At the first Yidan Prize Conference held in Africa, Malala Fund staff found the case for girls' education backed by hard demographic data and a call to move past enrolment numbers toward real learning outcomes.
For decades, the international community has approached global education like a construction project: build the classrooms, fill them with chairs and figure out the actual learning later. But a few weeks ago, we found ourselves in Dakar, Senegal, witnessing a profound shift in that blueprint. We were there for the Yidan Prize Conference, hosted on African soil for the first time.
Navigating a bustling sea of more than 280 delegates from 35 countries, the conference’s overarching theme hit incredibly close to home for both of us: "Unleashing Africa’s Potential: The role of education in a new era of development”.
At the centre of this new era was local hero Mamadou Amadou Ly, the Executive Director of Associate for Research and Education Development (ARED) and winner of the 2025 Yidan Prize, which is awarded to changemakers in education. His research and scalable bilingual models provide intuitive yet revolutionary evidence: children learn significantly better when classroom instruction mirrors the language they speak at home, rather than an administrative or foreign tongue. By successfully integrating national languages into public school curricula, ARED has proven that Africa is already pioneering its own world-class, evidence-backed models to drive systemic reform.
Yet, as the panels got underway, the celebratory atmosphere quickly turned sobering. The systemic battles echoing through those rooms in Dakar are the exact same ones Malala Fund and its partners fight every single day across Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania.
The illusion of access without quality
During our first afternoon, we listened closely as global ministers and policymakers dismantled the legacy metrics of simple school enrolment numbers. The global consensus was clear: expanding access to classrooms means absolutely nothing if the children inside them are left adrift.
If a girl sits in a brand new, beautifully constructed school but leaves unable to decode a basic sentence, "access" becomes an empty gesture. Foundational skills — reading, writing and basic arithmetic — are non-negotiable if our young people are to survive and compete in a hyper-connected global economy.
We kept returning to how perfectly this mirrors our mission at Malala Fund. In Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania, we push past the surface. We know that getting girls in school is only half the battle; if the quality isn't there, we are offering them a broken promise. True access and transformative quality are two sides of the exact same coin. Through targeted policy advocacy, we work to reshape the systemic frameworks that govern education, ensuring that governments don't just build classrooms, but actively invest in the high-quality, safe learning environments every girl deserves.
The demographic engine: Proof of quality in action
The high stakes of this interdependence became even clearer when we listened to Wolfgang Lutz, the world-renowned demographer and 2024 Yidan Prize Laureate. Lutz demonstrated how a high-quality classroom acts as an engine for human survival. His empirical data proved that female education is the primary driver behind declines in infant mortality and fertility rates.
At Malala Fund, we always say that educating girls changes the world. Lutz gave us the hard demographic data to back it up. When you provide a girl in Tanzania, Nigeria or Ethiopia with a high-quality education, you aren't just teaching her to read; you are structurally altering the health, economic survival and demographic resilience of future generations. But this transformation only triggers if she has both physical access to a safe school and the quality of instruction required to build her human capital.
Beyond the classroom: Secondary education for young Africans
We also attended Mastercard Foundation’s "Secondary Education and Transitions" session which kicked off by passing the mic directly to four young women to share their stories. Their candid and compelling insights on their daily realities, goals and obstacles reframed the conversation, positioning them not as passive recipients of education, but as the true experts on their own journeys.
Inspired by their testimonies, we joined the group tasked with a critical challenge: ensuring student progression and completion. As our group dove into pinpointing exactly where and why students drop out, the conversation quickly laid bare the stark gender disparities inherent in the system. While school fees, unsafe commutes and a lack of market-relevant skills cause many young people to drop out around the lower secondary school transition, girls are uniquely and most severely affected.
Delegates highlighted that gender-based violence, a lack of menstrual hygiene facilities and the compounding pressures of early marriage create a steep drop-off in female completion rates by upper secondary school. To fix this, our discussion moved away from superficial patches and toward true system-level change: implementing targeted cash transfers for vulnerable families, institutionalising flexible re-entry policies for young mothers and embedding robust gender-responsive budgeting directly into national education plans.
Breaking the silos: Radical collaboration for true impact
On the final day, a high-level panel on cross-sectoral partnerships for education revealed that we can no longer afford to work in isolated silos.
His Excellency Serigne Mbaye Thiam, high-level envoy for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), reminded us that true partnership is defined by the alignment of national policies and respect of institutional identity. At the heart of the GPE model is national ownership: local governments, civil society organisations and multilaterals must co-design education plans by working in lockstep to build equity.
This alignment is particularly urgent given our demographic trajectory. Peter Materu of the Mastercard Foundation highlighted a staggering reality:
"By 2030, Africa is the only continent where the working-age population is going to increase. Education is our bedrock, yet our Human Development Index sits at 55% compared to a global average of 73%."
Materu challenged us to shift from a check-the-box exercise of "brick and mortar" schools to "education for opportunity”. With development funding declining globally, organisations must be exceptionally efficient, collaborating to guarantee young people a minimum of 12 years of quality education that supports a dignified transition into the labour market. This is especially critical given that secondary school is currently the final stop for the vast majority, with only 9% of young Africans successfully transitioning to tertiary education.
Yet, building these partnerships is notoriously difficult. Dr. Laila Macharia of Imaginable Futures brilliantly diagnosed the three main barriers holding the education sector back in Africa:
Expertise barriers: Most education actors can't structure a consortium, price risk or speak the language of market-based finance. We sit across from the private sector, talk past each other and wonder why nothing gets signed — losing out on the benefits of public-private partnerships.
Relational barriers: True partnership takes significant time to build trust and navigate early ambiguities, and our systems rarely grant us the "grace to be beginners”.
Deficit framing: We too often lead with a deficit mindset, ignoring the immense assets already on the continent. Africa does not suffer from a lack of capital, evidenced by over $100 billion in annual community remittances. We must stop waiting for external validation, design financing instruments that reflect local realities, and invite businesses to the table as active stakeholders. We must leverage our "ancestral intelligence" — deep-rooted local knowledge and data — rather than importing ill-fitting models.
Gbenga Oyebode of the African Philanthropy Forum echoed this sentiment and pointed out the sheer velocity of our demographic growth: "Every year, Nigeria adds the equivalent of the entire population of Belgium. We are moving in a way none of us can fully contemplate." Oyebode challenged philanthropists to move away from cause-based, ad-hoc local giving and instead sit together with governments to strategically equip whole education systems — such as ensuring new schools are built based on data-driven geographic need, not random placement.
Finally, Bruce Au, secretary general of the Yidan Prize Foundation, grounded the panel’s call to action in a message of hope. Pointing to the 400 million young people navigating these systems daily, Au emphasised that the task of collaboration moves at the "speed of trust”. By celebrating localised, evidence-backed successes, we build the collective confidence needed to dismantle our silos and scale what actually works.
As the conference wrapped, we left Dakar with a profound sense of urgency, validation and shared purpose. The work we are doing on the ground in East and West Africa is right at the centre of this new era of development. While “enrolment booms” make for encouraging headlines, we can no longer celebrate access while ignoring the literacy crises unfolding within our classrooms. Getting students through the door is only half the battle; elevating the quality of education is critical for actual completion. Without this fundamental shift, we will simply continue to see dropout rates rise. Moving forward, our collective advocacy will continue to demand schools where access and quality go hand-in-hand, unlocking the boundless potential of young Africans from day one.
