Higher education: training the minds of West Africa's transformation

West Africa is preparing to absorb the largest demographic surge of young people on the planet, yet it trains too few graduates to turn that into an asset. In almost every country of the sub-region, the gross tertiary enrolment ratio remains below the 15 % mark, compared with 43.2 % worldwide. This is not a mere scheduling delay: it is a human-capital deficit that spreads to the entire economy, because no country industrializes, digitizes its services or steers its public policies without a critical mass of engineers, statisticians, physicians and researchers. The question, then, is not whether the region needs more graduates, but whether it will finally decide to train them, guide them well and retain them, instead of exporting them.

One region, widely diverging trajectories

World Bank and UNESCO-UIS data reveal a striking dispersion between neighbouring countries. At the top, Ghana reaches 22.1 % in 2023, the only country in the sub-region studied to cross the symbolic 20 % threshold. Senegal (16.1 %) and Togo (14.9 %) follow, while Benin plateaus around 10.2 %, barely one young person in ten of study age. At the other extreme, Mali (5.1 %) and above all Niger (4.2 %) rank among the lowest ratios in the world. What is striking about this ranking is that it does not map onto the distribution of wealth or population: comparable countries appear at both extremes. The hierarchy of access to higher education thus tells a story less about raw resources than about choices, institutions and consistency in public effort.

A global gap that is widening at the worst possible moment

Set against the global context, the gap changes scale. The worldwide average gross tertiary enrolment ratio reaches 43.2 % in 2023, and even lower-middle-income countries, the group to which several West African states belong, peak at 26.8 %. Sub-Saharan Africa, for its part, tops out at 9.3 %: at this level of education, it is the least-enrolled region on the planet, more than four times below the global average. In other words, while the world sends nearly one young person in two to higher education, the sub-region does not send even one in ten. This gap is widening at the worst possible moment, just as economies worldwide, and in Africa, shift towards skill-intensive sectors (digital, energy, health, financial services) that call precisely for the graduates the region does not produce in sufficient numbers.

While the world sends nearly one young person in two to higher education, Sub-Saharan Africa does not send even one in ten. At this level, it is the least-enrolled region on the planet.

Ghana and Senegal are taking off, Benin is standing still

Comparison over time is the best antidote to fatalism. Since 2010, Ghana has almost doubled its ratio, from 11.3 % to 22.1 %, and Senegal has more than doubled its own, from 7.6 % to 16.1 %, in a continuous and sustained rise. Cote d'Ivoire follows the same upward slope, from 6.5 % to 11.6 %. Benin, however, offers the counter-example: starting from a level relatively high for the region in 2010 (12.6 %), it fell back to 9.8 % in 2021 before edging timidly up to 10.2 %. In thirteen years, two neighbours thus gained ground while a third lost it. This divergence is anything but natural: year after year, it establishes a human-capital gap between countries that started from a comparable situation.

The lesson is not that this or that model should be copied identically, but that a catch-up is within reach of a policy sustained over time. The countries making progress are those that have methodically expanded their intake capacity, diversified their offering (public universities, technical institutes, a regulated private sector) and secured the transition from secondary to higher education. Benin does not lack demographic potential: it lacks a growth trajectory for its higher-education system, and above all the steering capacity to hold that trajectory over a decade. The interpretive frame matters here: a downturn like the one from 2016 to 2021 is not recovered through a single reform, because a university system is built through successive cohorts and each lost intake takes several years to rebuild.

Why the bottleneck persists: quantified constraints

The access gap is no mystery. It forms upstream, through a transition from secondary to higher education that is too weak, and hardens through the saturation of university capacity: overcrowded lecture halls, disproportionate student-to-teacher ratios, a training offer that does not keep pace with demographics. It is aggravated by chronic underfunding of research, which is nonetheless the indispensable foundation of quality in higher education. Burkina Faso's gross domestic expenditure on research and development amounts to only 0.25 % of GDP, far below the 1 % target the African Union has set for its members. Yet without funded research, there is no doctoral supervision, no renewal of the teaching corps, no production of local knowledge.

The second constraint is the scarcity of academic researchers. Senegal, though among the best-equipped in the sub-region, counts only 572 researchers per million inhabitants, against more than 4,000 in high-income countries, a ratio of one to seven. This shortage has a twofold effect: it mechanically limits teaching quality, and it pushes the best students, for lack of high-level supervision, to seek elsewhere the training and laboratories they lack at home. Underinvestment in research and the shortage of teaching staff are therefore not two separate problems: they feed one another, and close in together. A young doctorate holder trained abroad who returns to a university with no laboratory, no operating budget and overcrowded classes will leave again; the shortage is self-sustaining as long as working conditions are not restored at the same time as headcounts.

• Transition and intake capacity. The bottleneck forms at the move from secondary to higher education, then worsens as universities become saturated, their offering failing to keep up with the demographic surge of young people.
• Research funding. At 0.25 % of GDP in Burkina Faso, research-and-development spending remains far below the African target of 1 %, depriving higher education of the scientific foundation on which its quality depends.
• The teaching corps. With 572 researchers per million inhabitants in Senegal, against more than 4,000 in high-income countries, the region lacks the supervisors without whom neither quality nor the rise in headcounts is sustainable.

The crux of the matter: spending per student among the lowest on the continent

Behind enrolment ratios lies a more rarely cited constraint: the amount each country actually devotes to training a student. On this measure, West Africa sits not only below world standards, but below those of the rest of the continent. According to UNESCO-UIS data compiled by the World Bank, average spending per tertiary student in Sub-Saharan Africa stood at 1,775 dollars in 2019; but this average masks an enormous regional gap. Southern Africa spent 3,079 dollars per student, while West Africa devoted only 648 dollars, nearly five times less. At this level of funding, a West African student has neither the laboratories, nor the libraries, nor the supervision ratio that give a degree its value. Underfunding is thus reflected in the very quality of training, well beyond the number of places offered.

A paradox compounds the situation: where higher education is funded, it is often to the benefit of the most affluent. In Sub-Saharan Africa, about 21 % of the public education budget goes to higher education, against 27 % to secondary and 43 % to primary; yet the few beneficiaries of this level come mostly from the wealthiest households, so that the highest per-capita public spending funds categories that are already advantaged. West African higher education thus combines two funding handicaps: it is broadly under-resourced per student, and its spending is concentrated on an elite. Correcting one without the other will not suffice: widening access without raising spending per student would produce devalued degrees, and raising spending without opening access would amount to better subsidizing the same privileged few.

The wrong routing: too few graduates in science and technology

Training too few graduates is one problem; training them in the wrong fields is another, often invisible in the overall ratio. For access to higher education says nothing about its composition. Yet in Benin, only 11.3 % of higher-education graduates come out of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields: nearly nine graduates in ten cluster in fields often less connected to the needs of the productive economy. Ghana, more enrolled in volume, shows an even lower STEM share in the available data (below 5 %). This imbalance weighs heavily: the sectors driving growth (digital, energy, agri-industry, health, data) call precisely for scientific and technical profiles, the very ones the region produces least.

This faulty routing directly feeds the mismatch between training and employment. Continent-wide, the Mastercard Foundation notes that only 9 % of young Africans have completed a higher-education course, even as economies turn towards skill-intensive sectors. The combination is formidable: few graduates, and among them too few scientific and technical profiles, at the very moment demand for these skills is exploding. The problem, then, is not an excess of qualifications with no outlet, but a system that produces both too few and not in the right fields. The wrong routing also carries a hidden cost: scientific and technical fields are the most expensive to equip, so that a system underfunded per student tends by default to steer towards the least costly fields, aggravating precisely the skills deficit that ought to be filled.

The brain drain: training for other countries

The third problem is perhaps the most costly: a share of the best students leaves the region to train elsewhere, and many do not return. The Nigerian case is emblematic. In 2018, more than 76,000 Nigerians were already studying outside their country; in 2021, they numbered 84,797, a figure that has quadrupled in twenty years. Nigeria is not alone: Ghana (nearly 16,000 students abroad), Cote d'Ivoire (more than 14,000) and Senegal (nearly 14,000) each send tens of thousands of young people to train abroad. Benin itself counted 7,501 students abroad in 2018, a notable share of its national higher-education enrolment.

Student mobility is not reprehensible in itself: training elsewhere can enrich a country when graduates return. The problem arises when the flow becomes one-way. The Nigerian trajectory shows it: from 76,338 students abroad in 2018 to 84,797 in 2021, the curve rises without interruption, driven by a demand for training that the national system cannot satisfy. Yet many of these young people do not return: educated at their home country's expense in secondary school, they then deploy their skills in economies already rich in human capital. The brain drain thus turns an African public investment into a net subsidy to host systems.

What national averages conceal

A national ratio is an average, and averages mask what matters most. Behind the gross enrolment ratio lie considerable gaps by sex, setting and income. Gender parity is progressing, and sometimes reversing: in Senegal, women now show a higher access ratio than men (16.5 % against 15.7 %). But this aggregate progress does not erase glaring inequalities of access depending on whether one is born in the city or in a rural area, into an affluent or a modest family. A young man from the wealthiest quintile of a capital and a young woman from a landlocked rural area do not experience the same higher education, when they reach it at all. These fractures, invisible in the national average, nonetheless determine where and for whom a policy of widening access will be effective.

The same blindness applies to fields of study and to labour-market entry. A rising access ratio may conceal a growing concentration in fields with no outlet, and a graduate count says nothing of their professional future. Gender parity, too, dissolves as soon as it is broken down: the equality observed in enrolment volume in Senegal says nothing of women's presence in STEM fields, where they remain largely a minority across the continent, nor of their access to research careers. Without disaggregated data, at once by sex, territory, field and labour-market trajectory, public investment in higher education advances blind: it may widen access where it should have been rebalanced, or fund fields the labour market does not demand. Steering higher education requires seeing what national aggregates erase.

A higher-education statistic has value only if it is disaggregated, geolocated and repeated over time. Otherwise, public investment widens access where it should have been rebalanced.

The cost of inaction: a demographic dividend that can turn into a risk

The higher-education gap is not a debate for academics: it is a race against demographics. West Africa is home to the youngest populations on the planet: Niger showed a median age of 15.2 years in 2024, the lowest in the world, and Mali of 16.1 years, while nearly 60 % of the continent's inhabitants are under 25. This youth will remain an asset only if it is trained and employed. At a constant access ratio, the region will mechanically produce, year after year, a growing deficit of managers, engineers and researchers, filled at best by importing skills, at worst by a workforce under-qualified for the jobs of tomorrow. The cost of inaction is measured not only in missing graduates, but in uncaptured growth, in industries that fail to emerge and in public services that fail to modernize for lack of qualified staff.

The arithmetic is implacable. A system that enrols barely one young person in ten today will, simply to maintain its ratio, have to open more places every year, since the 18-to-23 cohort keeps growing without interruption. Catching up to the Sub-Saharan average, itself very low, would require growing enrolment far faster than demographics already does, and funding it even though spending per student is among the lowest on the continent. This is why the gap is not stationary: every year without planned expansion widens it further, and a system that stagnates in percentage terms regresses in reality, because it leaves a growing share of a larger generation at the university gate.

The brain drain further aggravates this countdown. Every student who leaves and does not return is a double cost: that of their initial training, paid locally, and that of their absence, felt in the hospitals, administrations and companies short of managers. When a large share of a generation of talent sees emigration as its horizon, this is not merely an education problem, it is an alarm signal about the region's capacity to offer prospects. The much-hoped-for demographic dividend can, for lack of investment in higher education, turn into a burden.

Every student who leaves and does not return is a double cost: that of their training, paid locally, and that of their absence, felt in the hospitals, administrations and companies.

Measuring to steer: the CRAD perspective

CRAD connects African field data to donor decisions, and higher education perfectly illustrates why this bridge is indispensable. Mapping the training offer in fine detail, measuring the true weight of STEM fields, tracking graduates' labour-market entry and documenting mobility flows country by country are the prerequisites of any credible higher-education policy. Without this foundation, states and their partners fund by guesswork: they build lecture halls where laboratories are lacking, open fields the market does not demand, or subsidize an access whose actual beneficiaries they do not know. Data turns intention into targeting.

This is the conviction that guides CRAD's approach to human capital: a higher-education statistic has value only if it is disaggregated, geolocated and repeated over time. Documenting the mismatch between training and employment, measuring the returns of each field and mapping talent flows means helping decision-makers invest where minds are retained and valued, rather than trained to be exported. Tracking spending per student, cross-referenced with labour-market outcomes, makes it possible to move beyond steering by inputs alone and to arbitrate on results: how much an employable graduate really costs, and in which field. Digital data collection and monitoring-evaluation are not technical accessories: they are the instruments that move a university policy from blindness to precision.

← All insights