By Kadija Gul, Senior Research Assistant at the Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development (AKU-IED) and Sajid Ali, the Amir Sultan Chinoy Professor and Director of Research at Aga Khan University,

In Pakistan much of the educational discourse continues to revolve around the millions of children who never make it to school. However, what about those who are officially enrolled but still missing from the classroom? This blog takes a closer look at this concern, reflecting the findings we compiled after extensive field visits to schools across Sindh province, interviewing headteachers as part of a large-scale research study sponsored by the Data and Research in Education – Research Consortium.

Seasonal child labour

“In this season, children get the seasonal opportunity to work in the fields so they can earn a few hundred rupees on a daily basis.” (Headteacher1)

According to school heads, one of the most prominent reasons for children’s regular absence is that they often work as seasonal labourers in farms, especially during the planting and harvesting seasons. One official child labour survey estimates that over half of children aged 5 to 17 work in agriculture, forestry and fishing in Sindh province. These children remain absent from the classrooms for weeks and months, often pushed into child labour due to their poor circumstances. They miss out on classroom activities and are sometimes even dismissed due to low annual attendance. Many other developing countries face similar challenges.

Family movements

“Working parents move to cities for work opportunities, taking their children with them, which also affects students’ education. Spending weeks away from school causes their learning loss and a few never come back to school as they permanently migrate with their families.” (Headteacher 2)

Another explanation for children’s absences is family relocation or migration for seasonal work, financial gain or in emergencies. The Assessment Capacities Project reports that floods in Pakistan displaced around 3.5 million people, while in Sindh more than 140,000 people were displaced following major flooding in August 2024. In South Asia, seasonal and temporary migration is becoming more common than permanent migration due to economic vulnerabilities and urbanization. The pull by cities triggers these migratory patterns, promising higher economic prospects combined with low prospects in rural areas. In Pakistan, over 8.5 million people have migrated within regions. While moving for work may help sustain livelihoods, or is unavoidable when related to disasters, it unintentionally disrupts children’s education.

Traditional gender roles and responsibilities

“Girls are expected to look after their younger siblings and perform domestic chores, especially during the harvesting season which forces them to stay at home.”(Headteacher 2)

Girls’ education and school dropout continue to be major global concerns. The GEM Report and UIS estimate that 133 million females do not attend primary, lower secondary or upper secondary education. In the Sindh province, girls are often absent due to domestic responsibilities and looking after younger siblings. These traditional gender roles co-exist with multiple socio-cultural barriers such as early marriage conservative norms and safety or distance from school concerns that exclude girls even when schools exist. Absenteeism due to socio-cultural barriers eventually limits girls’ progression and becomes a reason for their dropping out and not transitioning to secondary grades.

Overlapping madrasa timings with schools

“Children prefer going to madrasa during school hours and spend time there. We have requested religious leaders for change in madrasa hours so children can attend both madrasa and School.” (Headteacher 3)

School heads mentioned the preferences of children to attend madrasas during school term, something that other studies confirm. In many Muslim majority countries, there is a debate on integrating school and madrasa education. For instance, research has looked at countries that have tested collaborative approaches, such as in Indonesia and Malaysia, showing how they can foster critical thinking, interfaith harmony, civic duty and economic empowerment while bridging the gap between Islamic beliefs and modern educational expectations.

Conclusion

Despite growing concern for out-of-school children, the issue of absenteeism among enrolled students, which the 2026 GEM Report warns is a precursor to eventual dropout, receives less attention. Understanding how these factors affect children’s classroom participation and academic performance is essential. In this context, the Sindh Government’s Student Attendance Monitoring and Redress System (SAMRS) represents a progressive initiative to monitor and address these issues effectively. The regular absence of enrolled children seems to be prevalent in many developing countries. Learning from Sindh’s early warning system offers a good way forward.

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By: Felipe Paullier, Assistant Secretary-General for Youth Affairs, United Nations

Youth participation in policy and decision making on education is deeply personal to me. My journey into public service began in the student movement at my university in my home country, Uruguay, where I experienced first-hand the transformative power of meaningful youth participation. Those early lessons shaped a lifelong conviction: when we create real spaces for young people to engage in policy and decision making, we do not only empower individuals. We strengthen institutions and drive positive change for society as a whole.

Since my appointment as Assistant Secretary-General for Youth Affairs and Head of the United Nations Youth Office, that conviction has only grown stronger. Young people are not passive beneficiaries waiting to inherit the future. They are rights holders and partners who must help design it, together with other generations. Working with young people is not about appeasing them; it is a moral imperative and a practical necessity in a world facing deep, interconnected crises that require urgent actions and innovative solutions.

The youth edition of the Global Education Monitoring Report, focused on leading with youth, arrived at a critical moment. Across the globe, there is growing recognition of the role of young people as agents of change, but recognition alone is not enough. Too often, youth participation remains symbolic, with no clear structures to ensure accountability or influence. We need institutionalized and mandated pathways for meaningful youth participation in policymaking and decision-making processes, grounded in clear principles and sustained over time. It is not only about consulting young people, but about working with them at every stage. By building a strong body of evidence and concrete examples of the education sector, this report helps clarify how meaningful youth participation can move from aspiration to responsibility.

The education sector is a particularly powerful place to examine this, because education sits at the heart of young people’s lives. Education equips young people with civic literacy, critical thinking skills and the agency needed to participate effectively, while schools and universities can also serve as spaces where democratic engagement is practiced, not merely taught. Across the world, young people and students are already leading — from global advocacy efforts to local organizing, grassroots campaigns and community-based action. Yet these initiatives too often remain marginal and under-resourced. Greater visibility, sustained investment, intergenerational solidarity and genuine political will are urgently needed.

As we enter the final stretch toward 2030, this report issues a clear call to action: education policies cannot be designed for young people without being shaped with them. If we are serious about building inclusive, resilient and just societies, leading with youth must become the norm, now and beyond 2030. The future of education – and of our world – depends on it.

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By Max Genin, Youth Advisor, UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR); Steering Member, Pact for the Future Implementation Working Group on Youth, UN Youth Office.

The 2026 youth edition of the GEM Report, Lead with youth, contains a statistic that should give everyone working in this space pause. Of the youth and student organizations surveyed, 57% submitted feedback on education policy. Only 35% saw that feedback reflected in final decisions. Fewer than one in six were ever asked to monitor implementation.

The instinct, reading those numbers, is to conclude that governments aren’t listening. That diagnosis is wrong, or at least incomplete. And getting it wrong is precisely why we keep having the same conversation, publishing the same reports, and watching the same gap persist between what youth are promised and what actually changes.

I’ve spent the last several years working on both sides of this. I’ve drafted education legislation inside government, regulatory amendments that directly affected 200,000 teachers and 500,000 students in Ontario, Canada, and I’ve sat in rooms at OHCHR and the UN representing the people that legislation affects. What that experience taught me is that the problem isn’t that governments don’t listen to youth. The problem is that youth, by and large, are trying to change institutions using tools those institutions have no structural reason to respond to. The strategy is the gap.

The three buckets

Change in the international policy arena is driven by three things: power, money, and community.

Power is who controls the agenda, who appoints the committee chairs, who decides what gets on the docket. Money is who funds the process, who has the human and material capital, who can sustain a position across multiple negotiating cycles. Community is everything else: the coalitions, the campaigns, the conferences, the advocacy, the thought leadership, the workshops, the solidarity networks.

Youth live almost entirely in the community bucket. And community matters, it’s where change is sustained, where it is legitimized, where it ultimately lands. It’s how we got a UN Envoy on Youth in 2018. It’s how the climate crisis became a generational cause. It’s how youth-led protests have toppled governments from Bangladesh to Nepal. But community alone does not move power or money. Issuing statements, attending side events at UNGA, posting open letters, none of that registers as a credible threat or a credible offer to the people controlling the other two buckets. Sometimes it does, other times it doesn’t. And until it consistently does, the feedback forms will keep being filed and the policies will keep being written without us.

Shannon Koostachin understood this instinctively. In the late 2000s, a young Cree student living on a reserve in northern Ontario found herself attending school in a deteriorating portable building the federal government had simply stopped maintaining. Rather than accept it, she started campaigning. The campaign went national. Media attention grew. A private member’s bill was introduced to fund school construction in Indigenous communities. It passed. The government spent millions building schools that should never have been left to rot. It took years, and it only worked because Shannon eventually forced her way into the power bucket, the community pressure created the political cost, but the bill created the change.

I watched this dynamic reach its limit during a side event at UN General Assembly Week, co-hosted by the African Union. Ministers from multiple African countries were in the room alongside youth delegates from those same nations. When the ministers began describing their records on education, improved outcomes, better conditions, commitment to youth, the delegates interrupted them. Loudly. Not politely. They told them, to their faces, that they were lying. The chair had to use her gavel to restore order.

It was one of the most honest moments I have witnessed in a multilateral space. It was also a precise illustration of what community pressure looks like when it reaches its ceiling: pure, legitimate rage, with no structural leverage behind it. The ministers squirmed. Then the meeting ended, and they went back to their ministries, and the youth back to their events.

The tool we’re not using

There is a bridge between community and power that youth movements consistently underuse, and it is sitting in plain sight: international law.

A human rights-based approach does something strategically important that petitions and consultations do not. It reframes the relationship between young people and governments from a charitable one (e.g. “we’re asking you to consider our needs”) to an obligatory one. When a country has ratified a treaty, it has created a legal duty. Youth are not supplicants. They are rights-holders, and the state is a duty-bearer.

This is what I meant when I said, at the launch of this youth report in Paris, that education is a human right and it is “high time we stop asking for it, but rather, start expecting it”. That isn’t an attitude shift. It’s a legal argument. If your government has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child or the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, then the right to education, including the right to participate in shaping it, is not a courtesy they can extend or withdraw. It is an obligation they have already accepted.

This is not theoretical. In March 2026, the Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation in Intergovernmental Processes and UN Work were published under the Secretary-General’s authority and promoted to all 195 UN member states, the first time the system has formally defined what meaningful youth engagement actually requires. The document exists because enough people in the right positions decided that aspiration needed to become obligation. The question now is whether youth organizations will use it as the instrument it was designed to be.

The practical implication is this: when you walk into a consultation, don’t walk in asking for engagement. Walk in citing the specific treaty obligations your government has already signed, the specific articles that require youth participation in education policymaking, and the specific gap between those obligations and the process you are currently being invited to participate in. You are not making a request. You are documenting non-compliance.

What ‘expecting’ actually requires

None of this means abandoning community. It means being strategic about what community is for. Coalitions matter not because collective noise changes minds at the top, but because they build the political cost of ignoring you. Campaigns matter not because a viral post moves policy, but because they shift the salience of an issue until a politician calculates that ignoring it costs more than addressing it. Community is the pressure. Law is the lever.

The youth edition of the GEM Report recommends that governments establish formal mechanisms in legislation requiring youth participation in education decision-making. That is correct. But legislation without enforcement is just another document. The youth organizations that actually move policy, of which there are examples in this report from Colombia, Norway and Slovakia, are the ones that understood the difference between being consulted and having standing. They showed up knowing the treaty obligations, the budget line, the decision timeline, and the name of the person with signing authority. They made it more expensive to exclude them than to include them.

What needs to change first is not government willingness. It is the technical fluency of youth organizations themselves, their ability to walk into a room knowing the treaty, the budget cycle, and how decisions actually get made. Prepared, diplomatic, and unapologetically relentless and bold in their pursuit. Governments respond to people who speak their language. Build that capacity, and the willingness tends to follow.

Stop asking. Know your rights – and use them.

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The Kenya Spotlight country report on leadership and foundational learning was launched this week in Nairobi at the first international conference organized by the Kenya Education Management Institute (KEMI). A partnership between the Kenya Ministry of Education and the GEM Report, the report shows that the efforts being made to lever school and system leadership to drive improvements in foundational learning.

As in the other four focus countries (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco and Zimbabwe) in the third cycle of the Spotlight series on foundational learning in Africa, which focused on leadership, the Spotlight report on Kenya combined qualitative with quantitative data collected from 60 public primary schools in Bungoma, Nairobi, Mombasa and Tharaka Nithi counties. Responses were gathered from heads of institutions, early grade teachers, Boards of Management and education officials to inform a comprehensive and well-rounded analysis of the system.

Progress in access and remaining challenges

The country report echoes findings from the 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report, Countdown to 2030. Kenya has improved access to education, with completion rates rising significantly between 2000 and 2024, from 54% to 87% in primary education and from 24% to 41% in upper secondary education. Many learners complete their education later than expected. In Kenya, while 60% of students complete lower secondary education on time (i.e. within three to five years of the official graduation age), a significant 24% do so after even more years of delay.

National and international assessments highlight that Kenya is one of just four countries in Africa where more than 30% of students achieve minimum proficiency in reading at the end of primary school. Further improvements will require more targeted support.

Instructional leadership at the heart of learning

School leaders (known in Kenya as heads of institutions) have clearly defined roles spanning instructional leadership, accountability, mentorship and implementation of the competency-based curriculum introduced in 2019. While foundational learning is not always framed as an explicit responsibility in national policy, school leaders in practice show strong awareness of learning expectations for grades 1 to 3. Of all countries examined in the 2025 Spotlight series, Kenyan school leaders spent the most time on instructional leadership, with nearly all conducting classroom observations at least once a week — assessing classroom conditions (98%), giving teacher feedback (80%), and evaluating student learning (76%).

However, gaps remain between policy intent and practice. Tools such as the Teacher Performance and Appraisal Development (TPAD) framework and KEMI training emphasize that school leaders are expected to improve foundational learning, yet only 21% have received formal instructional leadership training. Many, particularly in rural areas, also carry heavy teaching loads that limit time for pedagogical support. The breadth of school leader responsibilities means that targeted leadership training is needed to help them manage competing demands effectively.

The appointment and deployment of school leaders in Kenya is guided by policies developed by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to ensure that they meet professional, academic and experiential standards. However, while the guidelines require competitive, merit-based promotion, only 64% of school leaders were appointed through advertised positions, while 32% reported appointments without advertisement, often via internal promotions or transfers.

Training gaps also undermine leadership effectiveness. Although 96% of school leaders reported having received training, only 18% received it before appointment, contrary to TSC guidelines emphasizing pre-service preparation. Kenya is moving to address this through the establishment of the Kenya School of Teacher and Education Management and the Kenya Teachers Training College, which aim to coordinate and professionalize school leader development.

The report highlights the critical roles of middle-tier leaders such as Sub-County Quality Assurance Standards Officers and Curriculum Support Officers in supporting teaching and learning. For example, the quality assurance officers dedicate 28% of their time to instructional tasks and 27% to school visits, with 60% conducting school visits more than once a week. Although this time allocation reflects a strong connection to classroom oversight in line with their mandate, the proportion still falls short of the sustained pedagogical leadership needed to drive teacher development and improved learning outcomes.

In addition, Sub-County Directors of Education show relatively limited engagement in pedagogical support tasks (to which they dedicate just 17% of their time), revealing a gap between their expected supervisory role and a reality dominated by bureaucratic functions.

Community engagement can play a key role in supporting learning outcomes, but its impact depends on the conditions under which it occurs. The development of guidelines on parental empowerment and engagement by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, within the rollout of the competency-based curriculum, illustrate a growing recognition of the role of community. However, in practice, this role remains inconsistent.

Recommendations

The following recommendations emphasize the importance of investing in school leadership, strengthening system-level support, and deepening community engagement.

1. Kenya’s ongoing shift to competency-based education calls for a renewed focus on school leadership at every level. This requires strengthening the capacity of heads of institutions with a particular emphasis on instructional leadership for foundational learning. Accountability mechanisms should also be reinforced by linking Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development data (that assess teacher performance) with observation data (collected by officers at the sub-county level) and learning assessment results, to build a more complete picture of performance.
2. The sub-county level workforce should be empowered to lead for learning. It should be signalled to curriculum support and quality assurance officers, as well as to education directors that they need to shift from administrative roles toward hands-on pedagogical support, including regular classroom observation, coaching and targeted feedback to schools. Reporting and observation tools should also be streamlined between the Ministry of Education and the Teachers Service Commission to reduce duplication and improve consistency of support. In clusters of schools, continuous professional development sessions should be co-led by curriculum support officers and school leaders, covering pedagogy, remediation strategies and the creation of teaching aids. These cluster structures should also expand beyond mathematics to cover English and Kiswahili. Equitable access for teachers in rural and marginalized communities, including through virtual sessions, should be ensured.
3. Strengthening community engagement is essential to sustaining reform. Boards of Management, which oversee individual schools alongside parent associations, should be regularly oriented on their roles in supporting children’s foundational learning. User-friendly guides can help parents understand practical ways to support learning at home, while assessment data should be used to foster joint accountability between schools and communities.
4. Education officers should be supported to use data. Simple, real-time tools to report and respond to instructional challenges during school visits need to be developed. At the same time, schools should build their capacity to track and act on learner progress data.

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By Aanchal Kapur, Education Policy and Systems Researcher

In humanitarian and conflict-affected contexts, early childhood education is often among the first areas to be cut or postponed when education budgets are constrained.

These decisions are typically framed as temporary compromises made under pressure, a way to prioritise ‘core’ schooling until systems stabilize. Evidence suggests, however, that their effects are neither short-lived nor marginal. Learning gaps that emerge before children enter primary school tend to persist across later grades and shape how education systems perform and recover.

Weak school readiness, widening learning gaps in the early grades, rising remediation and repetition costs, and slow post-crisis recovery are not unintended side effects. They are predictable outcomes of early underinvestment, particularly in fragile systems with limited institutional and fiscal capacity.

This matters because education systems rarely fail all at once, as the 2026 GEM Report just released emphasized. They weaken gradually, as pressures accumulate across different parts of the system. Early childhood education sits at the foundation of this process, shaping how systems absorb shocks and how equitably they recover.

Learning gaps begin before children enter school

Underinvestment matters. Global data consistently show that inequalities in learning largely reflect unequal access to organized early childhood learning opportunities, rather than differences in primary schooling alone.

In crisis-affected settings, these risks are magnified. Displacement, prolonged stress, disrupted caregiving, and food insecurity undermine early development, while access to structured early learning environments is often limited or inconsistent. When early childhood education is underfunded, many children enter grade 1 already behind. This immediately reshapes classroom dynamics: teachers slow instruction to accommodate uneven readiness, learning gaps widen, and early grades become sites of compensation rather than progression.

The scale of this challenge is visible in global learning data. Only 41% of children in low- and middle-income countries reach minimum proficiency in reading by the end of primary school. While this figure is often discussed as a failure of primary education quality, evidence shows that weak school readiness and early learning gaps are closely associated with it, particularly in crisis-affected contexts.

From a systems perspective, this distinction is critical. Learning gaps established before school entry trigger reinforcing feedback loops: remediation increases, repetition rises, teacher workloads intensify and inequalities widen. Once these dynamics are in motion, they become difficult, and costly, to reverse.

Short-term funding choices create long-term system costs

Despite this evidence, early childhood education in emergencies is still commonly financed through short-term, siloed funding mechanisms. Early learning is treated as optional — something to be addressed once enrolment has been restored and primary schooling stabilised.

At first glance, this approach appears fiscally prudent. In practice, it shifts costs forward. System-level analysis of education recovery following conflict, displacement and the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, shows that systems with weak early foundations recover more slowly and less equitably from shocks.

This increases per-pupil costs, stretches teacher capacity, and diverts scarce resources away from system strengthening, particularly in contexts with limited administrative bandwidth.

These costs are not evenly distributed. They are borne disproportionately by overstretched teachers, under-resourced schools, and households least able to compensate for early learning gaps.  In effect, early underinvestment creates a predictable trajectory: weak school readiness leads to remediation and repetition; remediation raises system costs; rising costs constrain future investment, including in early childhood education itself.

Early childhood education as system infrastructure

Early childhood education functions as system infrastructure. It stabilizes routines for young children, strengthens caregiver engagement, and maintains links between households and education services during periods of disruption.

When early learning is embedded alongside caregiver support, health and child protection services, it strengthens coordination across system components rather than operating in isolation. By sustaining engagement with families and communities, early childhood education helps preserve the institutional linkages that primary education systems rely on during recovery.

Importantly, long-term benefits depend on early childhood education being adequately resourced, developmentally appropriate, and meaningfully linked to primary education systems, not merely expanded in name.

What SDG target 4.2 reveals about current priorities

SDG target 4.2 commits governments to ensuring that all children have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education by 2030. SDG target 4.2 recognizes that access alone is insufficient: it measures not only participation in organised learning, but whether children are developmentally on track at the start of primary education.

Monitoring of progress towards SDG target 4.2 shows that participation in pre-primary education remains far from universal, with the largest gaps concentrated in low-income and crisis-affected contexts. In many of these settings, fewer than half of children are enrolled in pre-primary education, and access is particularly limited for children affected by conflict, displacement, and poverty. These gaps reflect wider inequalities in early childhood development and shape learning trajectories well before children enter formal schooling.

The GEM Report indicates that early learning gaps established before primary school act as a structural constraint on progress across later SDG 4 targets related to learning outcomes and education quality. When children begin school without foundational cognitive, language, and socio-emotional skills, subsequent investments in curriculum reform, teacher training and assessment are less likely to translate into equitable learning gains. As a result, early childhood education has emerged as a critical bottleneck for progress across the broader SDG 4 agenda, particularly in fragile and crisis-affected education systems.

Repositioning early childhood education in crisis responses

Taken together, the evidence points to three necessary shifts.

• Early childhood education must be treated as a core component of education response and recovery, not as an optional add-on funded through short-term humanitarian windows.
• Financing decisions must account for system-wide costs, recognising that early investment reduces later spending on remediation and learning recovery.
• Early childhood education must be approached as system infrastructure – embedded in planning, governance, and service delivery – rather than delivered in isolation.

For governments and donors, this implies aligning humanitarian and development financing so that early childhood education is sustained across emergency, recovery and longer-term system strengthening phases.

As countries enter the final stretch of the 2030 Agenda, decisions about early childhood education will shape whether progress on SDG 4 accelerates or stalls. In crisis-affected contexts especially, early childhood education is not a luxury to be postponed. It is a foundational investment, without which recovery, equity, and learning quality remain out of reach.

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A new report placing a spotlight on school leadership for foundational literacy and numeracy in Côte d’Ivoire was published and launched today at an event in Abidjan in the presence of the African Union Commissioner for Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, Gaspard Banyankimbona, and the Minister of Education, Literacy and Vocational Training of Cote d’Ivoire, Koffi N’Guessan.

The Spotlight report on Côte d’Ivoire is a partnership between the GEM Report and the Ministry of National Education, Literacy and Vocational Training of Côte d’Ivoire highlighting the country’s remarkable progress in expanding access to education and its commitment to strengthen school leadership for improved learning for all Ivoirian children. It is one of the five focus country reports that were part of the third cycle of the Spotlight report series, alongside those published  on Cameroon, Kenya, Morocco and Zimbabwe and the continental report, entitled Lead for foundational learning (now also available in French) and launched in October.

Cote d’Ivoire has achieved major progress in improving access to education

The 2026 GEM Report, Access and equity: Countdown to 2030, released two weeks ago, shows that Côte d’Ivoire has made significant improvement in helping children access education, with 93% of children now enrolled in primary school. Across all three age groups from pre-primary to upper secondary, out-of-school rates are overall estimated to have halved in a quarter of a century. An in-depth case study on the reasons for this success in the Report highlights, among other factors, significant investment by the government to triple the number of public secondary schools, the 2015 Education Law making education free, the provision of bridging classes to help excluded children re-enter school.

Significant reforms are also underway to improve learning outcomes

The Spotlight country report on Côte d’Ivoire shows the accompanying reforms that have focused on improving foundational learning. These include the Ten-Year Education and Training Plan (2021–2030), which sets out a clear vision for equitable and quality education for all; the Competency-Based Curriculum that places learners at the center of the educational process; the scaling-up of the structured pedagogy approach through the National Programme for the Improvement of Early Learning (PNAPAS). The 2019 PASEC assessment shows that Ivorian teachers outperform their peers in other francophone African countries. The Spotlight report, which also draws on a survey of 60 primary schools, found that children in grades 1 to 3 had almost universal access to textbooks, an achievement that few African countries can match.

Produced in partnership with the Ministry for National Education, Literacy and Professional Training, the Spotlight report on Côte d’Ivoire celebrates these significant efforts, and highlights areas remaining to drive further improvements in learning outcomes.

A call to strengthen school leadership

The report calls for a comprehensive reform of school leadership in Côte d’Ivoire: from how principals are recruited to how they are supported once in post. This means establishing a transparent, merit-based selection process, investing in leadership training throughout principals’ careers, and freeing them from excessive teaching loads so they can focus on their core instructional role.

Beyond the principal, the report also urges a more collaborative model of governance, strengthening the role of school committees and local education authorities as genuine partners in improving learning outcomes.

Two good practices are highlighted as strong bases upon which to build further improvements:

• Performance contracts (contrats d’objectifs et de performance, COPs) encourage shared accountability among school leaders, teachers, parents and communities.
• Structured pedagogy through PNAPAS provides teachers with evidence-based lesson plans and tools to develop literacy and numeracy skills.

“The progress our country has made over the past decade is a testament to the commitment of our government, our teachers and our communities,” said Koffi N’Guessan, Minister of National Education, Literacy and Professional Training. “Every child is born to learn, yet we know that access alone is not enough. The findings of today’s new reports give us a clear roadmap for ensuring all Ivoirian children leave school with the knowledge and skills to build a better future: stronger school leadership, better-supported teachers, and a shared accountability that reaches from the classroom to the community. We are ready to act on it”.

Watch the Côte d’Ivoire Spotlight Report launch live on Facebook from 10 AM GMT

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By Julia Stanton and Steve Diop, British Council

With limited electricity, poor internet connectivity, and inadequate funding, it can be challenging for teachers across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to integrate technology into their classrooms. However, the British Council’s publication Teaching and learning with technology: Case studies of practice provides insights into how teachers use everyday technologies to overcome these barriers.

The publication brings together 20 case studies selected from 119 teachers and teacher educators across 20 countries, and highlights approaches from urban and rural schools, tertiary institutions, teacher development programmes and community-based or after-school initiatives. It demonstrates how teachers across SSA are adapting low-tech and digital tools to meet local needs in a context in which, as GSMA data for SSA show, only around 27% of the population actively uses mobile internet.

Making use of what is available

Teachers use what is already available to them, such as messenger apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. Although these tools were not designed for educational purposes, they have proven ideal because of availability and low bandwidth requirements.

This mirrors the teacher policy recommendations from the UN Transforming Education Summit 2022, which stress that ‘strategies that make use of already available technologies, including low-tech solutions, should be considered in order to ensure rapid impact and high inclusion’.

In addition to the messenger apps, many teachers have found ways to integrate standard smartphone tools into their teaching. Elsie Enanga from Cameroon uses her phone and a Bluetooth speaker to record student speaking samples and introduce a variety of listening activities so they can practise their communication skills. As Elsie notes, ‘This use of a low ed-tech device has sparked a lot of interest in my English language lessons. Learners all want to have their voices heard’.

Making use of AI to localise materials

Online content and tools can help teachers to localise learning materials and the availability of generative AI tools on smartphones has further enabled this process. Geoffrey Makau Mutungi from Kenya makes use of ChatGPT to produce poems and narratives that are contextualised with familiar names, places and topics and address relevant social issues like drug abuse and teenage pregnancy. He notes that his students are more engaged with the content and better able to reflect on community challenges. He encourages his students to embrace critical thinking, since they ‘need to confirm the content they get from AI’.

Umar Suraka from Ghana began experimenting with ChatGPT to help him with lesson planning. This encouraged him to run hands-on sessions for his colleagues and for teachers from other schools on how they can use AI to facilitate lesson planning and materials creation. So far, he has reached over 300 teachers, who report that AI saves time and makes them feel more confident. They find their lessons are more engaging, practical, creative and interactive, going beyond what is offered by the textbook. Importantly, teachers are encouraged to critically evaluate any outputs for accuracy before using them.

‘AI is just a helper. Treat the results as a starting point not the final answer.’

Using technology for inclusivity

Teachers find that using technology helps them solve problems in their classrooms, such as how to make their lessons more inclusive and to continue teaching when faced with interrupted learning caused by crises.

Mame Couna Diaw from Senegal turned to technology to ensure that the visually impaired students in her class were not excluded. She records short audio messages on her phone before class to help students familiarise themselves with instructions, vocabulary and lesson content. She shares these through WhatsApp and Google Classroom. The visually impaired students can listen to the recordings in advance and can use screen readers or text-to-speech functions to follow the classes more easily. This results in them being more confident when participating in class:

‘This is extra work, of course, but just to make all my students the same level […] it’s really necessary [to do this] outside the classroom or before the class’.

Mohammed Saif, a visually impaired teacher educator from Sudan, uses technology to train other teachers in inclusive digital practices, demonstrating the role that assistive technology like screen readers, AI narration tools and digital platforms can play in making teaching and learning accessible. Teachers have begun to see accessibility as an integral part of teaching. This is particularly relevant in Sudan, where the ongoing conflict has disrupted education and pushed learning online.

‘The technical skills were important; the greater change was in how teachers began to see their role: as designers of learning that includes every learner.’

Nijiki Grace from Cameroon created WhatsApp groups for each of her classes to stay connected when schools closed due to a socio-political crisis. The groups also allow her to share lesson materials and other learning resources, and to encourage peer feedback on writing tasks.

‘Digital skills are a survival kit for today’s disruptive education landscape […] When ghost towns shut schools, learning doesn’t stop – our WhatsApp groups become classrooms.’

Extending learning beyond the classroom

According to the 2023 GEM Report, technology can be a cost-effective tool to reach students and their families and improve learning outcomes.

This was found to be a common practice in the British Council’s case studies on how teachers use technology. Teachers described using their smartphones and encouraging students to use their own to offer flipped learning before and after class. Smartphones also provide an opportunity for students to continue learning and practising on their own outside the classroom.

Dr Teshome Bekele Sime from Ethiopia turned to technology to help his students continue practising English outside the classroom, as time and resources were limited. Through Google Classroom and Google Docs, students work on drafting descriptive paragraphs, take part in collaborative discussion forums and provide peer feedback. This has improved their language skills and given them confidence. Dr Teshome recommends that teachers:

‘Start small and choose simple, free tools – blended learning should complement, not replace teaching’.

Blessing Epum from Nigeria runs a free virtual reading club with seven volunteer teachers across Africa to provide weekend reading sessions with activities for children in multiple countries. Younger learners join on Zoom, while older ones use WhatsApp for interactive reading, texting and voice notes. Participants develop stronger reading and listening skills, greater confidence, improved digital literacy, and new international friendships.

‘WhatsApp and Zoom have opened a window for children across Africa and [elsewhere] to learn together.’

Overcoming the ‘usage gap’

The case studies in the report highlight how teachers and teacher educators in challenging, low-resource contexts are using technology in creative and practical ways. Teachers are demonstrating innovation, resilience and a shared commitment to supporting learner progress by adapting low-cost tools such as messaging apps and low-bandwidth platforms. We hope that by reading these case studies, more teachers will be inspired to make use of the technology around them to improve the quality of teaching. This approach could also be a cost-effective, scalable model to be considered in many educational contexts.

Read the report: ‘Teaching and learning with technology: Case studies of practice’

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By: Anna Cristina d’Addio and Daniel April

Since 2020, the Global Education Monitoring Report’s Profiles Enhancing Education Reviews (PEER) website has provided a platform for understanding how countries design education systems through legislation and policy. With the launch of this year’s 2026 GEM Report, the platform has moved from a repository of country ‘snapshots’ into a dynamic tool tracking policy change over time, starting with two areas critical for equitable access to education: inclusion and equitable finance.

This change marks more than a redesign. It reflects a conceptual shift in how to monitor, interpret and ultimately use information on global education policy.

The original PEER: a global policy snapshot

When the PEER platform was initially developed, it was designed to systematically document national education legislation and policies. This was for two key reasons:

• To ensure every country was covered in the annual GEM Report thematic focus and strengthen the analysis on inclusion (2020), private actor regulation (2021/2), technology (2023) and school leadership (2024/5).
• To provide structured evidence base for policy dialogue and peer learning in these and future themes.

The platform was intentionally descriptive, providing a detailed picture of what policies existed at a given moment, rather than how they evolved. But in a global policy environment increasingly focused on results and accountability, this limitation became more visible.

Policies also need to be monitored, not just outputs and outcomes

The need for a redesign emerges at a critical juncture. As the world approaches the 2030 deadline for Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), there is growing demand to take stock of progress over time, not just document the current existence of a policy.

To contribute to the shape of a post-2030 agenda, the next three GEM Report editions form part of the Countdown to 2030 seriesThe 2026 GEM Report, which was launched last week, tracks global trends in expanding access to education and examines why some countries have advanced faster than others. Drawing on 35 country case studies, it explores the policies that drive progress and the barriers that still leave millions of learners behind.

Combining both quantitative data on trends, case study material and policy analysis, the GEM Report makes the point that policymakers need to understand what matters in the long-term not just what works in the short term. It emphasizes that progress takes time. While indicators may take several years to show change, there is much to be learnt from the institutional change countries are making in the background in the form of their policies.

The redesigned PEER platform responds directly to this need, providing information that is longitudinal, analytical and actionable.

The new PEER moves toward:

1. Policy evolution

Instead of isolated country snapshots, the new platform provides time-series policy analysis over the past 20+ years, beginning with two themes: inclusion and equitable education finance on pre-primary, primary, secondary and post-secondary education. This helps users observe reform trajectories and turning points.

2. Indicator-based analysis

The new platform introduces indicator-driven insights, linking legislation and policy changes to measurable dimensions of progress, as has been done this year with a new index on equitable finance. This enables cross-country comparison grounded in data and stronger alignment with the SDG 4 monitoring framework.

3. Continuous monitoring

Unlike its legacy site, the new PEER website is designed as a living platform reflecting a move from periodic to continuous reporting.

The decision to begin by mapping changes over time in inclusion and finance is deliberate. The 2020 GEM Report on inclusion and education emphasized that exclusion persists due to fragmented policies, weak implementation and insufficient financing alignment. Similarly, recent GEM Report work on equity and financing highlights how resource allocation and policy frameworks shape outcomes across education systems. By focusing on these themes first, the new PEER platform demonstrates how legislation translates (or fails to translate) into progress and connects policy frameworks with equity outcomes.

A tool for the post-2030 agenda

Perhaps the most important dimension of this redesign is strategic. As global education stakeholders begin to define priorities beyond 2030, the need is no longer just to ask What policies exist? but rather What progress has been made—and how?

The new PEER platform directly supports this shift by highlighting long-term reform trajectories, enabling evidence-based policy learning, and supporting forward-looking agenda setting.

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By Svein Oesttveit, Director a.i. of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Manos Antoninis, Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report 

The latest update of the UIS and GEM Report model shows that, in 2024, an estimated 273 million children, adolescents and youth were out of school. That figure breaks down into 79 million children of primary school age, 64 million adolescents of lower secondary school age, and 130 million youth of upper secondary school age. At the same time, according to the latest UIS data release shown in the 2026 GEM Report released yesterday, 1,433 million were attending primary or secondary school globally. The two numbers together tell a story that is both about progress and about its limits. 

The headline figure has been rising since 2017, but it is easy to misread what that means. The out-of-school rate, the share of school-age children, adolescents and youth who are not in school, has actually remained broadly stable at around 17% since 2015 – or one in six of the school-age population. The world hasn’t so much been going backwards, as not managing to go forwards, as populations have continued to grow.

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The 2026 GEM Report was launched today at a full-day event at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. It calls on countries to commit to equity in order to improve access to education. It emphasizes the need to learn from different countries’ historical experiences and to understand what sustains change at scale, rather than opting for quick fixes. And central to that argument is a call for greater national ownership of the international education agenda: countries setting their own ambitious but achievable targets, grounded in their own contexts, and accountable first and foremost to their own citizens. The report is the first of the three-part Countdown to 2030 series, which will also look at quality and learning in 2027and the relevance of education in 2028. 

Despite repeated targets calling for universal access, ambitions have consistently outstripped the pace of expansion. A new GEM Report and UIS update shows that 273 million children, adolescents and youth are out of school, a rise for the seventh consecutive year. This means one in six children, adolescents and youth worldwide are currently excluded from education. Progress has slowed across almost every region since 2015, with a sharp deceleration in sub-Saharan Africa. 

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