Learning What Matters, System Transformation in Africa - A Conversation with Dr Modupe (Mo) Olateju

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Bringing children especially and young people into spaces where they're able to see and appreciate differently means that education will build literacy skills and numeracy skills that children don't have, but will also help them to lean into that which makes them truly human.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. It's pretty clear from the statistics that there is a huge youth demographic bulge on the continent of Africa, with 40% of the population aged 15 or younger as of 2021, and the population of young people aged 15 to 24 is projected to grow to half a billion young people in the next 50 years. But as Professor Kingsley Moghalu from the African School of Governance has said, there's no guarantee that this will lead to positive outcomes for individual young people, communities, or countries. In order to enable all of these amazing possibilities, education is going to be a key factor in these emerging scenarios. And there are very few researchers, communicators, or advocates of education across Africa as brilliant and as well-placed as my guest this week to speak to these questions. Dr. Madupe Olateju is a fellow at the Center for Universal Education in the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings Institute. She's an international development specialist with expertise in public-private partnership in education, a widely published academic with additional research interests in education innovation and foundational learning, board chair at the Malala Fund, and the founder of the Education Partnership Center in Lagos, Nigeria in 2013. You can find further links to many of Mo's papers and work that she's doing with different networks across the world linked in the show notes.

Nice. All right. Thanks, Mo. Lovely to see you again after meeting in person at the, well, a couple of places we have actually, but most recently at the IDB Conference in The Hague, your keynote there. So now I'm really happy to be able to follow up with you and just kind of, yeah, spend a bit more time together and get into some of these details of your amazing work. So thanks very much.

Tim, it's such a pleasure. And it was a real treat to meet you in Singapore and then again at The Hague and just to have, you know, this little conversations as we're both running across the corridors.

Very jacked.

Finally, we've been able to sit down and have, you know, this proper time. It's really good. Thank you for inviting.

Yeah, no, no, not at all. My absolute pleasure. So, I mean, what I would love to, maybe if we start just framing maybe some of the space we're gonna talk about, partly geographically, because I, I think, you know, with all the work we do with young people through IB, but also more generally just thinking about Africa and the future of education and the, the, just the significant number of young people. I mean, the statistics are pretty incredible about the number of young people and the demographics in Africa right now. So yeah, I wonder just maybe starting there, it feels like a pretty critical question of education across African countries. And that's part of where your work has been, but obviously now very much more global. So situating it there, what, where do you see the particular challenges broadly for education in African countries, for African governments?

Yeah, no, great question. But of course, Tim, as you know, every good researcher will push back a little bit.

I welcome it.

I think really important, you know, that we think about the challenges that have beleaguered, you know, education in Africa, but perhaps to reflect a little bit on some of the framing of those challenges, because I realize, you know, in much of the work, you know, that's available globally today, that there is, you know, the commencement of that conversation from a bit of a deficit model. So thinking, you know, about the problems, you know, of education in Africa and perhaps not really nuancing that, you know, in a way that is more representative, I think, of contextual realities and historical antecedents, you know. And I realize that a lot of times when we ask the question about the challenges with education, we're actually referring to the challenges with formal education, some people refer to it as Western education or, you know, the education bequeathed to us, you know, by the British colonial government. But I would say that there are several components of enlightenment, which is what, how I define education, right? There's several components of enlightenment that have been preserved here in Africa, maybe to start from there, you know, whether it's indigenous ways of settling conflict and disputes, very interesting ways of doing this, or whether it's about, you know, respect for the environment that comes from, very deep-seated religious or cultural histories, but a lot of that has actually been eroded. And of course, we do see significant challenges when it comes to formal education as well. But then the problem, of course, is never because people don't want to be educated or they don't want their populations to be educated. It's because the problems are very deeply structural and very deeply political, you know, as well. And of course, we do have people that do not want children to be educated. We know that, you know, for a fact. So I think that, you know, for many countries in Africa, the colonial era systems actually interrupted what would have been a natural progression and development of African societies in ways that are indigenously relevant and perhaps would have been groundbreaking, you know, in today's world. Yeah, you know, when I think about, you know, art— I studied a bit of art— art in the Benin Kingdom, when I think about you know, science and technology, when I think about knowledge that came from Timbuktu, you know, in Mali, that today we're still digging out and we've not been able to really wrap our heads around its vastness, and I realize that there is something very heartbreaking about how that journey was interrupted, you know, and so that has left a legacy that I think still shapes, you know, who has access to education, what is taught, how it is taught, et cetera. But of course we have ever-present challenges as well. Funding is a big challenge, right? How do we finance education within the context of a teeming mass of young people and demographics that are increasingly getting younger and younger and younger, right? We know that we need infrastructure, we need classrooms, right? We need materials, we need infrastructure, we need perimeter fencing, et cetera. How do we resource this within the context of economies that have been quite systematically excluded from the global Commonwealth when it comes to trade and the ability to come to that trading table, you know, with fairness and equity and being able to bring their full selves into those relationships. And so not being able to mobilize the sorts of resources that are needed, but whilst being constantly, you know, indebted to countries that are better off. Teacher supply is another huge one, right? Because we still have formal systems of training teachers and ensuring the teachers are not just trained but are fully competent to deliver instruction and to lean into strong pedagogies. So again, these are big bottlenecks, you know, that we see across the continent. And I think the reality is that a lot of these challenges are actually intersectional. So we don't have enough money to pay teachers, so we don't have enough teachers, right? Colonial legacies means that We are mandating people to learn in languages that are quite foreign to them, which of course sets them back many, many years when it comes to comprehension. You know, a conflict will take away from resources, it'll fragment governance, you know, so we see that, you know, as well. And then we also see the isolated fixes. You know, we want to fix classrooms, so we're not really thinking more broadly, systemically. We want to train teachers, but we're not thinking about the wellbeing of those teachers and how they're coming into their own teaching and learning spaces. So I think, really intersectional issues, but, you know, always useful, I think, to nuance these sorts of questions and then talk about the challenges from that lens.

Yeah. No, I mean, thank you for that. I completely appreciate you going there and pushing back against the question, because I agree. And like, that's a good realization for me to, you know, framing of thinking about challenges. Maybe I could just, if I may, just go back a couple of steps. It's interesting to hear you use this word enlightenment, obviously with the historical period associations of that word. That's a super interesting Again, some nuance there. And like, I'd be really curious to hear you say a little bit more about why that word.

No, good question. I think for me, enlightenment, you know, as a term is devoid of its historical connotations and more around the actual, you know, meaning of that word, which is to my mind, which is quite a graphic one, I have to say, is really about switching a light bulb on, right? And so what does that do? What do I mean when I say switch a light bulb on? I mean bringing children especially and young people into spaces where they're able to see differently and also able to appreciate differently, you know, as well. And which means that education will build literacy skills and numeracy skills that children don't have, but will also help them to lean into that which makes them truly human. But also help them to lean into the fact that they speak a different language from me, or that they worship a different God from me, does not mean that I need to antagonize them or that they need to antagonize me. We can actually all live together. It's about bringing perspectives together, and we can do that from the time children are really young. Actually, that's the best time to start. When children are really young, to pull together those academic skills and competencies and merge those with what other people refer to as life skills or transversal skills, such that we're creating a situation where human beings can lean into their full selves. And so the light bulb continues to go on and continues to stay on within the notion of what others have referred to as lifelong learning. And so we are creating education systems that actually transcend the four walls of a school. That for me is what education is. And so what we do in school is important, but it is discrete. And ultimately, if it does not lead to a situation where we are constantly evolving and evolving in ways that help us to thrive, then it hasn't really achieved, I think, its full purpose. And I think that is where we struggle, you know, within the education sector as thinking of education as, you know, this discrete body of work or this discrete sector that sits somewhat, you know, separately from everything else that we do, you know, in society. We need to begin to, I think, change that. And maybe artificial intelligence will bring us closer to that point.

Yeah, well, interesting. I mean, maybe we'll get there in the conversation, but I I love that because I think that's part of what I heard you also speaking to around the richness historically, you know, in pre-colonial times that the richness of informal learning or non-formal education or different ways we might talk about it, but that families together in place, religious groups, communities, tribes, whatever, who are raising young people together, you know, all over the world. Prior to this, this strange construction of this thing called school, right? I mean, it, in a way, that's what, what I hear you speaking to there is this, yes, it is discrete. It is slightly strange that we then take young people away from all of that learning, the richness of that learning in community, and we put them in these places where apparently that's where they get the real knowledge capital, skill capital, credential capital that will then take them into success in life. And it's—

Tim, let me make it worse. Let me make it worse for you, right? It's the fact that in many contexts today, the externalities of schooling are actually outstripping the actual benefits that are supposed to accrue to you having gone to school. What do I mean? Girls are deriving more benefit from the safety of being in a schooling environment than they are coming away with learning when it comes to literacy or numeracy or social science, et cetera. And so we recognize that school as a construct, not just about academic instruction, it's about many things. It's about socializing young people. It's about keeping, frankly speaking, keeping girls safe. It's about many different things. But when those externalities then outstrip the purpose for which we have actually constructed the school, then I think it warrants a new conversation.

I love that.

Oh my goodness. That is so well said. And absolutely. And I mean, that kind of brings me, I mean, in the keynote of the IB Conference and in other places, very powerfully, you talk about these ideas of systems transformation, really shifting systems. And it feels, and even in some of the ways you articulated some of the challenges in the formal schooling context in African countries, it feels almost like a trap to compete in this the same broken system rather than thinking what would be a different, a genuinely radically different way of thinking about these places where we gather our young people. I mean, so is there a trap there to just keep, for governments all over the world, trying to keep thinking, oh, we have to stay competitive in this game, but we slightly know that this game is a bit broken and yet we can't fall behind in this formal schooling game. And so in that conversation, where is actually the fresh ideas coming in to really think radically about what a different way of doing that whole gathering could look like?

You know, the question you are asking conjures up a picture in my mind, and it's quite a famous quote. I don't know who, who actually made the original quote, but it goes like this: if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,, it will live the rest of its life believing that it is a failure. And so is it a trap? I mean, I don't know that I would use the language trap because trap connotes intentionality. I think there is a lot of cluelessness, you know, in the system. I don't know that there's any intentionality.

Mm-hmm.

Keep young people— that might have been the better case scenario, to be honest. I think the reality is a little different, you know, from that, but I think the visual, you know, connotation, you know, of being constricted is definitely, I think, powerful imagery when we think about this. But then it goes back to whether we are reflecting on education as a system or not, and whether we're situating within the context of a system or we're not. Because if we were, then there are some realities that we would see. And people like Rebecca Winthrop and, you know, David Sengue, and, you know, Emily Morris and Omar Kharga, you know, at the Center for Universal Education there at Brookings, and David Sengue, you know, in Adiona, you know, in that leadership context there, I think have done some remarkable work in terms of helping us to come to a clearer understanding of what jurisdictions that are transforming their systems actually look like. And, you know, wherever I go, it really all begins with the question of purpose. Why are we doing this? And when we don't ask that question, or we have the wrong people asking those questions, or we don't have enough people asking those questions, or we are asking the question for the wrong reason, then what we're going to find is that that system will struggle, right? And so the question of purpose is, why are we even doing this?

Mm-hmm.

Why are we even educating people? Somebody said something to me many years ago about an education context in Africa. He was one of these technical, you know, advisor, senior guy, you know, earning like $2,000 a day. Flew in, you know, to support this particular African context. And he said to me, he said, you know what, if we shut down this entire education system, you know, for one year and we said, everyone just go home and we wanna fix the system. He said, you know, when we all come back in a year's time, we might not be any worse. And I was so offended. How dare you fly in from the United wherever you're flying from. Yeah. You know, and say we should shut down an education system. But the more I reflected on the spirit behind what he was saying, the more I was hearing they don't know why they're educating their people. And then, boom, a few years later we had a natural experiment with the pandemic that showed us really clearly what happens when you shut down the system for a year, right? Of course things got worse, but in some context, yeah, it was business as usual. Nothing changed because this situation was dire anyway. So I think you know, purpose is a very important question. And really understanding, you know, whether we're educating people so we can get jobs, or we're educating people so that they can be happy, or whether we're educating people because we really want to compete against this other country. Why are we educating people? And again, the second thing that they talk about, you know, Rebecca and Sengge, they talk about pedagogy. Because at the end of the day, that interaction between the teacher and the learner is one of the most powerful sets of interactions that you can have in the education system besides the interaction between the parents and the child, you know. And so when we talk about pedagogy, it's really about the how we are delivering instruction. It's really about how do we ensure that we're focusing on active pedagogies rather than rote pedagogies, because frankly speaking, that time has passed, right? So it's thinking about how do we deliver curriculum in a way that is relevant in a way that is participatory and the learners themselves are co-creating knowledge with the instructor. And we're not just thinking of school as four walls of a physical environment, we're thinking of school as anywhere, right? As any space. And we're developing, you know, the ethos of lifelong learning. How do we structure those pedagogical experiences? And then third is about positioning. And that's really about how do we then bring all the different actors into alignment? Around the pursuit of pedagogical approaches that serve the child and serve the context in which that child is. And finally, it's power. Because how can you have this conversation without deconstructing power? Who holds the power? Who's making the policy? Who's involved in that process? Who's left to implement the policy with zero resources, right? So I think it's really these, you know, we call them the 4 Ps, and thinking deeply about how these 4 Ps also interact and engage, you know, with or intersect, you know, with each other. And that helps us to shape how we think about systems and they transform so that at the end of the day, we're not creating education systems where, you know, we're saying to them, the ballpark, the assessment is you've got to climb the tree, but guess what? You are all tilapia, right? So that we're not doing that.

Lovely.

I lived in Tanzania for a while, so tilapia is a, is a good reference for me. But no, I mean, I, I, it's so much interesting stuff there because, so I'm talking to Michael Stevenson coming up on the podcast about flourishing as a, as a kind of a new articulation of purpose around education. So, you know, interesting questions there, but I wonder like, how do you hold purpose when a lot of your really powerful work has been shining a light on the literacy and numeracy deficits in communities as well? Because sometimes the purpose goes into questions of meaning, as I say, flourishing, or, you know, purpose in life, making an impact in your community, these kinds of bigger questions. But actually some of the core of formal schooling has been literacy and numeracy. And that also obviously asks a pedagogical question. So yeah, I wonder how you hold the purpose question with that really like very fundamental need to just have really robust depth of knowledge in literacy and numeracy and the impacts that you've seen in communities of that having and not having that.

Yeah. You know, I'll throw us way back to 2014, you know, when I was living in Nigeria and had established an initiative called the Education Partnership Center that still continues to do really good work in the public and private education space, you know, in Nigeria and across Africa. And we were beginning as an organization, you know, meeting with different members of the education ecosystem and asking the question, you know, what is the real challenge with education, you know, in Nigeria, with formal schooling and the education sector as we were referring to it then? And most of the responses came back and revolved around the theme, which is accountability, where the system is just not accountable to itself. You know, teachers are not accountable, you know, to their head teachers. School systems are not accountable to parents except if they're private, you know, and the education system, the Minister for Education, the Ministries of Education, state ministries and federal, are not accountable to parents for educational outcomes. No one had, in a manner of speaking, walls when children fail, right? So the blame is often placed on the learner. And so we said, you know what, we need a system which is going to almost look like a mirror that we can hold up, you know, to the education system and say, you know what, this is neutral, this is unbiased. Take a look at yourself and see whether you like what you see. And so that mirror for us was data. And so we began an initiative called the Learn Nigeria, you know, assessment. And we partnered with everybody we could partner with— governments, Population Commission, Bureau of Statistics, you know, academics, civil society. We partnered with everybody, and we went to 21,600 households across Nigeria, and we assessed 40,000 children to determine what we thought were the priorities at the time— literacy and numeracy, right? We wanted to make sure you know, that we had data on how these children were doing. And it was a citizen-led effort so that parents were involved in this. It was household-based so we could capture children in school and outside of school. And the results were shocking. Only 55% of children in grade 9 were able to read at the level of an 8-year-old. The results in numeracy were worse. And we said to ourselves, good grief, How are we gonna share this data? And I remember we partnered with government and everybody else and we said, you know what, we are all partners and so there's nothing to hide. We're going to, you know, create report cards for every state and we're gonna take them to the governors and et cetera. And we're gonna show them, you know, well, this is the result that we're getting and whatever the pushback is, is what the pushback is. And do you know that there was not a peep from anyone that we showed that data to, whether it was a governor, or it was, you know, somebody really high up in the Ministry of Education, no one pushed back against that data because they knew that it was accurate. So the question we then asked when we started to hold the town halls to share the data was, if we're putting this amount of money into education, right? And this is the return on our investment, what does it tell us about how we are allocating extremely scarce resources? And the answer that came back from almost every space that we went into was, purpose. We just don't know why we're doing what we're doing, and that's why we're seeing these results, because there's an incoherence between what our expectations are but what we're actually doing in the education system. We have not articulated what we want the education system to do for us, because being literate and numerate is not in itself a significant outcome unless you're able to use the literacy and the numeracy to build you know, additional skills, higher order skills, be continuously productive in society. You're able to, you know, improve yourself as an individual. You can read, you can do numeracy, eventually maybe you can set up a business, you can da da da, right? So I think for me, that is where it intersects. It's the ability to use the data to show people that, you know what, there is an incoherence in this system. Can you see it for yourself without anybody else making any value judgments? In that space.

Yeah, it's, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because sometimes that, that argument about literacy and numeracy and then the purpose of getting those skills is the kind of the human capital theory argument, the economic development argument, and governments all over the world make that quite strongly. Unfortunately, I feel sometimes the purpose question gets colonized by an economic development argument. So is that, I mean, is that something that you then saw from the Nigerian government, particularly there in that case? I mean, was it, was it an economic development argument that gave purpose to those skills, or was it a broader kind of more wide boundary question?

You know, the reality is that the question of purpose is that it can be answered in many different ways.

Yeah, sure. Right?

What is most important is for a jurisdiction to sit down and have that conversation with itself, right? What do we want? You know, and so if our purpose for education is that we want to be an economically vibrant jurisdiction, we want to be able to, you know, derive significant benefits from the assets that we have, human assets, et cetera, then you know what? It needs to find its way back into how you design the education system, right? Now, the reality is that scarce would you find a community a country, a jurisdiction that is thriving economically, but is also not leaning into its human flourishing. Because the higher up you go, when it comes to, you know, Bloom's Taxonomy and the skills, and also when you think about the evolution of human beings and the needs that they have, the higher up you go, the more distinct differences become. And so when everybody is able to access foundational literacy and numeracy, we begin to ask the question, what next, right? And we keep asking the question, what next, what next, what next? You know, so I think it's not a coincidence that you see high GDPs associated, you know, with more movement in the direction of travel, of conversations around human flourishing. Well, what next? How do we become better as a people? How do we thrive as human beings? How do we flourish in it's difficult to have those conversations within the context of poverty because, as we say in Nigeria, stomach infrastructure is a real thing. You cannot have a conversation about the ultimate purpose of education with a person who's not had a meal in 2 days. It's just not going to fly. So even if a jurisdiction says our purpose is to economically empower our people, what it is indirectly saying is that something is going to happen as that economic empowerment is happening. But the real question for me is, are we even having the conversation honestly and with the right critical mass of people?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating question. It brings up something that is, I don't know, I, I, I find it a really interesting proposition that having that conversation opens up the possibility, let's say, that it's not, there's a linear logic to the story historically that I think is a, it seems to me a little bit dangerous of like, you have to get this bit first. So you get the foundational learning first, and then once you've got that, you can move, as you say, what next, what next, what next? I wonder if there's a way of somehow disrupting that story because that, I don't know, it always feels to me like the conversation about education transformation gets held back by this question of foundational learning. It's like, we've gotta get that bit first, cuz if we don't get that, then we can't have all these nice-to-haves of flourishing and meaning and purpose, et cetera. But actually, what about if, if it wasn't a linear story and actually engaging whole communities and informal learning and all of the different things that you've already referenced could allow for a completely nonlinear way to still get, like, we really want kids who are really bloody good at maths and reading. That's really important. And at the same time, they're doing that in the context of meaning-rich conversations with elders or, you know, purpose-driven community kind of work. I don't quite know what that means and looks like specifically, but I'm sure there's examples out there.

Yeah, no, there are. And I can give examples from our own context, you know, of having implemented and continuing to implement accelerated learning programs. And an example from Peru, which is one of the countries within the Network for Education Systems Transformation that I lead research on, you know, at Brookings. Now, I think what you're referring to is very commonly talked about as the notion of the false dichotomy, you know, between foundational learning or foundational literacy and numeracy and what some people refer to as holistic education, right? Or a breadth of skills, right? And so the argument is, why can't we— it's neither this nor that, it's everything, isn't it? Because literacy and numeracy is part of the breadth of skills or the suite skills that we're expecting young people to come away, you know, with after they've been in the education process. I think sometimes the devil is in the detail. And so I haven't witnessed, participated, led, you know, literacy and numeracy programming, you know, remedial programming in my own home country of Nigeria. The one thing that is very obvious to me is that the conversation about the false dichotomy hovers above the classroom. It's not a conversation that's had in the classroom or even among teachers. Teachers don't know what you're talking about. When you say false dichotomy. Because when a teacher is remediating, what are they doing? We are singing, we are dancing. Inky the Mouse is my pet. That's how we learn, ee, ee, ee. That's the letter sound for I, right? We're using phonics, we're using different approaches. We are demonstrating empathy and helping young people to understand why they need to take turns. Can you answer that question? I, I, I, I, I. No, why don't we take turns? Why don't you let her come forward first and let him come forward first? We're learning about culture, we're learning about music, we're leaning into the arts and to the creative. I saw this in Peru as well, where we were invited to a literacy program, and this was puppets. And so parents, you know, came into the school and they were manipulating these puppets. It was like a whole puppet show, you know, and the learners were singing and they were laughing and they were empathizing with each other. And I said to myself, that is no literacy program. That is an everything program, right? So I think that it's important again to realize that this conversation is a conversation that is not a classroom-level conversation. This is a conversation that is being held by people that are not necessarily in the classroom working with learners, because if you were, you would understand that it is impossible to build literacy and numeracy skills without these other components that I'm referring to. And that's where pedagogy comes in. That's where being able to build teacher capacity to do this well so that they're not just teaching a, e, i, o, u. Okay, we are done with our vowels for the day. Now let's move on to the content. No, there are ways in which we do this, and that's why we train teachers. That's why we support teachers. That's why we help teachers to understand that there are approaches that they can pull from in order to facilitate this. So I think that, you know, we need to move closer and closer to the reality that there is no dichotomy really. There is no disagreement. Where is this disagreement coming from? We are supposed to be doing it all for the children, and we are. Teachers are. Teachers all over the world are doing this., but not so, you know, those who are observing them from outside of the classroom. I don't think we're appreciating that enough.

Yeah, fascinating. No, I love that. It's so interesting. And so therefore, I mean, that leads me to the question of where do you see the role of technology? And I mean, you brought in AI earlier, but because, you know, you've got, you do have schools like Alpha School who are out there saying we're gonna take care of literacy and numeracy using screen-based technologies, AI, adaptive learning, adaptive testing, et cetera, which will allow us to then have more space in the timetable to then go and do other things, other meaning-rich activities in the community, et cetera. I don't know if you are aware of that specific model, but it's not the point. The point is more, how much do you see a role for not the thing you've just been describing, which is this incredibly human-rich, meaning-rich interaction and relational thing, but Actually saying, no, you go, go to use the technology to efficiently remediate the literacy and the numeracy to buy ourselves time to do more of the other stuff.

Yeah. You know, I don't know that we have a choice as a global community, but to position to collaborate with technology, you know, including AI. I don't, I don't know that we, we have a choice because the rate of development is so rapid. I think the choice that we do have is how human we want to remain within the context of that collaboration and what guardrails we are placing around that humanizing and the continuous humanizing of the learning process. Technology is fascinating. Technology can compensate for infrastructure gaps. We know this. We know that there are technical dimensions of adaptive learning that are quicker to implement right, than having a teacher, you know, do the tests and then we're going to do the formative assessment manually and then we will do the summative assessments manually and then we'll do some more formative assessments and then we'll do some more summative. And adaptive tech can help us move that process along much faster. But we still need the teacher. You still need some guidance. We still need to socialize young people. We still need to motivate them in ways that are uniquely human. We still need to bring in the practical day-to-day application of, oh, what happened to you this morning as you were coming to school? And how do we link that to what you're learning in the classroom today such that that then becomes a moment for the child to build deep learning that is relative, that is contextual, and that is really, I think, useful. Maybe the word I'm looking for is useful, 'cause a lot of what we learn is not useful, right? I think that that collaboration continues to be important. The conversation that I am not willing to have is the replacement conversation where we're taking whole human beings and replacing them with technology. Because ultimately what we are doing in the education sector is replicating. And so in a humanized environment, we're replicating human behavior, human gestures, human knowledge, human experience. When you replace that wholly with technology, You're replicating exactly that in the tech space. So I don't know that what we are trying to create in education is a bunch of robots, you know, for the future. I think what we are really trying to create is a bunch of human beings whom technology enables to flourish way more than they have ever been able to do and to perhaps leapfrog over the challenges that they are facing, you know, in their own particular context. So yes, I, I do think I have no problems whatsoever We're thinking about technology, but I think we need to think about it the right way because there are dangers as well. Aside from the fact that there are inefficiencies, there are dangers. We're seeing, you know, toys being pulled, you know, from shelves now. Toys that have AI embedded in them being pulled from shelves because that process is happening too quickly. You know, these toys encouraging children, you know, to do things and giving them guidance on harmful practices. That's not what we want to see when we talk about this. Collaboration.

Yeah, no, fascinating. Thank you. And I mean, there's a, there's a question of also appropriate technology in the sense of the infrastructure required to also then bring it in. And I, I mean, for example, when I was just astonished where I lived in Tanzania for a year and just how mobile all of the communications were in a way that is radically more advanced than many European contexts that I've lived in. You could communicate with many people, transfer money, all of this, like way more efficiently than I'd seen in other contexts. And I just, obviously you've gotta use the technological infrastructure that is there, but also the willingness to engage with it. I mean, I found it felt like some really kind of innovative uses of even basic platforms like WhatsApp for accepting them for many different uses commercially, et cetera, which I found completely fascinating. Are you seeing that happening in different African contexts? Educationally?

Oh yes, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it is said that necessity is the mother of invention, right?

Right, right. You're right.

So when you need to survive, you will become creative, you know, about surviving. And so within, you know, the context of the pandemic, for example, we saw a proliferation of new approaches to teaching and learning. Some of them were absolutely fascinating. One of the models that we piloted at Teb saw us taking instruction, putting literacy and numeracy instruction in a book. We actually put, you know, guidance in a book and we dispatched them to rural and peri-urban communities in Kano, which is Northern Nigeria. And then we got on the phone with parents, you know, to give them guidance on what to do. But we weren't talking to the parents, we were sending them SMSs. And many of these parents were not literate at all. And so the SMSs were so simple. We just needed a 1 for yes and 2 for no, you know, those sorts of, you know, very simple responses. Response options. And do you know that we saw a 30% increase in literacy and numeracy outcomes at the end of an 8-week period?

Wow.

In Lagos State, again, during the pandemic, people were forced, you know, to think differently in about education. And the very— the absolutely incredible minister for— commissioner for education, you know, in Lagos State at the time, you know, she introduced the notion of WhatsApp schools and the ability of teachers to actually offer instruction via WhatsApp to actually mark scripts and send them back, you know, to have opportunities to engage with learners one-on-one. And all of this resulted in increases in learning outcomes at a time when the opposite is what you would have expected, you know. So we are seeing a lot of creativity, but I think that sometimes there are also infrastructural and political constraints, you know, that other economies face, you know, whether it is capitalism, And the fact that technology is produced in one context but not necessarily sold or shared within that context, but is rather exported to other contexts. I think that's a reality for a big part of the global North America in particular. And so people not being able to really benefit tremendously from the innovation that is created, you know, within its own context. Africa, for example, leapfrogged, you know, with the GSM technology when it comes to mobile telephony long before, you know, the United States. But then we had to, we had no choice, right? So yeah, yeah, I think it's, you know, mix of factors that include, you know, how desperate, you know, the society is and, and just how difficult the challenges and how willing people are, you know, to innovate within very difficult circumstances.

For sure. No, absolutely. And I mean, speaking of capitalism, can I just ask you briefly just about the, 'cause some of your amazing work has been about the role of affordable private schools. And I, again, there's another dichotomy there, right? Of like, who provides the education? Is it Is it a state-funded government education or is it a private fee-paying school? Actually, in a way, that's another false dichotomy because there are many other ways of doing hybrid things in between. But some of your work has been focused on how the role of affordable private schools might need to come in to certain contexts to support where a government system is perhaps struggling a bit. So yeah, could you, how are you feeling now about those the role of them in some of this work, this transformative work?

So I think that it's, a lot of it is how we construct the arguments, right? And so within a lot of contexts, these affordable schools, also referred to by some as low-cost private schools or low-fee private schools, have emerged as a result of government failure. That's the reality of it, right? And so the de facto privatization of private school, which I've written about, has come about because government has either failed to provide, you know, high-quality education or failed to provide the context in which children, you know, would be able to thrive, particularly younger children. You know, we find in our own context in Africa that the conditions that are provided by these affordable schools, particularly for younger children, are almost impossible to be replicated by the government. So a child does not come to school today, you know, teacher is on the phone. Why did this person not come to school today? Are you okay? I'm coming to your house to see you. You can't expect teachers in public schools to go to 55 different children, you know, over the course of one week because those 55 have not been in school. So they're really difficult to replicate. We also see with younger children that parents want to be proximal, you know, to their children. And so they want to be in a school on the same street as where I live or two streets away. And, you know, the reality of government provision is that it's not designed to be as proximal to every single, you know, home as possible. They're just cost-wise, it's just not efficient to do that. So again, people are making these decisions because they perceive that government is not providing to the extent, degree, or quality that they wish for. But then we're beginning to see the replacement, you know, of government where, you know, government is now taking a backseat and saying, you know what, let the private schools just do their thing. And we will just cut back on the number of schools that we build or the number of teachers that we deploy to these schools. I think that is a bit of a problematic narrative because education is a fundamental human right. And for every school that is affordable, no matter how affordable it is, there are still barriers to access, which is not to say that in government schools there aren't barriers. Of course there are barriers as well. Many of them are invisible, you know, but I think with affordable, you know, schools, there is a cost element. You know, there's always a cost element and we have to think very deeply about that. That. Should these schools be supported? I think that they perform an important role, you know, in contexts like Nigeria and other contexts that are really struggling with populations of Pakistan, you know, populations of children outside of school. I think that a lot of these providers are actually helping children who would otherwise have been out of school also to be, you know, within the catchments of the educational system. And therefore, there are ways by which we can recognize and support them, which are not outright, you know, approvals. We're currently piloting an initiative, you know, the graded schools initiative, where we're incentivizing affordable private schools towards better practice. And the more you're able to achieve the standards that have been set, the higher up you go on the scale toward the ultimate goal of being approved by the government And the closer, you know, for each grade level you're able to move up, you are signaling, for example, to the banks that you are creditworthy and you can attract, you know, some funding. You are signaling to the media that maybe this isn't such a terrible school after all, you know. And so what we're doing is actually strengthening the market for low-fee private schools by introducing economic principles into that. But again, I don't think that it is now for the government to abdicate its responsibility. Any government that does that is quite frankly irresponsible, right? These schools have emerged because of government failure, not to incentivize greater failure, you know, on the part of government.

Yeah. No, absolutely. No, it's just so interesting. And I mean, maybe just to kind of bring, I mean, there's just so much I'd love to talk to you about, but just bringing it to a bit of a close in a way where we started in the context, but one of the things you said in your IP conference keynote, which I just found so powerful, was without relational grounding, well-intentioned policies will fail. And so this idea of grounding rather than thinking one size is gonna fit all, you know, nationally, globally, regionally, whatever, in terms of a policy, but actually how do we ground different policy approaches in relational webs of context? Just felt to me such an important and insightful thing that you were bringing in there. So yeah, just to close out, perhaps you could just say a little bit more about, about that piece.

Yeah, no, thank you. So we've written about this. This is one of the findings of the work of the Network for Education Systems Transformation, and all of this is available on the Brookings website. So as a network, we've written about this. In fact, we have referred to relationships as the invisible enabler or barrier of education systems transformation. And I think that the first step is acknowledging that relationships power transformation and acknowledging that then surfaces what the nature of these relationships is, whether these are constructive or destructive, you know, relationships. What underlies these relationships? What are the mindsets? What are the ideologies that power these relationships? And also recognizing that, you know, very often we're trying to shift policy, but the reality is that the policymaker as an individual or as a set of individuals are moving through that space as private citizens, as public citizens, as private, as public, and recognizing that for every juncture where they are, they are being influenced through relationships, you know. And so I think that very often where we see, for those that do advocacy, where we see advocacy for particular changes and we say to people, the data is there, why can't you just use the data? We need to look a little bit below the surface and say, what is actually powering this decision or this refusal to take this decision? And understanding and deconstructing where those relationships lie and then build pathways to establishing them. And so that for us, I think, is an emerging concept. We are digging a little bit deeper into that through a new research cohort called the Narratives of Change cohort, where we're digging into, you know, what we mean by change in the education system. How is that constructed by different cohorts of the ecosystem, different members, you know, of the ecosystem, and how are those narratives ultimately influencing the journey of transformation, you know, in a particular context? It's a really fascinating piece of work, and we will be ready to share the findings in 2026.

Amazing. Totally fascinating. And I'll put lots of links into the show notes for a lot of your work and the network of System Transformation. And, but it just, yeah, I mean, it going back to your work with the Education Partnership Center, the data is clearly highly, highly impactful. But as you're saying there, it's just so powerfully that the data is also part of this wider web of relationships. So yes, we need to know those literacy and numeracy scores, et cetera. And they, they count, they speak really loudly, but so does humanizing that kind of web of relationships that sit around all of that and around the policymakers. And I just, I love that, that you're bringing that in. No, thank you so much. Just such interesting work. And I just so appreciate you taking the time to share it with me today.

Such a pleasure. It's always wonderful to chat with you. And I'm, I'm glad that we found this time, you know, to have this conversation. Thank you. I, I, I hope you'll invite you back.

Amazing. With pleasure. No, thank you, Mary.

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