Sierra Leone Telegraph: 25 March 2026:
Over the past 25 years, participation in early childhood education (Pre-primary schooling) has increased worldwide. The fastest progress occurred in the three regions and subregions that had the lowest starting levels: Northern Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Asia.
Each of them grew by 1.1 percentage points per year on average and did not have a major slowdown after 2015.
Global net enrolment rates in pre-primary education followed a similar pattern and rose faster, from 41% in 2003 to 54% in 2024, but most of the increase happened until 2015 (to 51%), and the growth has slowed down by almost two-thirds since.
Central Asia, Northern Africa, Western Asia, South-eastern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa again stand out for their rapid growth, as participation rates more than doubled since 2000. Still, however, in sub-Saharan Africa, less than one in four children of pre-primary school age are enrolled.
COVID-19 had an impact; however, participation rates among children aged 3-5 fell by more than 10% in the region.
Making pre-primary an entitlement
In total, 91 out of 195 countries (or 47%) guarantee at least one year of free pre-primary education, of which 42 guarantee at least three years, according to the UIS database. However, a global analysis for this report featured in the PEER website suggests that this might be an underestimate, as it found that public pre-primary education is tuition-free in 128 of 191 countries (or 67%), ranging from 48% in sub-Saharan Africa to 81% in Europe and Northern America.
Madagascar has been providing one year of free and compulsory pre-primary education since 2022. In Rwanda, the government abolished fees for pre-primary government-aided schools in September 2022, at least partly in response to concerns that parents had been paying on average RWF 66,600 (USD 58) per year per child.
In 2023, Sierra Leone adopted legislation for 13 years of free education, including one year of pre-primary. South Africa amended its Basic Education Law in 2024 to mandate one year of pre-primary schooling.
Early childhood education governance influences policy execution, funding, workforce training, and quality control. Countries differ in whether they organize early childhood care and education in an integrated way or not.
With 13 out of 47 countries splitting early childhood education responsibility between ministries, sub-Saharan Africa has an above-average prevalence of fragmentation.
In mainland Tanzania, the education budget is managed jointly by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the President’s Office, Regional Administration and Local Government, with the Ministry of Finance channeling most funds to the 184 local government authorities. The pre-primary education budget for 5- to 6-year-olds is a budget line in the primary education budget and is part of compulsory and free basic education.
The Ministry of Community Development, Gender, and Children coordinates early childhood education for children under 5, with the Department of Social Welfare overseeing integrated early childhood development.
Kenya also delegated early childhood education to counties following the 2010 Constitution, under a National Pre-Primary Education Policy and Standard Guidelines, which has some advantages but also created coordination gaps on issues such as curriculum and teachers.
Moreover, counties mostly spent their funding on infrastructure rather than teaching and learning improvements. In South Africa, two years of compulsory pre-primary education are the responsibility of the Department of Basic Education in a move towards integration.
Investment and private provision
In many contexts, historic government underinvestment in pre-primary education means that households that want to send their children to preschool have to pay the cost of private service provision.
Affordability, therefore, becomes a major barrier to the expansion of early childhood education and disproportionately impacts low-income households. In Africa and Asia, early childhood education participation levels have increased since 2004, but participation gaps between the poorest and the richest have remained the same.
Infrastructure
Several countries have undertaken ambitious infrastructure programmes to increase the availability of places in public preschools and reduce parents’ reliance on fee-charging private providers.
In many low- and middle-income countries, pre-primary classrooms are added to primary schools to cut infrastructure costs, use current administrative systems, and offer families convenience and continuity.
Ethiopia decided to expand pre-primary education in 2010, considering community-based, private, faith-based, and primary school–attached preschools as options, of which the last (known as O-Class) contributed about 80% of the total enrolment increase of 2.6 million between 2010 and 2015.
The enrolment rate increased from 5% in 2012 to 44% in 2022 at the national level. In Oromia, the enrolment increased from 11% in 2018 to 48% in 2022. In 2021 alone, 3,700 preschools were built.
The Gambia and Liberia integrate pre-primary classes within basic schools, sometimes sharing teachers. South Africa placed most of its reception, or R, classes in primary schools. Enrolment at public schools tripled from 242,000 in 2001 to 768,000 in 2012, which meant that, by 2014, 95% of Grade 1 students had attended Grade R.
Few countries address the problems in equity and quality, which can arise when private provision dominates but can be hard to monitor. Globally, only 45% of countries regulate fees, and just 15% regulate profit-making.
OUT-OF-SCHOOL POPULATION HAS BEEN INCREASING SINCE 2015
While 1,433 million were attending primary and secondary school globally in 2024, it is also estimated that 273 million were out of school, of which 108 million are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Since 2000, the share of sub-Saharan Africa in the global out-of-school population increased from 32% to 50% and from 25% to 47%, respectively, across primary and secondary.
Across all age groups, sub-Saharan Africa, along with Central and Southern Asia, now accounts for three-quarters of the global out-of-school population. Their share in the out-of-school youth of the upper secondary school age group has increased from 59% in 2000 to 74% in 2024.
But as numbers out of school are rising, so are numbers enrolled
Enrolment growth rates since 2000 have varied a lot by region and country income group. While enrolment levels have fallen in Europe and North America in both primary and secondary education between 2000 and 2024, they have more than doubled in primary education and more than tripled in secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa.
Demographic growth has been a challenge: Since 2000, there has been a demographic growth of the school-age population of 79%, 89%, and 85% in SSA across pre-primary, primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary, respectively.
These diverging demographic trajectories will continue, leading to different challenges in access to education in the coming years.
According to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024, the global school-age population is expected to decrease by 4% between 2025 and 2050. It will increase only in Oceania (5%), Northern Africa and Western Asia (7%), and, especially, sub-Saharan Africa (37%).
Despite the demographic pressures, infrastructure expansion has slowed down in sub-Saharan Africa. From 2010 to 2020, public primary school growth in sub-Saharan Africa stagnated or fell in 28 out of 29 countries.
Recent surveys also report that at least 40% of classrooms are non-permanent in 9 out of 19 countries, and at least half of schools are in good condition in just 7 out of 17 countries with data.
Rwanda has been a major recent exception in sub-Saharan Africa. There, the annual primary school construction rate increased from 40 schools annually in the 2000s to just 50 in the 2010s, while the student/classroom ratio in government and government-assisted primary schools increased from 60:1 in 2005 to 83:1 in 2020. In response, around 1,100 new schools were constructed between 2019 and 2023/24 despite the COVID pandemic constraints.
A major issue related to children remaining in school is the high prevalence of teenage marriage and pregnancy. Globally, the proportion of women married before age 18 dropped from 25% in 1995 to 19% in 2024, but is as high as 25% in Central and Southern Asia and the Pacific Island states and 31% in Sub-Saharan Africa, impacting girls’ education and futures.
Completion rates have improved consistently; however, largely because repetition rates once enrolled have started to fall. However, high levels of repetition remain in lower secondary education in SSA, which contribute to the problem of overage enrolment.
Meanwhile, upper secondary completion rates increased by 13 percentage points in sub-Saharan Africa (where 28% of youth complete).
Laws and policies related to free education have been credited with influencing participation. To start with, in seven sub-Saharan African countries, the introduction of fees as part of structural adjustment measures in the 1980s reduced primary enrolment by an average of 17%.
In sub-Saharan Africa, abolishing tuition fees in secondary education appears to have increased enrolment by seven percentage points. In Ghana, an evaluation of the introduction of free secondary education in 2017/18 found that girls’ completion rose by 14 percentage points in high-uptake districts.
But studies also indicate that fee abolition policies at this level of education have a negative impact on disparity.
The impact of compulsory and free education legislation is stronger when they complement each other. A study of 14 African countries found that making lower secondary education compulsory and free increased attainment by 1.6 years for girls and 1.4 for boys relative to only making education free, while the transition rate into lower secondary education increased by 14 percentage points.
Flexible pathways can help children re-enter and return to school. In sub-Saharan Africa, 33 countries operate accelerated learning programmes for children whose education has been disrupted to support re-entry into formal secondary education by providing basic skills in a short time frame.
Yet the transition from these programmes into the formal school system remains a key challenge. Evidence from 40 programmes suggests that transition rates vary widely, from 3% to 90%.
The growth of private providers has been one response to the need to expand education access. There is a lack of studies on whether the expansion of private schools has directly increased enrolment.
Two facts suggest that they have not done so. First, private schools have been mostly established in urban areas with close to universal enrolment, with the potential exception of informal areas where governments have often been reluctant to build schools.
Second, they serve richer populations: in a sample of 42 countries, children from the richest households (39%) were 10 times more likely than those from the poorest (4%) to attend private schools.
In other words, private schools have probably only attracted students from public schools, changing the composition of enrolment, rather than increasing overall enrolment.
This conclusion is also supported by the inverse relationship between government and household spending.
In Africa, in countries where governments spent less than 3% of GDP on education, households spent, on average, 2.6% of GDP on education; by contrast, in countries where governments spend more than 6% of GDP on education, households spent 1.2% of GDP on average.
Inclusive environments help disadvantaged learners – notably those with disabilities – enrol in, progress through, and complete school. New analysis, which is featured in the updated version of the PEER website, has found that the share of countries with a definition of inclusive education has increased from 68% in 2020 to 84% in 2025, and is rising to almost 90% of countries in Africa today.
A second mapping on the PEER website showed that 13% of countries in SSA have inclusive education laws in place, and 44% have inclusive education policies. 10% of countries have laws calling for children with disabilities to be educated in separate education settings.
Tertiary participation is rising more slowly in SSA than in the rest of the world, from 4% in 2000 to only 9% today, compared to a rise from 20% to 50% in Northern Africa. One core barrier is cost. Globally, most public universities charge minimal or no tuition.
A review of tertiary education financing systems for this report, featured in the PEER country profiles, indicates that 31% of countries have national laws or policies declaring public universities tuition-free, ranging from 19% in Eastern and South-eastern Asia and 21% in sub-Saharan Africa to 48% in Northern Africa and Western Asia and 53% in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the policy is based on a rights-based approach.
Equity
Monitoring equity is hard, mostly because there is a lack of data. Sub-Saharan African countries are generally overrepresented among the countries with a sizeable number of data observations (between 4 and 14) disaggregated by location and wealth because they are prioritized by the international surveys programme.
The report emphasizes the need to focus on equitable financing to improve access across the board. It assesses the extent to which countries are using five key financing mechanisms to redistribute finances to sub-national governments, to schools, families, and through social protection. It finds that their use is far less likely in low-income countries than high income.
Globally, 76% of countries re-allocate resources in favour of disadvantaged schools. Equity-oriented school transfers are almost universal in Europe and Northern America (91%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (88%), but less common in Oceania (56%) and sub-Saharan Africa (63%).
62% of education ministries offer some form of assistance to students, ranging from 38% in Oceania and 44% in Sub-Saharan Africa to 82% in Europe and Northern America and 94% in Eastern and Southeastern Asia.
School meals are monitored, which has led to an increase in enrolment, attendance and learning. A global review of national policies and programmes for this report, featured in the PEER website and informed mainly by the World Food Programme, the Global Child Nutrition Foundation and national reports, shows that 84% of countries have school meal programmes, with above average prevalence in Latin America and the Caribbean (100%), Eastern and South-Eastern Asia (94%), sub-Saharan Africa (92%) and Europe and Northern America (89%).
Northern Africa and Western Asia (56%) and Oceania (44%) have the lowest rates. An analysis of economic returns to school feeding programmes in 14 countries, of which 9 are in Africa, estimated that an annual investment of USD 11 billion generated an estimated USD 156 billion in social benefits through improved lifetime productivity and health.
However, many governments still struggle to establish and maintain school meal programmes due to unreliable funding, dependence on external donors and weak monitoring systems.
In Nigeria, a 2004 pilot of the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme in 12 states was discontinued within two years due to funding shortfalls, limited stakeholder engagement, weak infrastructure and insufficient oversight.
The programme was relaunched nationally in 2016 and its coverage increased from 1 million students in 2017 to almost 10 million students in 56,000 public primary schools in 2022. It had a budget of NGN 142 billion (USD 374 million) in 2023.
Financial management challenges, such as fund diversion risks, irregular budget flows, and a centralized payment system, have continued to plague implementation and led to restructuring in 2024. Three non-governmental organizations have been engaged to strengthen accountability.
An analysis of school feeding in Western Africa has shown that governments in other countries in the region cannot allocate sufficient budget resources to cover operational expenses, even as they increasingly recognize school feeding as an integral component of their education and social protection strategies.
This challenge became more acute in 2025 after the withdrawal of the United States as a funder of many school feeding programmes in the region, for example, in Mali.
Social protection policy can greatly contribute to overcoming obstacles that disadvantaged children face in accessing and progressing through education. Cash transfer programmes, whether unconditional or conditional on school participation, have been shown to boost school participation.
For instance, a meta-analysis of 35 studies had found that children receiving conditional cash transfers were 36% more likely to be enrolled in school.
The prevalence of these programmes ranges from 38% in Oceania and 58% in sub-Saharan Africa to 85% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 98% in Europe and North America. In income group terms, the range is from 36% of low- to 87% in high-income countries.
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