Out-of-school children: the promise of education still betrayed in West Africa

The world is going backwards on education. In 2024, 273 million children and young people are out of school, a figure that has risen for the seventh consecutive year according to UNESCO's 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report. This is not just another statistic: it is the sign that a universal promise, that of schooling every child, is unravelling year after year. And the weight of this setback is not evenly distributed. Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounts for 39% of these excluded children and more than half of those who should be in primary school. It is now the only region in the world where the absolute number of out-of-school children keeps rising. West Africa stands at the heart of this trajectory, and the question it raises is not technical but political: how many generations is the region prepared to let slip by without acting?

A global setback, a burden concentrated in Africa

For two decades, the global trend was downward: schooling was gaining ground, driven by the Millennium Development Goals and then by the 2030 Agenda. That momentum has reversed. Since 2017, the number of out-of-school children and young people has increased every year, reaching 273 million in 2024. Population growth, security crises and shrinking public budgets combine to erode past gains. What is striking about this shift is its geography: it is not global, it is concentrated. Sub-Saharan Africa carries 39% of the total, Central and Southern Asia 34%, and the rest of the world shares the remainder. In other words, two regions account for nearly three quarters of the world's educational exclusion, and one of them, Africa, is the only one where the curve is still rising.

Two West Africas: the coastal-Sahelian divide

Viewing West Africa as a homogeneous bloc is the first analytical mistake. World Bank data, drawn from UNESCO-UIS, in fact reveal two overlapping regions. On one side, a coastal band nearing universal primary schooling: Togo shows an out-of-school primary rate of 0.6%, Ghana 4.8%, Benin 9.6%, Côte d'Ivoire 12.6%. On the other, a central Sahel falling sharply behind: in Niger, 40.4% of primary-age children remain out of school, in Burkina Faso 34.3%, in Mali 34%. Between Togo and Niger, the ratio is 1 to 67. Such dispersion, between countries sharing the same sub-region and often similar climatic conditions, cannot be explained by nature: it tells the story of diverging political, security and budgetary trajectories. This is a decisive nuance, because it means that the Sahelian collapse is in no way a geographic inevitability.

One figure, however, escapes this reading in rates: that of Nigeria. With 24.3% of children out of primary school, the country sits at the regional average. But set against its population, this percentage becomes an abyss: 9.07 million primary-age children there are deprived of school, more than all the other reference countries combined. Niger comes far behind with 1.88 million, Burkina Faso with 1.36 million, Mali with 1.19 million. The methodological lesson is clear: a moderate rate in a very populous country produces a mass problem that the high rates of small countries never rival. Any regional strategy that reasoned only in percentages would miss the bulk of the burden, which is concentrated in Nigeria.

Exclusion worsens at each level: the secondary rupture

While primary schooling holds up more or less in coastal countries, the educational chain breaks at the transition to secondary. In lower secondary, out-of-school rates explode: 79.7% in Niger, 63.9% in Senegal, 59.3% in Burkina Faso, 56.3% in Mali. Even countries that perform well at primary lose a large share of their adolescents along the way. Only Ghana maintains a low rate consistent with its primary level, at 5.2%. This drop-out at the transition is no minor detail: it is the main breaking point of the West African education system. It is where costs converge (school fees, uniforms, supplies), along with distance (lower secondary schools are scarce in rural areas) and the pressure of child labour, which becomes more profitable as the adolescent grows. Enrolling children in primary without securing the transition is filling a leaking tank.

In Niger, 40.4% of primary-age children and 79.7% of lower-secondary adolescents are out of school. At each level climbed, the door closes a little further.

What averages hide: drop-out does not follow the same trajectory everywhere

The most recent national rates capture a snapshot, but it is the moving picture that informs action. Tracking the same countries over time reveals dynamics that fixed rankings conceal. In the central Sahel, Burkina Faso illustrates the direct effect of conflict: its out-of-school primary rate rose from 28.5% in 2020 to a peak of 42% in 2023, before partially receding to 34.3% in 2024. This upward spike is no statistical fluke: it tracks the curve of insecurity. Niger, for its part, hovers around 40% with no clear improvement, while Mali is slowly receding from 40% to 34%. These three trajectories, overlaid, show that the Sahel is not a static bloc but a space of differentiated crises, where steering must be done country by country and year by year.

The moving picture also holds nasty surprises where they are least expected. Togo, long near universal at primary, sees its out-of-school rate in lower secondary climb from 11.7% in 2019 to 27.1% in 2024, more than a doubling in five years. Côte d'Ivoire, by contrast, markedly improves its situation, falling from 46.3% in 2019 to 30.8% in 2024, and Ghana drops to 5.2%. These opposing movements are a reminder that no gain is permanent and that strong performance at primary says nothing about what follows. A system can succeed in getting children in and fail to keep them there: this is the Togolese case, which calls for specific attention to retention in lower secondary before the deterioration takes root.

Gender: a real inequality, but not always the one you think

School exclusion has long had, rightly, a girl's face. Sub-Saharan Africa counts 16.7 million girls out of school, of whom 9.3 million will never set foot in a classroom. No country in the region has achieved gender parity: the ratio is 96 girls for every 100 boys at primary, 91 in lower secondary and only 87 in upper secondary. The higher one climbs in the system, the more girls disappear. And the pace of catch-up is chilling: at the current rate, the poorest girls in Sub-Saharan Africa will reach universal primary schooling twenty years after the poorest boys. Two decades of lag, not against an abstract target, but against their own brothers.

Yet West Africa imposes here a nuance no serious policy can ignore. In Senegal, the data overturns the stereotype: it is boys who drop out most at primary, with 32.9% out of school against 15.4% for girls. Benin shows the more classic reverse pattern (12.4% of girls against 6.8% of boys), while Niger and Burkina Faso display small gaps within a context of catastrophic levels for both sexes. The conclusion is methodological as much as political: a gender policy mechanically modelled on the assumption that girls always drop out more would miss its target in Senegal. Without data disaggregated by sex and by country, public action fires blind, even with the best intentions.

Four drivers of exclusion, all documentable

West African school exclusion is no mystery: it results from four well-identified drivers, which reinforce one another and which, all of them, can be measured and addressed.

• Insecurity. Conflict has closed more than 14,000 schools in West and Central Africa, a number that has more than doubled in two years. The central Sahel accounts for most of it: 5,318 primary schools closed in Burkina Faso, 1,545 in Mali, 958 in Niger. In Burkina Faso alone, these closures deprive more than 2 million children of school, meaning more than one school in five brought to a halt.
• Poverty and child labour. The direct cost of schooling and the opportunity cost of early work weigh most heavily at the transition to secondary, when the adolescent becomes a source of labour or income.
• Distance and rural provision. The low density of secondary schools in rural areas makes lower secondary physically inaccessible for a share of children who have nonetheless completed primary.
• Quality. Being enrolled is not enough: 89% of 10-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read and understand a simple text. Exclusion does not stop at the school gate, it continues inside.

The crisis within the crisis: learning poverty

Public debate focuses on out-of-school children, and rightly so. But it masks a second crisis, more insidious, affecting those who are indeed enrolled. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 89% of 10-year-olds are in learning poverty: they are unable to read and understand a simple age-appropriate text. This figure changes the nature of the problem. It means that even universal schooling, if it were achieved tomorrow, would not be enough, because the classroom no longer guarantees learning. The count of out-of-school children therefore seriously underestimates the true scale of educational deprivation: one would have to add the near-totality of those who, seated in class, fail to acquire the fundamental skills. It is an almost entire generation approaching adulthood without knowing how to read properly.

89% of 10-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read a simple text. Being seated in class is no longer enough: exclusion continues inside the school.

The cost of inaction: demography takes no pause

Every cohort left unschooled, or schooled without learning, is a net amputation of the region's human capital. The reasoning is relentless: a generation reaching adulthood without fundamental skills weighs on future productivity, curbs innovation, inflates social spending and deprives states of the very resource they most need to capture their demographic dividend. Yet West Africa is precisely in the window where this dividend could open, provided its youth are educated. Learning poverty at 89% turns this promise into a threat: instead of a skilled workforce, the region risks producing a mass of under-trained youth, against a backdrop of unemployment and social tensions. The cost of inaction is not paid in five years but over several decades, and it is cumulative: what is not learned at 10 is almost never made up.

This cost also has a gender dimension. The 9.3 million Sub-Saharan girls who will never enter a classroom represent not only an individual injustice: they embody a lasting economic and social loss, for girls' education is one of the best-documented investments in terms of returns, on health, fertility, household income and the schooling of the next generation. Letting twenty years of lag against boys slip by means deferring all these benefits by as much, for a country as for an entire region.

Without reliable data, no policy holds

A common thread runs through this entire assessment: the quality of data conditions the quality of action. The figures presented here are robust but heterogeneous. The global total itself has ranged from 251 to 273 million depending on the year of publication, the country rates rest on different reference years that limit strict comparability, and the counts of closed schools come from humanitarian sources whose methods differ from those of official education statistics. This heterogeneity does not invalidate the diagnosis, but it says a great deal about a structural deficit: too many education statistical information systems in West Africa are incomplete, late or poorly disaggregated. Yet one cannot steer what one does not measure properly.

This is the conviction that guides CRAD's work on education and human capital: an annual national statistic, however indispensable, does not say where the child drops out, nor why, nor for how long. Pinpointing high out-of-school areas, distinguishing girls' drop-out from boys', measuring retention at the primary-secondary transition and tracking real learning, campaign after campaign, is what turns a political intention into targeted investment. Mapping exclusion finely means moving education policy from declaration to precision, and concentrating every public franc where it saves the most school trajectories.

An immense challenge, but one already met elsewhere in the region

The picture is dark, but it does not permit fatalism, and the region itself provides the proof. Ghana, with 4.8% of children out of primary school and 5.2% in lower secondary, shows that a West African country can approach universality and, above all, hold the transition to lower secondary, where almost all its neighbours falter. Togo shows 0.6% at primary. Côte d'Ivoire has cut its secondary out-of-school rate by more than fifteen points in five years. These successes owe nothing to a milder climate or exceptional wealth: they result from public-policy choices sustained over time. West Africa's challenge is therefore not to invent an unprecedented solution, but to apply consistently what already works among the sub-region's best performers, adapting it to each national context. The decisive difference lies in the duration and coherence of the commitment, exactly what today separates Ghana from Niger.

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