In my work on STEM and ICT education in Liberia, I have watched good projects arrive with real energy and real money, run well in a few classrooms, then stop the moment the grant ends. Tablets ended up in storage cupboards. Platforms went dark when a licence lapsed, and the teachers we trained moved on, with no opportunity to put their newly learnt skills to use.
Every one of those pilots proved that something could work, however, most of them struggled to change the system. That gap, between what works in three schools and what holds across three hundred, is the real education challenge in Africa today. And the gap is not, at heart, about technology, but rather, it is about the architecture that governs it.
Africa has never been more enthusiastic about educational technology. Since the pandemic, digital learning has moved from the margins of ministry conversations to their centre. Investment has grown and platforms have multiplied. Ministers now compete to announce national learning apps and device rollouts. The political appetite is genuine, and it is welcome.
The issue I have witnessed is that the outcomes have not been able to keep the pace. Across sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 89 per cent of ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple story, on World Bank figures. UNESCO’s 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report, titled “Technology in education: a tool on whose terms?”, found that handing computers to pupils does little for learning when teachers are left out of the design, and that independent evidence of technology’s value in the classroom is still thin. It also noted that education technology products are replaced roughly every three years, so governments often buy tools that are obsolete before they are embedded.
Why do so many pilots die young? The reasons are familiar to anyone who has sat where I sit. A donor designs a project around its own reporting cycle rather than the ministry’s ten-year plan. Software is chosen before anyone asks how it fits the national curriculum. Teachers get a day of training and no follow-up. Devices arrive with no budget for repair, replacement or the power to charge them. Procurement rules written for textbooks get applied, awkwardly, to a live digital service.
None of these are technology failures. They are failures of integration. A country can adopt a great deal of technology and transform very little, because adoption is an event and transformation is a system. The distance between the two is where most of our money has been lost.
So what would architecture look like? Start with the least glamorous part. A third of primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa have electricity, according to UNESCO data, and a platform is worth nothing in a classroom that cannot switch on a light. Architecture is the deliberate alignment of everything a single tool cannot supply: reliable power and connectivity, devices, digital content mapped to the national curriculum, teacher training that continues past the launch event, assessment that shows whether learning improved, data systems that speak to one another, financing that outlives the grant, procurement built for software rather than stationery, and the institutional capacity to run all of it. Architecture is what turns a set of projects into a system a ministry can own and sustain. It is the difference between buying technology and building capability.
In Liberia, we are working through these questions with the humility of a system still rebuilding. We have learned to ask a harder question before signing anything. The test is no longer what a tool can do on launch day, but instead, what will keep it running in year three, once the launch is forgotten and its champions have moved on. We try to plan technology around the curriculum and the teacher, and to give a promising idea a realistic path to the whole country before we celebrate it.
Africa is the youngest continent on earth, and the children now in school will shape its economy for decades. Governments are putting foundational reading and numeracy back at the top of the agenda. The African Union named 2024 its Year of Education and has opened a Decade of Education to 2034, with digital learning and its financing written in as core pillars. The continental direction is set by the AUDA-NEPAD Africa EdTech 2030 Vision and Plan. What has been missing is the link between that ambition and what happens in a classroom in Liberia or Zomba.
That is the work I have joined as a Founding Luminary of Mwanga wa Elimu, a coalition organising African governments, educators, developers and partners around delivery of that Vision. It brings the people closest to the classroom and the people who sign the policies into the same conversation, so they can align on architecture instead of chasing the next pilot.
The future of education in Africa will be settled by whether we build the architecture that lets technology strengthen learning for every child, in every classroom, at the scale a continent this young demands. That asks something specific of those of us in government. We must stop behaving like purchasers of technology and start behaving like architects of systems. The enthusiasm has done its job – the building must begin now, henceforth for the current and future generations.
——————
Nathaniel K. Cisco Jr. is Assistant Minister for STEM and ICT Education at Liberia’s Ministry of Education and a Founding Luminary of Mwanga wa Elimu.
EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.