Despite the centrality of education to development and growth programmes in underdeveloped countries, and despite the commitment of African countries to universal access to education (at least at junior levels), at least 100 million children were not in school in 2025. This is according to an analysis by a team of researchers under Kenyan academic Moses Ngware. 

Africa has a school-age population of some 469 million.

In numerical terms, this represents very limited progress over the past three decades. In 2000, the continent counted something above 100 million out-of-school children. This had declined to 90 million by 2014. The 2025 level is roughly where the continent was 25 years ago.

If seen as a proportion of the school-age population, the trends are more positive. Africa’s population is growing at some 2.5% per year (this is the world’s highest), meaning that 100 million children in 2000 represented a greater share of all those on the continent than it did in the 2020s. Between 2000 and 2024, the proportion of primary-school-age children not in school fell from 37% to 20%. There had also been significant falls in the proportions of young people in the higher grades who were not in school. In 2024, some 53% of upper secondary-school-aged youth were in school.

Ngware writes: “In the past five years, we have seen a steady increase in absolute numbers of out-of-school children and adolescents from 95 million to 100 million, with an average of about one million children either not transitioning from primary to secondary school or leaving school or not joining school at all.”

Improvements in educational enrolment were particularly marked in Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Madagascar, and Mozambique. The researchers attributed this to policy interventions and political will. Welfare measures such as conditional monetary transfers and food assistance along with providing more school facilities made schooling more accessible for low-income households.

On the other end of the spectrum, countries like Angola, Cape Verde, Lesotho, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe had seen very little improvement. This arose from factors that tended to be country- and situation-specific, such as political instability, poor economic conditions, and the high opportunity costs of going to school. On the last point, boys, in particular, are often needed for economic tasks such as herding cattle, which takes precedence over their education.

In the countries of the Sahel region, political violence, climate-related disruption of livelihoods, and historically poor participation rates appear to be behind the absence of many young people from education systems.

Across Africa, the broad contours of the problem are ascribed to two sets of drivers. The first is financial. Some 42 countries on the continent have made policy commitments to providing free education, but only three do so in practice. External funding to assist with this has been in decline for some time.

The second is the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns, which pushed as many as 10 million young people out of education. Many of these were compelled to marry or to take up work out of necessity.

The researchers suggested some possible lessons from the better-performing countries. These had strong, coordinated national policy frameworks, which operated with donor support. Social support measures, such as school feeding schemes and conditional household income support (rigorously evaluated for effectiveness) could make an impact. The abolition of fees at lower levels and providing school supplies would significantly lower the costs of education for the poorest households. Targeted policies for those least likely to access formal education (girls in certain areas, children with disabilities, children living in remote communities) could play an important role in bringing them into education systems. Finally, several bespoke policies – expanding infrastructure, catch-up programmes, provision for late enrolment – have been useful in specific contexts.