How to fix Africa's learning crisis | Rapelang Rabana

By 2030, nearly half of all young people globally will be African, yet over 80 percent of 10-year-olds in sub-Saharan Africa struggle to read a simple text. Traditional methods of building more schools and training teachers are inadequate, as the region needs 15 million additional teachers at a cost of nearly 40 billion dollars annually to achieve optimal student-to-teacher ratios.

Rapelang Rabana argues that solutions from Western countries do not fit Africa's unique context. She emphasizes that African educational systems must reflect the realities of the children they serve rather than adopt foreign models. Imagine Worldwide is tackling this learning crisis by providing solar-powered tablets that work offline and adapt to each child's learning level, which is particularly useful in overcrowded classrooms.

In Malawi, the tablet program has made teaching more enjoyable for 97 percent of educators, with Imagine aiming to reach one million children this year and over four million annually by 2030. The learning gains from this initiative rank among the top global education interventions, with projections indicating a tripling of literacy and numeracy rates by the fourth year of schooling.

Imagine adopts a system-strengthening approach by collaborating with governments to integrate its program into public education systems. Feedback is crucial for growth, and the application used by Imagine allows preliterate children to learn independently. Rabana's personal experiences have informed her understanding of the importance of feedback and the disparities in educational outcomes across the continent.

Rabana critiques the assumption that Western educational standards are universally applicable, pointing out that the African education system is built on unrealistic expectations, such as having a class of 25 students with a highly qualified teacher. With less than 15 percent of schools in sub-Saharan Africa equipped with computers and under 4 percent having internet access, she notes that technology issues often stem from personal devices, while shared devices in controlled environments can be more effective.

She stresses that technology should support teachers rather than replace them, arguing that the negative impacts of educational technology in Western contexts do not reflect the realities faced by African children. The program's long-term model requires recurring costs of under five dollars per child per year, mainly for tablet replacements every three to four years, with plans for country-wide coverage in nations like Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania.

Rabana identifies significant challenges in education technology, particularly in finding suitable technologies for pre-literate children and those with intermittent connectivity. She calls for increased investment in offline models and multilingual resources to better serve low-income populations, highlighting a disconnect between perceived technological advancements and the actual lack of solutions for underserved communities.

She emphasizes the critical lack of investment in technology aimed at pre-literate and non-English speaking children in Africa, advocating for AI models optimized for offline use to support African languages. Rabana argues for the establishment of a network of local data scientists and machine learning experts to address the continent's learning crisis effectively.

She insists that resolving Africa's learning crisis cannot rely solely on Western efforts, underscoring the need for localized solutions tailored to the continent's specific challenges. Rabana's insights call for a restructuring of the technological approach in Africa, particularly in developing large language models that cater to a diverse range of African languages.