More school, less learning: barriers to effective education in the Global South

Imagine a schoolchild, somewhere – anywhere – in the Global South.* How likely is it that:

She attends school?
There’s a teacher in her classroom?
The teacher is skilled and knowledgeable?
She leaves school able to read and write, add and subtract?

With each question, we should be less optimistic. Access to education has increased dramatically, but quality of education has not. Children are much more likely to be in school than they would have been twenty or thirty years ago. But this hasn’t led to an equivalent improvement in learning.

I’ll begin this post by justifying the claim that more schooling isn’t causing more learning. Then we’ll look at why. In the next post, we’ll look at promising programmes tackling these challenges.

The problem: more access, less learning

More children go to school than ever before. Worldwide, 9 in 10 primary school-aged children are enrolled in primary school. School enrolment is lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa; even here, three quarters of children are in school (Azevedo et al., 2021).

But this isn’t translating into learning. Less than half of ten year-olds in low and middle income countries can read proficiently. In low-income countries, only one in ten can read (Azevedo et al., 2021).

To see how stark the problem is, let’s look at rural Gambia. At the end of Grade II (after three years in school), just one child in a hundred could read a text designed for Grade II children fluently. One in a thousand could answer questions related to the text (Eble et al., 2021)

We can illustrate the limited benefits of increased school attendance by travelling a hundred miles south. In Guinea-Bissau, 40% of fathers have attended school; 24% can read a paragraph. Their children are twice as likely to attend school. But they are much less likely to be able to read: less than one in three can recognise a single-digit number or read a single word (Fazzio et al., 2021).

Overall, literacy has risen worldwide. But schools have struggled to deal with the increasing numbers of children attending and the needs they present. The quality of education schools offer has stagnated, or declined. The more children attending school, the less likely it is that they are learning anything (Le Nestour et al., 2021).

Why, with so much more schooling, is there still so little learning?

A very simple model would suggest that the educational success of our imaginary child rests on overcoming two challenges: getting to school and finding good teaching. Let’s look at each.

Challenge 1: Getting children to school

For all their faults, attending school is essential. If you learn to read, you learn to read at school: only 2% of men and 5% of women who can read learned to do so without going to school (Le Nestour et al., 2021). While access to schools has increased, barriers remain:

Students may not be able to get to school. Some areas of Guinea-Bissau aren’t served by government schools (Fazzio et al., 2023). Some children lack transport to get to schools. They may be expected to work when the harvest is due, or to spend many hours on household chores (Trani et al., 2023).
Parents may not support attendance. In rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, teachers describe parents promising their children will attend, but not acting to make it happen (Trani et al., 2023).
Schools may be closed. Students may arrive to find their school is closed. This may be caused by teacher absence (Chaudhury et al., 2006) – or by labour disputes. Spot checks in Ghana during one study found 5% of schools were closed by strikes on any given day (Duflo et al., 2020). In Guinea-Bissau, researchers found 25% of school days were disrupted across their four-year study (Fazzio et al., 2021).

So some children still face barriers in attending school. Nonetheless, most children are in school – and most aren’t learning much.

Challenge 2: Getting children good teaching

Effective teaching makes a big difference. This is well-established in the Global North, and evidence is accumulating for it in the South. For example, a study in Pakistan found that the best teachers are far more effective in improving student outcomes than the least effective (Bau and Das, 2017). Similarly, a study in Ecuador showed that more effective teachers improve both academic results and child development (Araujo et al., 2016). But there are big barriers to ensuring our child experiences good teaching.

Teachers often aren’t present. At any given moment in the school day, roughly a third of teachers in the Global South aren’t in the classroom. (Different studies reach different figures: 19% across Africa, Asia and Latin America (Chaudhury et al., 2006); 44% across sub-Saharan Africa (Bold et al., 2017).)** Delayed teacher salaries demotivate teachers, and force them to earn money through other work (Bold et al., 2018; Trani et al., 2023). Absent teachers aren’t replaced by substitutes: students mill around or go home (Chaudhury et al., 2006).

Teachers often aren’t teaching. Even when the teacher is in the classroom, between a fifth and half of classroom time is spent on things which aren’t academic activities (Bruns and Luque, 2014). Scheduled teaching time in sub-Saharan Africa is around 5½ hours per day. Actual teaching time is around 2¾ hours (Bold et al., 2017).

Teachers lack resources. Just 5% of teachers are using teaching materials (Duflo et al., 2020). Students may lack basic resources, like pencils and paper (Trani et al., 2023). In one study, in Uganda, researchers saw only a single book in a single classroom across three years of observations (Hoadley, 2024).

Teachers lack content knowledge. Many teachers don’t know the things they’re meant to be teaching. Give a Fourth Grade teacher a test designed for Fourth Grade pupils (or ask them to grade student answers to this test). In sub-Saharan Africa, only ⅔ of teachers can pass. This means that ¼ can’t subtract double-digit numbers, for example (Bold et al., 2017). Similarly, only half of teachers in El Salvador have basic mathematical knowledge (Brunetti et al., 2023). To teach effectively, teachers need to know more than their students – but very few teachers’ knowledge goes beyond that of the grade they teach (Bold et al., 2017). This means teachers aren’t able to help students identify key ideas or grammatical features in a text (Hoadley, 2024).

Teachers lack teaching skill. Very few teachers are able to perform basic teaching tasks. Asked to formulate appropriate lesson goals based on a text, one in ten teachers in sub-Saharan Africa succeeded. None of them could formulate assessment questions or offer students feedback. Lessons don’t include basic features: less than half of teachers explain the lesson’s topic, or offer a concluding summary. A third of lessons seem unplanned (Bold et al., 2017). Moreover, lessons are characterised by low cognitive demand. Teachers ask questions while giving or showing the answer, for example: “You were reading about Martha who runs what does Martha do?” Another teacher asked students to ‘read’ a 17-word paragraph 22 times in 23 minutes – testing their memories – not their reading (Hoadley, 2024).

The barriers to a child receiving a meaningful education are therefore extensive:

School may not be accessible or open
Even when school is open, the teacher may not be there
Even when the teacher is there, they may not be teaching
Even if the teacher is teaching, they may not know what they’re meant to be teaching
Even if the teacher knows what to teach, they may not be able to teach effectively

Why do these barriers exist?

Why aren’t teachers there? Why aren’t they teaching? Why aren’t students learning? It’s easier to show that teachers are absent than to establish why. But researchers suggest some causes:

For some teachers, priorities lie elsewhere. Low pay and barriers to attendance mean teachers may not prioritise teaching (Trani et al., 2023). Teachers often aren’t accountable for their performance (or their attendance) – pay incentivises getting old, rather than teaching effectively (Bold et al., 2017). (This contrast is most obvious when parents hire locally-accountable contract teachers, who tend to perform far better (Bold et al., 2018).)
Ineffective teaching practices are well-established. Teachers everywhere teach as they were taught and as others teach, rather than in the most effective ways. In sub-Saharan Africa, common practices include having children repeat sentences in chorus, and asking simple, undemanding questions. Partly, this reflects cultural norms in favour of respect, authority and consensus: these encourage pedagogical practices which achieve correct answers – not learning (Hoadley, 2024). Attempts to counteract this by spreading progressive and student-centred teaching approaches have proved ineffective (Miyazaki, 2015).
Leadership is weak. Within schools, teachers may lack leadership support. Headteacher absence is high (Chaudhury et al., 2006); in Ghana, half of heads were absent during spot checks (Duflo et al., 2020). Heads have neither higher qualifications nor substantial additional training; this limits the effect they can have (Miyazaki, 2015). Teacher hiring practices may look good on paper, but they’re often weak in practice (Bold et al., 2017). There’s often a lack of political stability or institutional capacity (Fazzio et al., 2021). The pressure – from teachers, unions, and the state – is to maintain the status quo, not push for change; teacher unions act as powerful interest groups (Bold et al., 2018; Chaudhury et al., 2006). Sanctions for teacher absence (let alone poor performance) are often non-existent (Chaudhury et al., 2006). Equally, teachers feel that leaders and government agencies don’t support them (Trani et al., 2023).
Family support is limited. It’s possible that children who have begun attending school more recently need more support than schools historically offered (Le Nestour et al., 2021). Families and the community are often limited in what they can do to support their children and supplement schooling (Trani et al, 2023). In rural Gambia, three quarters of adults can’t read at all (Eble et al., 2021). In Guinea-Bissau rural villages lack internet connections, reading materials or literate adults to support children (Fazzio et al., 2021). Poorer communities struggle to hold weaker teachers to account (cf. Chaudhury et al., 2006), lacking the knowledge, resources and institutional levers to do so.

The overall effect is a vicious cycle. Poor teaching in this generation means graduating students aren’t equipped to teach the next generation effectively. They lack the knowledge they need and much of their learning about how to teach has been spent observing what not to do.

Conclusion

Access to schools has increased. Learning hasn’t – at least, not at the same rate. Our imaginary child, if she can make it to school, may find a classroom without a teacher. If they’re present, the teacher may lack crucial knowledge and skill. Worse, the child is unlikely to see things improve: headteachers, communities and governments aren’t offering the support teachers need.

Necessarily, this picture is painted in the broadest brushstrokes. Even within sub-Saharan Africa, Tessa Bold’s (2017) paper, which I’ve cited repeatedly, shows substantial variation across countries. Teacher absence, for example, ranged from 23% in Nigeria to 57% in Uganda. But, broad as the brush stokes are, the picture is fair: at 23% or 57% absence is a big issue.

It’s also a negative picture. I began reading with an open mind. I’ve shown the picture that emerged. UNESCO (2013) described a “global learning crisis.” I’ve tried to explain why it exists.

This post reflects the situation most children face. I’ve not described the interventions tackling these challenges. The most exciting ones are achieving dramatic results at huge scale – across hundreds or thousands of schools – often in poor and remote areas. In the next post, we’ll look at how schools, researchers and governments are improving teaching in the Global South.

* Can we talk meaningfully about education in the ‘Global South’? The term masks great diversity: in income and resources, culture and state capacity. Yet the challenges – like teacher absenteeism and limited learning – seem to differ more in degree than in nature. If we were planning an intervention in a specific country, the broad-brush picture I’m giving here would be unhelpful. In offering an overview and evidence summary, it seems justifiable.

** This paper included data from seven sub-Saharan African countries: Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda. I have used ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ as shorthand to avoid having to write ‘in seven sub-Saharan African countries’ every time I refer to it. Data from other countries in the region points to similar conclusions. For example, teacher absence is 31% in Ghana (Duflo et al., 2020).