In Sub-Saharan Africa, less than half of all girls used to complete primary school. Today, seven out of ten do, and the gap between boys and girls is virtually gone. In 2000, 58.6% of boys, compared to only 48.5% of girls, completed primary school in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2023, there was virtually no difference between the school-completion rates of boys versus girls in Sub-Saharan Africa — 71.3% of boys, and 68.5% of girls, completed primary school.
School completion rates are still lower in Africa than on other continents, notes the World Bank. “In 2023, for instance, primary completion stood at approximately 70 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)– the region with the lowest rate of primary education completion. SSA is nevertheless the region that has also made the most dramatic improvements over the past two decades– especially for girls. The female completion rate has increased from 48.5 percent in the year 2000 to 68.5 percent in 2023 – almost catching up to the completion rate of boys (71.3 percent in 2023).”
While international organizations are sad when boys outperform girls, they don’t care when girls outperform boys, such as in high school and college. In the United States, women account for more than 60% of people getting a bachelor’s degree, while men account for less than 40% of people getting a bachelor’s degree. Girls now complete primary school at a slightly higher rate than boys in Latin America & the Caribbean; and East Asia and the Pacific (96.8% of girls complete primary school in Latin America, compared to 94.5% of boys).
While Africa may seem to be catching up with other continents, it still has a long ways to go, because the quality of primary education is worse in Africa than on every other continent, with teachers chronically absent from their jobs, and often ineffective at teaching basic skills. Even secondary schools in Africa often are full of students who are functionally illiterate and can’t do basic math, even though they are eager to learn. 15 years ago, most seventh-graders in Nigeria couldn’t do basic arithmetic, such as adding 7+11.
African educational systems have improved somewhat since then thanks to innovators like NewGlobe Schools. As Peter Coy explained in the New York Times:
Some of the world’s most successful educational techniques are being applied today in Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda and India, in schools serving poor children that are run or advised by NewGlobe Schools, a company founded by Americans with headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. These techniques deserve to be applied more widely, including in wealthy nations such as the United States.
A new study led by a Nobel laureate economist, Michael Kremer of the University of Chicago, found that in Kenya, enrolling in schools run by NewGlobe for two years increased test scores by an amount equal to being in school for an additional 0.89 year for primary school pupils, and to being in school an extra 1.48 years for pre-primary pupils. The poorest children improved the most.
“The test score effects in this study are among the largest observed in the international education literature, particularly for a program that was already operating at scale, exceeding the 99th percentile of treatment effects of large-scale education interventions,” Kremer and his colleagues found.
NewGlobe clearly has built a better mousetrap, but it has taken a while for the world to beat a path to its door. It has encountered multiple obstacles, including from the U.S. Congress, although it is gradually winning followers.
One reason for the slow uptake in the early going was resistance from teacher unions, including the Kenyan National Union of Teachers….Students in Bridge International Academies, as NewGlobe’s schools in Kenya are called, routinely outperformed students in the public schools, the researchers found. To be sure, that was not a high hurdle: The Kremer paper cites other research finding that “Kenyan teachers were absent from class during 47 percent of unannounced visits and spent about two hours and 20 minutes a day teaching.”
Recently, there was other good news: “World Bank researchers recently published the results of an AI tutoring trial in Nigeria. It was an incredible success: the students learned more in the six-week program than they would have otherwise learned in two years. And this was measured using a pen-and-paper exam, so the kids weren’t just faking it with ChatGPT,” notes The Doomslayer.
The World Bank adds that the
benefits extended beyond the scope of the program itself. Students who participated also performed better on their end-of-year curricular exams. These exams, part of the regular school program, covered topics well beyond those addressed in the six-week intervention. This suggests that students who learned to engage effectively with AI may have leveraged these skills to explore and master other topics independently.
Moreover, the program benefited all students, not just the highest achievers. Girls, who were initially lagging boys in performance, seemed to gain even more from the intervention, highlighting its potential to bridge gender gaps in learning.
