Sub-Saharan Africa is a rising frontier, but economic growth will remain uneven across the region as countries will remain at varying stages of development. While GDP is forecast to more than double in real terms over 2022-2040 in sub-Saharan Africa. For the past decade, school enrollments in the low-income sub-Saharan African countries have risen sharply at all levels of education. The primary gross enrollment rate (GER) grew by an average of 3.1 percentage points per year between 1999 and 2009, compared with only 0.8 percentage points per year in the 1990s in the sample of 33 low-income sub-Saharan African countries. Enrollments in secondary and higher education are also growing rapidly, although from a smaller base.
Education is considered a universal human right, as well as an issue of public good and responsibility. The simultaneous expansion of enrollments at all three levels of education translates into steep financial challenges for most, if not all, sub-Saharan African countries. Low-income sub-Saharan African countries—despite their low tax base—are already spending more than 4 percent of their GDP on education on average, a level comparable to that of low-income countries in other parts of the world. During the growth years of the past decade, many sub-Saharan African countries experienced strong growth in their public revenues as a result of strong macroeconomic growth combined with better tax collection and larger aid flows. In recent years, however, these salutary trends may have slowed or reversed because of the global economic downturn. Of all regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of education exclusion. Over one-fifth of children between the ages of about 6 and 11 are out of school, followed by one-third of youth between the ages of about 12 and 14 (UNESCO, 2025). According to UIS data, almost 60% of youth between the ages of about 15 and 17 are not in school.
Hence, sub-Saharan Africa is the region that faces the greatest challenges in the provision of higher education, despite very substantial increases in enrolment over the past four decades, with an average annual growth rate of 8.4% over the past four decades, compared to 4.3% for the world as a whole. Currently, over 4.8 million students are enrolled in higher education institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. This number represents an increase of 20-fold since 1970, when total enrolment was less than 0.2 million students for the entire sub-Saharan region. Unfortunately, most African countries do not have sufficient tertiary education capacity to meet rising admission demands. Faced annually with growing numbers of eligible applicants, African public universities have increased student intakes even though investments in faculty and facilities that would permit quality training of additional students have not kept up with the demands of rising admissions. Examples abound of decisions taken by education authorities without fully considering staffing and institutional capacity.
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Revolution in Education: What’s Driving SSA’s Student Exchange Boom?
The efforts of countries and their institutions to attract international students to come and study in their universities is becoming one of the major marketing areas of internationalization. Sending students in foreign intuitions to study in various higher education fields has also been taken as a strategy in many higher education institutions for a number of reasons. Exchange of good practices, information and knowledge; capacity building in research and development; attracting talented minds from all over the world; generating income from international students through tuition fees and promoting cultural integration are some of the rationales for promoting international student mobility. Thus, attracting best minds and most talented students from all corners of the world has been one of the objectives of promoting international students’ mobility. Moreover, higher education sectors in some regions may not be in a position to meet all demands of local students because of the lack of adequate infrastructure, the presence of limited disciplines and post graduate programs.
At present, the total number of international students from SSA is still comparatively small, trailing world regions like Europe or the Middle East. But mobility has already spiked in recent years. Between 1998 and 2021, the number of international students from the region increased by nearly 170 percent, from close to 164,000 in 1998 to over 441,000, according to UNESCO statistics. But, beyond the demographic surges, there are immediate factors that are making mobility more palatable to students in sub-Saharan Africa than their counterparts elsewhere. The unmet demand for higher education in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of saturation of universities in the region has become a major catalyst, per Beatrice Khaiat, the general director of Campus France. “Currently, about three-quarters of the students from sub-Saharan Africa who earn their degree outside their home country earn it outside Africa,” said Khaiat.
- The real or perceived uneven quality of degrees and diplomas is also driving African students to foreign destinations such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the US. The issue is that, in competition for a job, a student is interested in a degree that will provide an edge over candidates with similar degrees, stated ICEF Monitor.
- The idea that a degree obtained outside their country is of higher quality than that from a local university is rife in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, a factor that tends to influence the affluent urban middle-classes towards sending their children abroad to earn a bachelor or a masters degree.
- Subsequently, instead of using financial resources to improve the quality of under-funded local public universities, some African countries are using huge sums of money to allocate scholarships to students to study abroad.
Investing for Future Generations: Overcoming Educational Barriers
Without a doubt, capacity issues in their domestic higher education systems are the main push factor for sub-Saharan African students. The college-aged population is expected to double by 2050, and currently only 9% of this cohort are enrolled in higher education. This imbalance, if unchecked, will almost certainly limit economic growth and social development, and could worsen security issues. Therefore, policymakers in each country should thus continue to be unrelenting in their commitment and efforts to expand educational opportunities in a broad-based and equitable manner (across gender, regions and social groups). A big part of this is commitment of resources. While enabling factors such as viable academic credit transfer system, regional quality assurance and accreditation framework, harmonized degree structure, harmonized tuition policy, institutionalization of internationalization processes and flexible visa procedures should also be put in place. Besides, sub-Saharan Africa needs to significantly increase investment in education to meet national and global goals. This includes addressing teacher management challenges and ensuring that skills development programs are relevant to local economic needs.
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