Dangote Foundation, NESG, Others Rally to Save African Education
African leaders launch coalitions to end continent’s deepening learning crisis
Godswill Michael
Determined to reverse Africa’s worsening education crisis, the Aliko Dangote Foundation, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), Human Capital Africa (HCA) and the African Philanthropy Forum have joined forces to drive homegrown solutions that will secure the continent’s learning future.
The organisations, at a high-level dinner in Abuja, launched two landmark initiatives — the African CEOs’ Coalition for Foundational Learning and the Africa Philanthropy Coalition for Foundational Learning — to mobilise African private sector leaders and philanthropists toward improving basic education outcomes across the continent.
The launch comes amid mounting concern over Africa’s growing “learning poverty.”
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, nine out of ten children cannot read and understand a simple text by age ten, one of the world’s highest rates. The crisis has been worsened by a projected 24 per cent global cut in education aid between 2023 and 2026, according to UNICEF, leaving African countries to fill an estimated $3.2 billion gap.
At the event, speakers underscored that the time had come for Africans to lead the charge in fixing their education systems.
Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, Founder and CEO of Human Capital Africa, said the coalition was born out of conviction that “Africa led philanthropy and private sector leadership can change the trajectory of education on our continent. They must become active participants in the process of fixing this time bomb. It is a solvable problem if we work together.”
She added that Africa could no longer depend on external donors. “The message is clear: we can no longer depend on others to solve this challenge for us. Africa must lead, by mobilising domestic resources, designing solutions for our contexts, and building powerful partnerships that put foundational learning at the centre of our development agenda,” she said.
Echoing that call, Niyi Yusuf, Chairman of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, said business leaders have a vested interest in ensuring Africa’s young population becomes a productive, innovative workforce.
“As business leaders it is in our enlightened self-interest to ensure our populations become a productive and innovative working class that can think, but most importantly thrive,” Yusuf said. “When the foundation is weak, there is only so much you can build on top. By 2050 Africa will have 2.5 billion people, and the majority of them will be young people. They are not just the workforce of the future, they are the consumers of the future. If they can’t produce quality. If they can’t earn properly. They cannot consume. As the NESG, we would like to publicly commit to this work on foundational learning. The journey starts today.”
Also lending her voice, Zouera Youssofou, CEO of the Aliko Dangote Foundation, stressed that fixing early learning is fundamental to Africa’s development agenda.
“If you don’t get foundational learning right, nothing else will matter. That is the message that we need to keep repeating. We all know it. But we are not paying enough attention and we are not investing enough in it,” she said.
Youssofou emphasised the importance of locally driven interventions: “African philanthropies are in Africa, close to the beneficiaries of our work and aware of the context. There are things a local organisation can do that an outside organisation cannot. We have been the beneficiaries of foreign aid for too long. These are things that we must address ourselves.”
In his keynote address, Dr. Tayo Aduloju, CEO of the NESG, described the learning crisis as a consequence of systemic failure. “This problem is so profound, because we can see that we are budgeting and spending our limited resources on building more schools, on employing more teachers, and we are told that just spending money solves the problem. It doesn’t,” he said.
Aduloju lamented that many African children “are struggling to learn in a system that does not teach learning.” He added: “Learning poverty is a symptom of a nation of irresponsible adults. We have to solve for a generation of irresponsible adults that has left 20 million children out of school and more unable to learn. As the NESG commits to this coalition we must acknowledge that we cannot afford to fail. How we treat the child in the next decade will determine not just our competitiveness but our survival as a country and as a continent.”
Reinforcing the potential of Africa-led philanthropy, Mosun Layode of the African Philanthropy Forum noted that Africans have the financial capacity to drive their own educational transformation.
“Africans have an estimated investable wealth of $2.7 trillion and the number of millionaires is expected to grow by 65% in the next decade,” she said. “We have the wealth required to drive development on the African continent. We need to ensure our philanthropy is aligned with national plans, does not work in silos and invests its resources collaboratively in the areas that drive impact.”
The two new coalitions — bringing together Africa’s top CEOs and philanthropists — are expected to complement the work of the African Ministerial Coalition for Foundational Learning, which has already secured commitments from over 30 African countries to end learning poverty by 2035.
