ABA Editorial · Aug 2, 2025 · 13 min read
Approximately 98 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa are not enrolled in school. Classroom infrastructure is inadequate in many rural areas. Teacher shortages are severe across most countries. The education infrastructure gap is the foundation that all African edtech interventions must work within. This report maps the structural gaps and the implications for any technology-based response.
Before any discussion of African edtech opportunities, it is necessary to understand the scale of the underlying education infrastructure gap that technology is being asked to address. The gap is large. Approximately 98 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa are not enrolled in school, according to UNESCO and other authoritative sources. Among those who are enrolled, many attend schools with insufficient classrooms, inadequate learning materials, poorly trained teachers, and limited or no access to electricity, water, or sanitation. Teacher shortages are severe across most African countries, with pupil-to-teacher ratios that exceed 40 or 50 students per teacher in some settings and that remain above 25 even in relatively better-resourced contexts. The education infrastructure gap is the foundation that all African edtech interventions must work within, and understanding the gap is essential to evaluating what any specific intervention can realistically achieve. This report maps the structural gaps.
The 98 million out-of-school children figure combines primary and lower secondary ages and reflects the cumulative effect of children who never enroll and children who enroll but drop out before completing basic education. The distribution of out-of-school children is not uniform across countries or demographics. Girls are more likely to be out of school than boys in many countries, particularly at secondary level where early marriage, household labor expectations, and safety concerns contribute to dropout. Rural children are more likely to be out of school than urban children due to school distance, teacher availability, and economic pressures. Children from the poorest quintile of households are substantially more likely to be out of school than children from wealthier households.
The causes of non-enrollment are heterogeneous and vary by context. In some areas, the nearest school is too far for young children to walk safely. In others, school fees or associated costs (uniforms, books, transport) exceed what families can afford. In conflict-affected areas, schools have been destroyed or are inaccessible due to security conditions. In areas experiencing displacement, children may be in temporary settlements where formal school infrastructure has not been established. Technology-based interventions can address some of these causes (distance learning for remote locations, low-cost content delivery for households that cannot afford traditional tuition) but cannot address others (conflict, displacement, gender-based barriers that have structural roots beyond education).
African teacher shortages are severe and getting worse in many countries due to population growth outpacing teacher training and deployment. UNESCO has estimated that Sub-Saharan Africa needs millions of additional teachers over the coming years to achieve universal primary and lower secondary education. The shortages are particularly acute in specific subjects (mathematics, sciences, languages other than the national instructional language) where training programmes have struggled to produce graduates at required rates. Teacher training quality is also uneven across countries and institutions, with many teachers entering classrooms with limited preparation in pedagogy, subject content, or classroom management.
Technology cannot create trained teachers from nothing, but it can extend the reach of existing teachers (through remote instruction, video lectures, or shared digital content) and can provide professional development and ongoing support that improves the quality of teaching within existing workforce capacity. Several African edtech operators have focused specifically on teacher training and support, including initiatives that work with ministries of education on curriculum implementation and pedagogical improvement.
Physical school infrastructure varies dramatically across African contexts. Some countries have made substantial investments in new school construction over the last two decades, producing classroom capacity that meets or exceeds enrollment demand in many areas. Others have underinvested, leaving schools operating in inadequate buildings with insufficient classrooms, missing roofs, unreliable electricity, and limited water and sanitation. The specific situation in any given country depends on historical investment patterns, population growth rates, urbanization pressures, and current fiscal capacity.
The classroom shortage interacts with the teacher shortage in ways that compound the challenge. A school with insufficient classrooms may run double shifts (morning and afternoon sessions), which reduces per-student learning time. A school with insufficient teachers may increase class sizes, which reduces individual attention and learning outcomes. A school with both shortages may combine these strategies, producing conditions where teachers manage large classes under time pressure with limited materials.
Reliable electricity is a precondition for any edtech intervention that depends on charging devices, running projectors, or operating computers. Mission 300 and broader African electrification initiatives are gradually closing the electricity access gap for households, but school-specific electrification has lagged household electrification in many countries. Schools in rural and peri-urban areas frequently operate without reliable electricity, even when the broader community has access.
Internet connectivity is similarly uneven. Urban schools in larger cities typically have some form of internet access, though bandwidth and reliability vary. Rural schools often have no connectivity at all, or have access only through individual mobile devices carried by teachers or administrators. The UNICEF and ITU Giga initiative is targeting approximately 500,000 African schools for connectivity by 2030, which would represent a substantial improvement on the current situation but is still several years from full realization. Starlink satellite broadband has extended to 18 or more African countries, with further expansion announced through 2025 and 2026, offering an alternative path to school connectivity in areas where traditional infrastructure is not available.
African education spending varies substantially by country but is generally below the levels needed to address the infrastructure gap on realistic timelines. Public education budgets face competing claims from health, security, infrastructure, and debt service, and educational priorities are often deferred when fiscal conditions tighten. International donors including the Global Partnership for Education, Education Cannot Wait (for crisis-affected contexts), and bilateral donors supplement domestic financing, but the aggregate commitment remains substantially below what the infrastructure gap requires.
The implication for African edtech is that infrastructure-dependent interventions (those that assume reliable electricity, connectivity, and devices) face binding constraints that limit their scalability regardless of how well the technology works. Interventions that work within existing infrastructure constraints (SMS-based delivery, offline content, low-bandwidth platforms) can reach more students even if they offer less sophisticated experiences.
Three indicators will shape the African education infrastructure gap. First, whether school construction and teacher training investment pace accelerates to match population growth, or whether the gap continues to widen. Second, whether Mission 300 electrification and the Giga connectivity initiative produce measurable improvements in school infrastructure availability. Third, whether international donor financing commitments remain stable given broader geopolitical and fiscal pressures that affect aid flows. Education infrastructure is the slowest-moving component of African educational development, but it is the foundation on which everything else depends, and its trajectory shapes what any edtech intervention can achieve.