Munich to Nairobi via Washington: Three Lessons on African Education Policy
August 2026
Munich to Nairobi via Washington: Three Lessons on African Education Policy
August 2026
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August 2026
Over the past two years, I have had the chance to benefit from the Africa Fellowship in Education Program of the Global Education Analytics Institute, which aims to foster a network of education economists across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) who can inform education policy through rigorous research. During this period, I had the opportunity to travel to Munich, Washington, Nairobi and other places to participate in education conferences, attend closed meetings on education policy and discuss education research with many brilliant researchers from across Africa. The fellowship involved writing a research paper, and I wrote mine on the use of television in classrooms. This experience exposed me to current preoccupations in the area of education research and policy, and to the many different solutions that people are suggesting to improve the situation in Africa (and elsewhere). Below are three main lessons I noted from this experience.
1. Classrooms, chairs, textbooks - we shouldn’t be discussing these basic inputs in 2026
1. Classrooms, chairs, textbooks - we shouldn’t be discussing these basic inputs in 2026
Over the past three decades, enrolment rates in SSA at all levels of education have substantially gone up, including in primary education where the gross enrolment rate has gone from 79% in 2000 to 97% in 2024. Efforts to get children into school have been successful even in the poorest countries, and the focus is now on improving the quality of education. This means that, if a country still has primary classrooms where children have to sit on each other, it is lagging behind, and needs to catch up, fast.
But don’t get confused, basic inputs such as textbooks, classrooms, and pens are not what education experts have in mind when they criticize input-based interventions, i.e. the idea that you can improve education quality just by distributing tablets, computers, TVs, and other items. Such perspectives notably emphasize interventions pertaining to incentives, not only the level of salaries but also different ways of compensating teachers, as well as pedagogical interventions and school governance.
However, it’s hard to imagine how a well-motivated teacher would be effective if they don’t have a classroom to teach in. That is to say, there is a minimum level of inputs necessary to obtain the desired educational outcomes. As for classrooms, a lot can be done quickly by bringing down the cost of constructing them, but this is a topic that would need a blog of its own.
At the Hoover Institution, Washington DC
2. No matter how poor a country is, there is always money to fund one or two world-class schools
2. No matter how poor a country is, there is always money to fund one or two world-class schools
My guess is that, if you asked the population in a random African country to vote between building one excellent school in the capital or 10 little schools in different corners of the country, the majority would choose the latter. That’s because individuals and local politicians naturally tend to lobby for their local communities. Some people may call it preference for equality, but it’s really about looking out for personal interests regardless of a higher goal. A tragedy of the commons, with the commons here being the central government budget. It’s politically hard to convince people to pool resources for the higher goal of building one or a few world-class schools, but I believe it is the right way to go. It’s even a matter of sovereignty for certain sectors. Recent examples include the production of vaccines and chips.
Sending top students to study abroad should not be a substitute for building domestic institutions, for one because it’s not guaranteed that they will come back to their home country, and because it could be more cost-effective to invest in excellent schools at home. There are, of course, benefits to studying abroad, notably getting to know other approaches to solving problems. However, studying abroad should primarily be about exchanging ideas, not because it's impossible to build knowledge locally. At the end of the day, countries are in competition with each other, continents are competing with each other, and countries cannot build long-term autonomy if they remain permanently dependent on imported human capital. Excellence needs to be built locally, by making sure that even the poor have access to the top school or schools.
Place de la Sorbonne, Paris
Anyone who has walked into the Sorbonne in Paris knows that you can’t help but get the sensation of walking into a palace. Well, that was the goal of its constructors, and it illustrates the importance given to education. A school should look like a king’s palace (and have a king’s budget too). If a country can’t do that for all schools, it should do it at least for a few.
3. Randomistas have recently identified promising avenues to increase the quality of education
In the spirit of Karl Popper, it’s not scientific if it’s not testable. There are interesting ideas in the field of education that are not randomizable, the epitome of evidence-building in social sciences. The idea of building excellent schools mentioned above is one of them (but it makes sense, right?). That said, in the past two decades or so, with the rise of experimentation in social sciences, many ideas have been rigorously tested through randomized trials. There is now more certainty about the cost-effectiveness of certain education programs in improving the quality of education. You can find a review here. Teaching at the right level, understood as adapting instruction to a child’s learning level, including remedial classes, has shown large positive effects in different countries. Similarly, improving pedagogy through structured lesson plans (aka structured pedagogy) has shown promising results. Other interventions, such as providing information on the benefits of education, community involvement in school management, and deworming, have been shown to be relatively cost-effective. Programs that essentially consist in distributing inputs alone, even textbooks, show low cost-effectiveness. The overall lesson is that each intervention, even when impact evaluations have shown that it has worked well elsewhere, still needs to be carefully introduced into the education system and adapted to the local context.
Conclusion
“The problem with education in Africa is that emphasis on excellence is exogenous while it’s endogenous in developed countries.” This is a harsh critique I heard from a European education expert during an informal conversation over the period of the fellowship. Like every critique that stings, there is some truth to it. In this case, the truthful part is that there are relatively easy, evidence-backed stuff that African countries should do but aren’t doing. I mentioned some above. The not-so-accurate part is the insinuation that the demand for quality education is not present. When you notice the amount of effort parents put into sending their kids to school, it’s clear that populations across Africa generally yearn for quality education. The problem, and much of the solution, lie within governments.
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