school-age children are out of school – and Sokoto has some of the world’s biggest gender gaps in education. Just a handful of the kids have any chance of making it through to secondary education.

The ultimate aim of any education system is to equip children with the numeracy, literacy and wider skills that they need to realize their potential – and that their countries need to generate jobs, innovation and economic growth.

Bodinga’s schools are a microcosm of a wider crisis in Africa’s education. After taking some rapid strides towards universal primary education after 2000, progress has stalled. Out-of-school numbers are on the rise – and the gulf in education opportunity separating Africa from the rest of the world is widening. That gulf is not just about enrollment and years in school, it is also about learning. The ultimate aim of any education system is to equip children with the numeracy, literacy and wider skills that they need to realize their potential – and that their countries need to generate jobs, innovation and economic growth. From South Korea to Singapore and China, economic success has been built on the foundations of learning achievement. And far too many of Africa’s children are not learning, even if they are in school.

The Center for Universal Education at Brookings/ This is Africa Learning Barometer survey takes a hard look at the available evidence. In what is the first region-wide assessment of the state of learning, the survey estimates that 61 million children of primary school age – one-in-every-two across the region – will reach their adolescent years unable to read, write or perform basic numeracy tasks. Perhaps the most shocking finding, however, is that over half of these children will have spent at least four years in the education system.

Africa’s education crisis does not make media headlines. Children don’t go hungry for want of textbooks, good teachers and a chance to learn. But this is a crisis that carries high costs. It is consigning a whole generation of children and youth to a future of poverty, insecurity and unemployment. It is starving firms of the skills that are the life-blood of enterprise and innovation. And it is undermining prospects for sustained economic growth in the world’s poorest region.

Tackling the crisis in education will require national and international action on two fronts: Governments need to get children into school – and they need to ensure that children get something meaningful from their time in the classroom. Put differently, they need to close the twin deficit in access and learning.

School Enrollment – Good News and Bad News

The good news story on education in Africa is that out-of-school numbers have fallen dramatically over the past decade.  

Primary school enrollment has increased from 58 percent to 76 percent, gender gaps are narrowing, and more kids are making it through to secondary school. Ten years ago, countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Senegal were treading water, or slipping backwards on enrollment. Now they are heading in the right direction. The elimination of school fees, increased investment in school infrastructure, and increased teacher recruitment have all contributed to the change.

The bad news comes in a double dose. There are still some 30 million primary school-age children out of school – one-in-every-four in the region – and progress towards universal primary education has stalled. Instead of hitting the Millennium Development Goal target of universal primary education by 2015, the out-of-school number could rise by 2 million.

Meanwhile, Africa has the world’s lowest secondary school enrollment rates. Just 28 percent of youth are enrolled in secondary school, leaving over 90 million teenagers struggling for employment in low-paid, informal sector jobs. Today, a child entering the education systems of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country has an 80 percent chance of receiving some form of tertiary education. The comparable figure for sub-Saharan Africa is 6 percent.

Why has progress on enrollment ground to a halt? Partly because governments are failing to extend opportunities to the region’s most marginalized children. Africa has some of the world’s starkest inequalities in access to education. Children from the richest 20 percent of households in Ghana average six more years in school than those from the poorest households. Being poor, rural and female carries a triple handicap. In northern Nigeria, Hausa girls in this category average less than one year in school, while wealthy urban males get nine years.

Conflict is another barrier to progress. Many of Africa’s out-of-school children are either living in conflict zones such as Somalia and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in camps for displaced people in their home country, or – like the tens of thousands of Somali children in Kenya – as refugees. Six years after the country’s peace agreement, South Sudan still has over 1 million children out of school.

The Learning Deficit

Just how much are Africa’s children learning in school? That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Few countries in the region participate in international learning assessments – and most governments collect learning data in a fairly haphazard fashion.

The Learning Barometer provides a window into Africa’s schools. Covering 28 countries, and 78 percent of the region’s primary school-age population, the survey draws on a range of regional and national assessments to identify the minimum learning thresholds for Grades 4 and 5 of primary school. Children below these thresholds are achieving scores that are so low as to call into question the value-added of their schooling. Most will be unable to read or write with any fluency, or to successfully complete basic numeracy tasks. Of course, success in school is about more than test scores.

It is also about building foundational skills in teamwork, supporting emotional development, and stimulating problem-solving skills. But learning achievement is a critical measure of education quality – and the Learning Barometer registers dangerously low levels of achievement.

The headline numbers tell their own story. Over one-third of pupils covered in the survey – 23 million children – fall below the minimum learning threshold. Because this figure is an average, it obscures the depth of the learning deficit in many countries. More than half of students in Grades 4 and 5 in countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Zambia are below the minimum learning bar. In total, there are seven countries in which 40 percent or more of children are in this position. As a middle-income country, South Africa stands out. One-third of children fall below the learning threshold, reflecting the large number of failing schools in areas servicing predominantly low-income black and mixed race children.

Disparities in learning achievement mirror wider inequalities in education. In Mozambique and South Africa, children from the poorest households are seven times more likely than those from the richest households to rank in the lowest 10 percent of students.

Unfortunately, the bad news does not end here. Bear in mind that the Learning Barometer registers the score of children who are in school. Learning achievement levels among children who are out of school are almost certainly far lower – and an estimated 10 million children in Africa drop out each year. Consider the case of Malawi. Almost half of the children sitting in Grade 5 classrooms are unable to perform basic literacy and numeracy tasks. More alarming still is that half of the children who entered primary school have dropped out by this stage.

Adjusting the Learning Barometer to measure the learning achievement levels of children who are out of school, likely to drop out, and in school but not learning produces some distressing results. There are 127 million children of primary school age in Africa. In the absence of an urgent drive to raise standards, half of these children – 61 million in total – will reach adolescence without the basic learning skills that they, and their countries, desperately need to escape the gravitational pull of mass poverty.

Rising awareness of the scale of Africa’s learning crisis has turned the spotlight on schools, classrooms and teachers – and for good reason. Education systems across the region urgently need reform. But the problems begin long before children enter school in a lethal interaction between poverty, inequality and education disadvantage.

The early childhood years set many of Africa’s children on a course for failure in education. There is compelling international evidence that preschool malnutrition has profoundly damaging – and largely irreversible – consequences for the language, memory and motor skills that make effective learning possible and last throughout youth and adulthood. This year, 40 percent of Africa’s children will reach primary school-age having had their education opportunities blighted by hunger. Some two-thirds of the region’s preschool children suffer from anemia – another source of reduced learning achievement.

Parental illiteracy is another preschool barrier to learning. The vast majority of the 48 million children entering Africa’s schools over the past decade come from illiterate home environments. Lacking the early reading, language and numeracy skills that can provide a platform for learning, they struggle to make the transition to school – and their parents struggle to provide support with homework.

Gender roles can mean that young girls are removed from school to collect water or care for their siblings. Meanwhile, countries such as Niger, Chad and Mali have some of the world’s highest levels of child marriage – many girls become brides before they have finished primary school.

School systems in Africa are inevitably affected by the social and economic environments in which they operate. Household poverty forces many children out of school and into employment. Gender roles can mean that young girls are removed from school to collect water or care for their siblings. Meanwhile, countries such as Niger, Chad and Mali have some of the world’s highest levels of child marriage – many girls become brides before they have finished primary school.

None of this is to discount the weaknesses of the school system. Teaching is at the heart of the learning crisis. If you want to know why so many kids learn so little, reflect for a moment on what their teachers know. Studies in countries such as Lesotho, Mozambique and Uganda have found that fewer than half of teachers could score in the top band on a test designed for 12-year-olds. Meanwhile, many countries have epidemic levels of teacher absenteeism.

It is all too easy to blame Africa’s teachers for the crisis in education – but this misses the point. The region’s teachers are products of the systems in which they operate. Many have not received a decent quality education. They frequently lack detailed information about what their students are expected to learn and how their pupils are performing. Trained to deliver outmoded rote learning classes, they seldom receive the support and advice they need from more experienced teachers and education administrators on how to improve teaching. And they are often working for poverty-level wages in extremely harsh conditions.

Education policies compound the problem. As children from nonliterate homes enter school systems they urgently need help to master the basic literacy and numeracy skills that they will need to progress through the system. Unfortunately, classroom overcrowding is at its worst in the early grades – and the most qualified teachers are typically deployed at higher grades.

Public spending often reinforces disadvantage, with the most prosperous regions and best performing schools cornering the lion’s share of the budget. In Kenya, the arid and semi-arid northern counties are home to 9 percent of the country’s children but 21 percent of out-of-school children. Yet these counties receive half as much public spending on a per child basis as wealthier commercial farming counties.

Looking Ahead – Daunting Challenges, New Opportunities

The combined effects of restricted access to education and low learning achievement should be sounding alarm bells across Africa. Economic growth over the past decade has been built in large measure on a boom in exports of unprocessed commodities. Sustaining that growth will require entry into higher value-added areas of production and international trade – and quality education is the entry ticket. Stated bluntly, Africa cannot build economic success on failing education systems. And it will not generate the 45 million additional jobs needed for young people joining the labor force over the next decade if those systems are not fixed.

Daunting as the scale of the crisis in education may be, many of the solutions are within reach. Africa’s governments have to take the lead. Far more has to be done to reach the region’s most marginalized children. Providing parents with cash transfers and financial incentives to keep children – especially girls – in school can help to mitigate the effects of poverty. So can early childhood programs and targeted support to marginalized regions.

Africa also needs an education paradigm shift. Education planners have to look beyond counting the number of children sitting in classrooms and start to focus on learning. Teacher recruitment, training and support systems need to be overhauled to deliver effective classroom instruction. The allocation of financial resources and teachers to schools should be geared towards the improvement of standards and equalization of learning outcomes. And no country in Africa, however poor, can neglect the critical task of building effective national learning assessment systems.

Aid donors and the wider international community also have a role to play. Having promised much, they have for the most part delivered little – especially to countries affected by conflict. Development assistance levels for education in Africa have stagnated in recent years. The $1.8 billion provided in 2010 was less than one-quarter of what is required to close the region’s aid financing gap.

Unlike the health sector, where vaccinations and the global funds for AIDS have mobilized finance and unleashed a wave of innovative public-private partnerships, the education sector continues to attract limited interest. This could change with a decision by the U.N. secretary-general to launch a five-year initiative, Education First, aimed at forging a broad coalition for change across donors, governments, the business community and civil society.

There is much to celebrate in Africa’s social and economic progress over the past decade. But if the region is to build on the foundations that have been put in place, it has to stop the hemorrhage of skills, talent and human potential caused by the crisis in education. Africa’s children have a right to an education that offers them a better future – and they have a right to expect their leaders and the international community to get behind them.

Education Access & Equity Global Education

Global Economy and Development

Sub-Saharan Africa

Center for Universal Education

August 2, 2024

June 20, 2024

Elyse Painter, Emily Gustafsson-Wright

January 5, 2024

What Will It Take for Africa to Lead an Education Turnaround?

Victoria kwakwa.

One striking statistic puts in context the state of education in Africa today. According to the latest State of Global Education Update , nearly 9 in 10 children in Sub-Saharan Africa are unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10. Globally, 70% can’t perform this task – up from 57% before the COVID-19 pandemic. Children who were out of school failed to learn what they were supposed to and, in some cases, even forgot the skills they had previously acquired. This perilous situation continues: About 160 million students in Eastern and Southern African countries were out of school for some period of time due to COVID-related school closures, and an estimated 34% of adolescent girls remain out of school today.  On International Day of Education, I’d like to contribute to the global effort to highlight this full-blown learning crisis and underscore the importance and urgency of efforts focused on bringing children back to school and accelerating learning recovery and progress.

Even in the context of competing crises – inflation, energy, food security, climate, – this is a crisis too severe to ignore. Basic education, but also secondary, tertiary, and technical and vocational training, will determine this generation’s ability to get jobs and contribute to economic growth in the future. Failure to integrate millions of children and youth in productive activities, in a global economy increasingly based on knowledge and digital skills (with potentially over 230 million jobs that will require digital skills in Africa by 2030), could well result in social unrest in a few years’ time – a scenario no policymaker wants to face.

Recent experiences in Eastern and Southern Africa show progress is possible even in the face of multiple adversities such as tight budgets, high demographic growth, and cultural norms that restrict opportunities for women and girls. For example, funding from the International Development Association , the World Bank’s fund for the poorest economies, which provides low-interest loans and grants, has been put to good use in recent years – including during the COVID-19 pandemic – to:

• build 22,500 new classrooms in Rwanda between 2019 and 2022
• enroll 2.3 million more students in free primary schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the 2021-2022 school year
• increase the number of students enrolled in accredited higher education programs in Mozambique by 75% between 2018 and 2022
• provide 27,000 adolescent girls and women in Somalia with a mix of literacy, numeracy, life and vocational skills that will allow them to improve their livelihoods
• and significantly increase the number of Inclusive Education Resource Centers (from 113 in 2017 to 1,050) supporting more than 61,000 children with special needs in Ethiopia.

These examples, and more, are detailed in an immersive story published today to inspire hope amid glaring and dire prognostics of learning losses and employment failure. But these interventions are just one part of the solution. Transforming education will take strong political commitment over the long term to lead on the needed policy reforms, increased financing and changed social norms.

On International Day of Education, please join my call to scale-up proven results and do more to Expand access to schools, Equip more young people with quality education and in-demand skills, and Empower all children, whatever their gender or level of ability, so no one is left behind. Together, we can roll up our sleeves and lead an education turnaround!

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Africa grapples with huge disparities in education

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At the dawn of independence, incoming African leaders were quick to prioritize education on their development agendas. Attaining universal primary education, they maintained, would help postindependence Africa lift itself out of abject poverty.

As governments began to build schools and post teachers even to the farthest corners of the continent, with help from religious organizations and other partners, children began to fill the classrooms and basic education was under way.

Africa’s current primary school enrolment rate is above 80% on average, with the continent recording some of the biggest increases in elementary school enrolment globally in the last few decades, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is tasked with coordinating international cooperation in education, science, culture and communication. More children in Africa are going to school than ever before.

Yet despite the successes in primary school enrolment, inequalities and inefficiencies remain in this critical sector.

According to the African Union (AU), the recent expansion in enrolments “masks huge disparities and system dysfunctionalities and inefficiencies” in education subsectors such as preprimary, technical, vocational and informal education, which are severely underdeveloped.

It is widely accepted that most of Africa’s education and training programs suffer from low-quality teaching and learning, as well as inequalities and exclusion at all levels. Even with a substantial increase in the number of children with access to basic education, a large number still remain out of school.

A newly released report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Income Inequality Trends in sub-Saharan Africa: Divergence, Determinants and Consequences, identifies the unequal distribution of essential facilities, such as schools, as one the drivers of wide income disparities.

Ayodele Odusola, the lead editor of the report and UNDP’s chief economist, makes the following point: “Quality education is key to social mobility and can thus help reduce poverty, although it may not necessarily reduce [income] inequality.”

To address education inequality, he says, governments must invest heavily in child and youth development through appropriate education and health policies and programmes.

Higher-quality education, he says, improves the distribution of skilled workers, and state authorities can use this increased supply to build a fairer society in which all people, rich or poor, have equal opportunities. As it is now, only the elites benefit from quality education.

“Wealthy leaders in Africa send their children to study in the best universities abroad, such as Harvard. After studies, they come back to rule their countries, while those from poor families who went to public schools would be lucky to get a job even in the public sector,” notes Mr. Odusola.

Another challenge facing policy makers and pedagogues is low secondary and tertiary enrolment. Angela Lusigi, one of the authors of the UNDP report, says that while Africa has made significant advances in closing the gap in primary-level enrolments, both secondary and tertiary enrolments lag behind. Only four out of every 100 children in Africa is expected to enter a graduate and postgraduate institution, compared to 36 out of 100 in Latin America and 14 out of 100 in South and West Asia.

“In fact, only 30 to 50% of secondary-school-aged children are attending school, while only 7 to 23% of tertiary-school-aged youth are enrolled. This varies by subregion, with the lowest levels being in Central and Eastern Africa and the highest enrolment levels in Southern and North Africa,” Ms. Lusigi, who is also the strategic advisor for UNDP Africa, told Africa Renewal.

According to Ms. Lusigi, many factors account for the low transition from primary to secondary and tertiary education. The first is limited household incomes, which limit children’s access to education. A lack of government investment to create equal access to education also plays a part.   

“The big push that led to much higher primary enrolment in Africa was subsidized schooling financed by both public resources and development assistance,” she said. “This has not yet transitioned to providing free access to secondary- and tertiary-level education.”

Another barrier to advancing from primary to secondary education is the inability of national institutions in Africa to ensure equity across geographical and gender boundaries. Disabled children are particularly disadvantaged.

“Often in Africa, decisions to educate children are made within the context of discriminatory social institutions and cultural norms that may prevent young girls or boys from attending school,” says Ms. Lusigi.

Regarding gender equality in education, large gaps exist in access, learning achievement and advanced studies, most often at the expense of girls, although in some regions boys may be the ones at a disadvantage.

UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics reports that more girls than boys remain out of school in sub-Saharan Africa, where a girl can expect to receive only about nine years of schooling while boys can expect 10 years (including some time spent repeating classes).

More girls than boys drop out of school before completing secondary or tertiary education in Africa. Globally, women account for two-thirds of the 750 million adults without basic literacy skills.

Then there is the additional challenge of Africa’s poorly resourced education systems, the difficulties ranging from the lack of basic school infrastructure to poor-quality instruction. According to the Learning Barometer of the Brookings Institution, a US-based think tank, up to 50% of the students in some countries are not learning effectively.

Results from regional assessments by the UN indicate “poor learning outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, despite upward trend in average learning achievements.” Many children who are currently in school will not learn enough to acquire the basic skills needed to lead successful and productive lives. Some will leave school without a basic grasp of reading and mathematics.

The drivers of inequality in education are many and complex, yet the response to these challenges revolves around simple and sound policies for inclusive growth, the eradication of poverty and exclusion, increased investment in education and human development, and good governance to ensure a fairer distribution of assets.

With an estimated 364 million Africans between the ages of 15 and 35, the continent has the world’s youngest population, which offers an immense opportunity for investing in the next generation of African leaders and entrepreneurs. Countries can start to build and upgrade education facilities and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all.

The AU, keeping in mind that the continent’s population will double in the next 25 years, is seeking through its Continental Education Strategy for Africa 2016–2025 to expand access not just to quality education, but also to education that is relevant to the needs of the continent.

The AU Commission deputy chairperson, Thomas Kwesi Quartey, says governments must address the need for good education and appropriate skills training to stem rising unemployment.

Institutions of higher learning in Africa, he says, need to review and diversify their systems of education and expand the level of skills to make themselves relevant to the demands of the labour market.

“Our institutions are churning out thousands of graduates each year, but these graduates cannot find jobs because the education systems are traditionally focused on preparing graduates for white-collar jobs, with little regard to the demands of the private sector, for innovation or entrepreneurship,” said Mr. Quartey during the opening of the European Union–Africa Business Forum in Brussels, Belgium, in June 2017.

He noted that if African youths are not adequately prepared for the job market, “Growth in technical fields that support industrialization, manufacturing and development in the value chains will remain stunted.” Inequality’s inclusion among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities) serves as an important reminder to leaders in Africa to take the issue seriously.

For a start, access to early childhood development programmes, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, can help reduce inequality by ensuring that all children begin formal schooling with strong foundations.

The UNDP, through its new strategic plan (for 2018 through 2021), will work to deliver development solutions for diverse contexts and a range of development priorities, including poverty eradication, jobs and livelihoods, governance and institutional capacity and disaster preparedness and management.   

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Transforming Education in Africa an evidence-based overview and recommendations for long-term improvements

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UNESCO welcomes ambitious African Union education goals

The African Union Summit of Heads of State and Government in Addis Ababa has just officially declared 2024 the “Year of Education”, calling on all governments to accelerate progress towards achieving quality education for all. 

This decision of the African Union sends a very strong signal to invest in education as a driver of sustainable development of the continent and to consider the needs of young generations. UNESCO, as the UN lead organization for education, is determined to support the efforts of African States to achieve universal primary and secondary education and access to quality higher education and research opportunities in Africa.

Significant progress has been made in broadening access to education in Africa over the past few decades. The out-of-school population in Sub-Saharan Africa at primary and secondary levels dropped from 44% in 2000 to 29% in 2020 – as referenced in the latest UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report 2023. During this period, the youth literacy rate in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 66% to 77.5%,  and the adult literacy rate from 52.6% to 64.3%.

African countries’ ambitions to improve access to quality education for all children are also evidenced in a  SDG 4 scorecard released on 7 February. It shows that African States are committed to reducing primary out-of-school rates from 19% in 2022 to 11% by 2025. They are also committed to ensuring that 79% of teachers at the pre-primary level and 85% at the primary level are trained, given the significant shortage of qualified teachers across the continent. 

Addressing the funding gap and teacher shortage

Despite this progress and these commitments, Africa is still home to the largest out-of-school population in the world: 98 million school-aged population do not go to school. And nearly 9 in 10 children who are in school cannot read and understand a simple text by the age of 10. This is why the African Union's decision to dedicate 2024 to education is so important. During this year, solutions to two major challenges will be discussed across the continent with the support of UNESCO: the funding gap and the teacher shortage.

According to  UNESCO , an additional $77 billion is needed annually for African countries to reach their national education targets and provide quality education for all. Yet despite this need, development aid to education in sub-Saharan Africa fell by 23% in the last recorded year. Students also need more qualified teachers: 15 million must be recruited by 2030 to achieve universal primary and secondary education in Africa.

Magic System launches an anthem to promote this year of education

UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador A’Salfo and his internationally acclaimed Ivorian band,  Magic System , launched a new version of the band’s hit song ‘Magic in the Air’ to mark the launch of Education as the African Union’s Theme of the Year 2024. Entitled ‘Education in the Air’, the song has been rewritten to promote education as a key lever to shape brighter futures for people and societies as a whole.

Working through the Magic System Foundation and as UNESCO's Goodwill Ambassador, I strongly believe in the power of education to transform lives and to create a just and peaceful world. Now is the time for all of us to work together to ensure that all learners thrive and pursue their dreams. With the “Education in the Air” global campaign, I invite everyone to dance for education.

The lead singer of Magic System who has been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador since 2012, invites the group’s fans to film themselves dancing to the re-versioned song, with the hashtag #DanceForEducation. The best dance clips will make it into a music video to be launched in May to celebrate Africa Day. 

Earlier this month, UNESCO Director-General travelled to Abidjan where she met with H.E. Alassane Ouattara, the President of Côte d'Ivoire, and discussed UNESCO’s support to education in the country through a $45 million programme. On this occasion, the Director-General also met with A’Salfo and the whole Ivorian band Magic System at their Foundation to thank them for producing this anthem which will raise awareness among citizens about educational issues.

Press contact

Phone: +33 1 45 68 17 29

About UNESCO  

With 194 Member States, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization contributes to peace and security by leading multilateral cooperation on education, science, culture, communication and information. Headquartered in Paris, UNESCO has offices in 54 countries and employs over 2300 people. UNESCO oversees more than 2000 World Heritage sites, Biosphere Reserves and Global Geoparks; networks of Creative, Learning, Inclusive and Sustainable Cities; and over 13 000 associated schools, university chairs, training and research institutions. Its Director-General is Audrey Azoulay.

“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed” – UNESCO Constitution, 1945. 

More information:  www.unesco.org  

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