Education

On 23 September Nigeria and Italy hosted a funding meeting for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), a global fund that helps lower-income countries pay for and improve their schools. The meeting raised $3.5 billion. Of that, $2.1 billion was pledged to GPE itself, against a target of $5 billion for 2026 to 2030. Another $1.4 billion came as co-financing from public development lenders, foundations and companies. Partner countries promised to raise their own education spending by 32% by 2030, to $471 billion. Italy doubled its contribution. Nigeria, the co-host with the most children out of school, published no pledge. The fund now has less than half of what it asked for.

Google and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency for digital technology, offered 100,000 scholarships for Google's online AI certificate in more than 80 countries. On 24 September the African Development Bank, the AI Hub of the UN Development Programme, Google and the learning platform Apolitical launched free online AI courses for African public officials. They published no budget and no target for how many officials would take part. Neither offer trains teachers, changes what schools teach or connects schools to the internet.

The second report on education across Africa by the UN education agency (UNESCO), the UN children's agency (UNICEF) and the African Union finds 75 million more children in school than in 2015. Over the same period, the number out of school rose by 13.2 million, to more than 100 million. African countries now invest less in education than they did in 2015 and 2020. The yearly funding gap is about $77 billion. The share of children who finish school rises by less than one percentage point a year. At that pace, many children now starting school will leave without finishing.

Sub-Saharan Africa needs 15 million new teachers by 2030, a third of the 44 million needed worldwide. Teachers are also leaving faster. Across the world, the share of primary teachers who leave the job each year almost doubled, from 4.6% in 2015 to 9.1% in 2022. Every teacher who leaves makes the African shortage harder to close.

Four in five ten-year-olds in Africa cannot read and understand a simple text, and learning levels appear to be falling. Seven in ten children in sub-Saharan Africa get no schooling before primary school. In 2021, low-income African countries spent about $54 a year on each student, while high-income countries spent about $8,500. Yet schooling pays well in Africa. Each extra year in school raises earnings by 12.4% in the region, against 10% worldwide.

In July 2026 UNESCO published a paper called Breaking the debt trap. It finds that governments in sub-Saharan Africa spend on average 3.6 times more on debt payments than on education. In eight countries they spend at least five times more: Angola, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, the Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Mauritius, Uganda and Chad. Since 2017, each extra dollar paid on debt has come with about 28 cents less for education, after inflation. Most of these payments, 62%, go to lenders inside the country. Money that could pay teachers goes to lenders first.

Aid for education is falling fast. It is expected to fall 30% from its 2023 peak by 2027. Aid for basic schooling fell 15% between 2023 and 2024, and 17% in low-income countries. The United States cut its total aid by 57%, and Germany cut its development budget by 25%. The United Kingdom's aid is falling to 0.3% of national income by 2027. Liberia, Mali and Niger may lose more than 40% of their education aid. A common claim is that 97% of education money in the region comes from national budgets. That average hides countries that depend heavily on aid, such as Burundi, where aid pays for 19% of public education spending.

Few school systems have rules on AI. A 2023 UNESCO survey found that only 10% of schools and universities worldwide had formal guidance on it. Mauritius adopted Africa's first national AI strategy in 2018, and Kenya and Rwanda have their own. In June 2024 eastern African states adopted the Nairobi Statement on AI, which stresses ethical use and training for teachers. Research is also thin. Sub-Saharan Africa spends 0.38% of its national income on research, against a world average of 1.92%. It has 88 researchers for every million people, against 1,486 worldwide. Africa is entering the AI age with few rules for schools and few scientists of its own.

Nigeria had about 9.1 million primary-age children out of school in 2023. That is more than twice Ethiopia's 4.2 million in 2024, and the largest number among African countries with recent data. Nigeria's federal education budget rose to 3.52 trillion naira in 2025, from 1.54 trillion naira in 2023. Because Nigeria is so large, progress on schooling across Africa depends heavily on its choices.

Sierra Leone offers free schooling while carrying heavy debt. It spends 8.4 times more on debt than on education. Its 2026 education budget of 4.0 billion leones, about $169 million, rose 9.4% in cash terms and fell about 1% after inflation. Debt payments of 8.6 billion leones are more than double the education budget. When interest is counted in total spending, education takes 13.5% of the budget and 2.2% of national income, below the benchmark of 4% to 6%. Early childhood education gets 0.04% of the education budget. Aid pays for 31% of public education spending, so falling aid adds to the pressure.

Angola spends 12.2 times more on debt than on education, and gave education 6.5% of government spending in 2025. Kenya gave education 28.5%, the highest share among the countries compared here. Uganda gave 8.5% in 2022 and Zambia 14.5% in 2025. Their debt payments were 5.3 and 5.9 times their education spending. Kenya's model for funding university students began in May 2023. The High Court declared it unconstitutional in 2024, and the Court of Appeal restored it in March 2025. About 400,000 students were left unsure of their fees.

Kenya has given 10,382 laptops and as many smart boards to junior schools, and trained more than 62,000 teachers in computer skills. A programme backed by UNICEF had connected 363 of a planned 1,000 primary schools to the internet by December 2025. Rwanda depends on aid more than any country named by the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report. Aid pays for nearly 40% of its public education spending, so cuts abroad reach its classrooms directly.

The continental report names fast population growth as one of three reasons progress has stalled, beside crises and weak funding. More children reach school age every year, and the systems that must teach them are short of teachers and money. When the number of pupils rises and the budget stays flat, spending per child falls every year.

Most of the debt payments that crowd out schools go to lenders at home, such as banks and pension funds that hold government bonds. African governments can therefore act without waiting for creditors abroad. A minimum for education spending, written into each government's debt plan, would protect classrooms when debts are rescheduled. Parliaments can make that minimum part of the budget law.

AI makes reading, reasoning and judgement more valuable, and a child who cannot read at ten cannot use it. Teaching every child to read and count is therefore the first AI policy any African government needs. Online certificates for adults do not reach the four in five children who leave the early grades unable to read. With so few researchers, African universities cannot yet supply the scientists that debates on AI and pandemics assume. Disputes such as Kenya's over university fees show that governments still handle universities as a budget problem. Universities train the experts a country needs to make its own decisions, and they need steady funding for that.