Our Terms & Conditions | Our Privacy Policy
The continent’s most urgent infrastructure need isn’t concrete, it’s foundational learning, writesFemi Awoyinfa
In a village school just outside one of the capital cities in Nigeria, a primary three pupil stares blankly at the blackboard. She’s ten years old and still unable to read a simple sentence. She is not alone. Across sub-Saharan Africa, nearly nine out of ten children cannot read or understand a basic text by age ten. This isn’t just a crisis of education, it’s a crisis of development.
Africa is standing at a demographic crossroad. Over the next 25 years, the continent’s population will swell past 2.5 billion, with more than 40% under the age of 15. This youth bulge is often cited as an opportunity for innovation, growth, and global relevance. But numbers don’t educate themselves. Unless urgent investments are made in foundational learning: basic literacy and numeracy in the early years, this demographic dividend will become a debt.
The World Bank calls it “learning poverty”. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is among the worst in the world: 89%, compared to 58% in South Asia and just 9% in high-income countries. And the consequences are staggering. The Bank estimates that poor foundational learning costs low and middle-income countries up to $129 billion annually in lost productivity and lifetime earnings. The learning crisis is not isolated; it undercuts progress in every sector.
It shows. In Nigeria, with over 200 million people, there are fewer than 100 practicing oncologists, Ethiopia, with a population 120 million, has only about 1,200 public sector surgeons. These shortages are not due to a lack of ambition. They are the downstream effects of weak education systems that have failed to equip the next generation with the tools to learn, specialise, and lead. There is also the additional effect of brain drain among the country’s educated youth. By contrast, India’s decades-long investment in basic education has helped it build a health workforce of over 2.7 million doctors.
This is not for lack of effort. Over the past three decades, governments, donors, and civil society have poured billions into basic education. But the right combination of effectiveness, affordability, and scale has proved stubbornly out of reach. A reminder that good intentions alone don’t teach children to read.
The roots of the problem run deep, but some green shoots are beginning to emerge. In Kenya and Nigeria, digital platforms like EIDU are offering early evidence of what scalable, cost-effective innovation can achieve. EIDU, currently reaching over half a million pupils, uses mobile technology to support teachers and track student progress in real-time. The results are promising. In schools where it operates, the lowest performing 25% of pupils show the most progress, gaining the equivalent of an extra half year of learning.
Beyond scores, EIDU’s impact has the potential to ripple outward boosting teacher motivation, attendance, punctuality, pupil engagement and equipping educators with practical tools. In Nigeria, state governments like Oyo and Katsina have integrated the approach into selected public classrooms. These local experiments are not silver bullets. But they do signal a shift: a recognition that the foundations of literacy must be rebuilt before we can speak of transformation.
Governments across the continent must now act with intent. Fixing foundational learning does not grab headlines like new bridges or airports, but its absence is felt in every sector, from health to governance to employment. It is the missing infrastructure in Africa’s development blueprint.
The time for marginal reforms is over. African leaders must back foundational learning with serious public investment, measurable targets, and a willingness to embrace both local ideas and external innovations. If not, the youngest continent on Earth will grow up unprepared for the world they are meant to shape.
The future of Africa is young, but if that future can’t read, it can’t lead.
.Mr.Awoyinfa is a global leader in international development
Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.
Aggregated From –
Comments are closed.