QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
— Nelson Mandela
We often hear education discussed in terms of certificates, examinations and jobs. Those things matter. But Mandela’s words ask us to think beyond them.
Education also gives a person language for what they are experiencing. It can help a child recognise injustice rather than simply accept it. It can teach someone to question an argument, understand another person’s history, vote with greater care or refuse an idea simply because everybody around them believes it.
A classroom, then, is never just a room where mathematics and grammar are taught.
What a society allows its children to learn—and which children it allows to learn at all—eventually shapes the society those children build.
Quote source: Nelson Mandela Foundation
DID YOU KNOW?
About 108 million children and young people are out of school in sub-Saharan Africa.
UNESCO reported in its 2026 Global Education Monitoring work that approximately 273 million children and young people were out of school worldwide in 2024. About 108 million of them were in sub-Saharan Africa.
Those numbers are enormous, but statistics can sometimes hide the person inside them.
Being out of school may mean a child helping the family earn money instead of learning to read. It may mean a girl whose education ends after an early marriage. Or a child whose school exists on paper but cannot safely open because the community is living through conflict.
That last example is painfully familiar in parts of Cameroon.
In the North-West and South-West regions, insecurity and repeated disruptions have kept many children away from formal classrooms. UNICEF Cameroon reported in July 2026 that temporary learning spaces are being used in affected communities—sometimes in tents, borrowed halls or simple shelters—so children can continue learning when ordinary schools are inaccessible.
UNESCO’s latest figures also contain some good news: enrolment in sub-Saharan Africa has more than doubled at primary level and more than tripled at secondary level over the longer term. The problem is that population growth, poverty and crises mean millions are still being left behind.
So perhaps the question is not simply whether a country has schools.
It is whether the child who needs one can actually enter, remain there and learn.
Sources
- UNESCO — Global Education Monitoring Report
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics
- UNICEF Cameroon
- Nelson Mandela Foundation
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