Addressing the learning crisis in Africa

Our client

Our client is one of the world’s largest philanthropic organisations, with a multibillion-dollar commitment to support African countries and institutions to develop and implement innovative approaches to confront hunger, disease, gender inequality, and poverty.

The client’s mission

The foundation is deeply concerned about the depth and severity of the learning crisis in Africa, with nine out of ten children unable to read and understand a sentence, or do basic maths, by the age of ten. The foundation is working to enhance the global, regional and country-level political salience of the problem, and to showcase simple, cost-effective and scalable solutions that can be implemented to reverse the learning crisis and ensure progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

Our support

We work closely with the foundation team to design and deliver a cohesive, multi-stakeholder advocacy campaign to raise awareness of the challenge facing the continent and to ensure that policymakers and education practitioners understand and have access to the tools that can help solve this problem at scale. Our support includes:

• Policy and regulatory insights 
• Ecosystem and stakeholder mapping
• Influencer and champion identification and activation 
• Stakeholder engagement strategy
• Call to action design 
• Political salience building
• Positioning and narrative design
• Human-centred and data-led storytelling

The results

A significant increase in awareness of the learning crisis at a global, regional and country level is driving collective donor and development partner action, the establishment of regional platforms in Africa to convene and engage policymakers and the emergence of country-level champions implementing successful solutions at scale.

Our client is playing a leading role in spearheading these efforts, particularly in the context of COVID-19 and competing crises – inflation, energy, food security, climate, and instability – that have an impact on educational outcomes. There is a growing recognition, globally and on the continent, of what’s at stake: failure to address the learning crisis risks creating a generation that will struggle to secure jobs, contribute to economic growth and reach its full potential.