Public Education Spending: The Budget Effort in Question

A single figure reveals the place a government truly gives its schools: the share of national wealth it devotes to them. In West Africa, this share caps out at around 3.6% of GDP (a simple average of nine countries in 2022), below the African average (4.3%), below the global average (4.66%) and, above all, below the 4% floor the international community set for itself. Yet this underfunding is not a budgetary fate: at comparable GDP levels, some neighbours make radically different choices. And it comes at the worst possible moment, as the region's school-age demographics are about to undergo the continent's sharpest surge. Behind a seemingly dull average lies the schooling future of tens of millions of children.

A regional average falling behind

The underfunding of West African education is not an impression, it is a measurement. At around 3.6% of GDP (a simple average of the nine countries tracked in 2022), the region sits almost a full point below the Sub-Saharan Africa average (4.3%) and close to a point below the global average (4.66%). The gap looks modest; it is not. The Education 2030 framework for action, adopted in Incheon in 2015 by all UNESCO member states, sets a dual benchmark: devote at least 4 to 6% of GDP and at least 15 to 20% of total public spending to education. Measured against this yardstick, West Africa does not even reach the floor threshold. On the ground, this missing point of GDP translates into overcrowded classrooms, underpaid teachers and missing textbooks.

A gap of one to seventeen between countries

Intra-regional dispersion is the most striking fact, and the most instructive. In 2022, Senegal devoted 5.95% of its GDP to public education, the highest rate in West Africa, followed by Burkina Faso at 5.30%. At the other end, Nigeria allocated only 0.35% of its GDP, a ratio of roughly one to seventeen between the two extremes. This exceptionally low Nigerian level reflects only federal spending as recorded by the World Bank: education there is largely financed by the federated states, whose budgets are not consolidated into this indicator (it should be read as a federal floor rather than a total national effort). Between these poles lies an intermediate pack: Mali (4.05%), Togo (3.78%), Niger (3.71%), Côte d'Ivoire (3.48%) and Benin (3.10%). Ghana, at 2.91%, also remains below the 3% threshold, which confirms a central lesson: a country's relative wealth in no way guarantees the priority given to its schools. It is the political decision, not the level of development alone, that makes the difference.

Senegal: proof that another choice is possible

The Senegalese case deserves attention, because it disproves the idea of an unbreakable regional ceiling. At 5.95% of GDP in 2022, then 6.16% in 2023, the country sits not only within the range recommended by the Education 2030 framework (4 to 6%), but at its top. This effort is not a statistical accident: it reflects a durable budgetary orientation, with education long ranking among the leading items of public spending. At a level of wealth per capita comparable to several of its neighbours, Senegal has made schooling a stated and funded priority. This is the decisive point for the rest of the region: the gap separating Benin (3.10%) from Senegal (5.95%) is not a gap of means, it is a gap of priority. Closing even half of that gap, for a country like Benin, would represent a near-doubling of its margin on the path toward the international floor.

Why spending falls behind: three mechanisms

If the regional effort remains below the threshold, it is because a multi-spring mechanism pushes spending downward. Three factors combine. First, the narrowness of the base: the same percentage applied to modest economies yields only small absolute amounts, which makes every budget trade-off painful. Second, competition from other sovereign items (security, debt servicing, subsidies), which in several Sahel countries has seen security spending eat into social margins. Third, the erosion of a historical shock absorber: international aid to education, long used as an adjustment variable, has been declining since 2019. When this support contracts without domestic resources taking over, it is the school envelope that absorbs the adjustment.

The consequences of this mechanism can be measured. Learning poverty, the share of 10-year-old children unable to read and understand a simple text, reaches 89% in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2022, up from 86% before the pandemic. In other words, nearly nine children in ten pass the key age for consolidating reading without mastering this foundational skill. A system that funds neither enough teachers, nor textbooks, nor learning time cannot produce any other result.

• Narrow base: at an equal percentage, a modest economy yields small absolute amounts, which hardens every budget trade-off.
• Crowding out by sovereign spending: security, debt servicing and subsidies capture a growing share of the budget, particularly in the Sahel.
• Retreat of external aid since 2019: the contraction of long-structural support weighs directly on the education envelope when domestic revenue does not compensate.

The percentage doesn't tell the whole story: the question of amounts

Reasoning solely in terms of GDP share obscures a brutal reality: the same percentage applied to economies of very different sizes produces incomparable resources. This is what spending per learner reveals. According to international estimates (order of magnitude), low-income countries mobilise only around 55 dollars per learner per year, while high-income countries spend several thousand, a ratio of one to more than a hundred. In other words, even a high relative budget effort in a poor country translates into absolute resources that remain a fraction of those available elsewhere. The challenge is therefore not only to prioritise better, but also to grow the base, which brings the question of education financing back to the broader one of mobilising domestic resources.

Low-income countries spend only around 55 dollars per learner per year, compared with several thousand in wealthy countries: a ratio of one to more than a hundred.

The demographic time bomb: funding a school system that doubles

Underfunding is not only a problem of level, it is a problem of trajectory. For West African demand for schooling is not stabilising: it is exploding. Between 2015 and 2030, Africa's primary school-age population will grow by around 33%, from 189 to 251 million children, and it is West Africa that will bear the continent's sharpest rise, on the order of 22 million additional children. In the Sahel alone, the number of young people under 20 will double by 2050. Maintaining a constant budget effort as a percentage of GDP, in this context, mechanically amounts to reducing spending per head. Merely not to regress, the region must therefore increase its spending faster than its wealth. Budgetary status quo here is already a programmed regression.

The cost of inaction: out-of-school children and a teacher shortage

When financing does not keep pace with demographics, two fractures widen. The first is exclusion from school. Central and West Africa already host around 57 million children, adolescents and young people aged 6 to 18 who are barred from school, close to a quarter of the world's out-of-school population. In the Sahel, nearly 40% of primary school-age children are not in school, and in countries such as Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger, more than half of children and adolescents lack access to education. The second fracture concerns human resources: Sub-Saharan Africa will have to recruit around 15 million teachers by 2030 to meet its goals, including 4.4 million for primary and 10.7 million for secondary. Without budgetary easing, these posts will be neither created, nor funded, nor trained for. The cost of inaction is not settled in 2030: it is paid over thirty years, in the form of a less educated, less productive and more exposed generation.

A 70 billion dollar financing wall

By 2030, the gap can be quantified globally. To meet the targets of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on quality education, Sub-Saharan Africa must close an annual financing gap of around 70 billion dollars, a fraction of a global shortfall of 97 billion across the 79 low- and lower-middle-income countries. The context worsens the equation: international aid has been declining since 2019. Dependence on external donors, long a shock absorber, can no longer serve as a strategy. The mobilisation of domestic resources becomes the decisive variable, and the fine-grained steering of spending the condition of its effectiveness.

What the average hides, and why fine measurement changes the decision

The regional average of 3.6% is a veil as much as a piece of information. It erases the one-to-seventeen gap between countries, but it also erases the gaps within each country, where real equity plays out. A national education budget, even in line with the international floor, may concentrate its resources on urban capitals and higher education while leaving rural schools in the north without textbooks or tenured teachers. The GDP share says nothing about this geography of spending; spending per learner, disaggregated by level, region and sex, does. This is precisely where the value of field measurement lies. As long as we reason in national aggregates, we arbitrate blind. Once we geolocate and disaggregate spending, we see where the public franc actually produces learning and where it is lost, and we can reallocate.

This is the conviction that guides CRAD's work: no education policy is more solid than the data on which it rests. Comparing national percentages is a useful starting point for situating an effort; it is not a steering instrument. To turn a budget into learning outcomes, spending must be traced all the way to the classroom, measuring what it actually funds (filled teaching posts, distributed textbooks, effective school days) and relating it to outcomes measured in the field. It is this chain, from the budgeted franc to the acquired skill, disaggregated by territory and by sex, that allows a ministry to arbitrate knowingly and a donor to fund an effort whose return it can verify.

The equity angle: what aggregate spending owes to the gender dimension

Exclusion from school is not gender-neutral. In areas where security pressure and poverty concentrate early drop-outs, it is girls who first leave or never join the system, particularly at the transition from primary to secondary. Public spending steered at a fine grain makes it possible to identify these breaking points and to channel targeted resources to them (school meals, scholarships, boarding facilities, recruitment of female teachers), where an aggregate envelope dilutes them. Measuring the budget effort by sex and by territory is not a statistical refinement: it is the condition for education spending to actually serve those who are today furthest from it.

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