How to fix Africa's learning crisis | Rapelang Rabana

**Elise Hu** (0:03)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
By 2030, nearly half of all the young people on Earth will be African, and yet across Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of kids show up to school eager to learn and leave without ever learning to read. The usual fix is the one you would expect, build more schools, train more teachers. But Audacious Project grantee and education technologist, Rapelang Rabana, says that in today's world, that plan alone isn't enough. Fixing it starts with confronting a bias most of us don't even know we have.

**Rapelang Rabana** (0:44)
The idea, the assumption that solutions that work in countries that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic should somehow work everywhere else in the world. Let's pause right there. Because that assumption is at the heart of the problem.

**Elise Hu** (1:00)
In her talk, Rapelang, who leads an organization called Imagine Worldwide, makes a case for scrapping the Western education playbook in places where it just doesn't fit. In its place, she's calling for innovations that fit the world kids actually live in. In Africa, this might look like smarter, adaptable tech. Solar-charged tablets that teach kids to read and count, adapting in real time to each child's level and pace in their own language. No internet, no electricity required.
Rapelang lays out her powerful vision in today's talk, and stick around after because she sat down with me to go deeper, including why this fight is so personal for her.

**Rapelang Rabana** (1:39)
I may be smart, but I'm not that exceptional. I have won the lottery. My parents have won the lottery in education here, and it shouldn't have to be such a hit and miss.

**Elise Hu** (1:48)
That's all coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk and conversation of the day.

**Rapelang Rabana** (2:01)
By the year 2030, nearly half of all the young people walking this earth will be African. And being able to read is the scale upon which so many other skills depend. Yet, more than 80 percent of 10-year-old children in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read a simple text of understanding. Not because they're not smart, not because they didn't pitch up for school, but because the system is failing them. The go-to solution for this learning crisis has always been the same. Build more schools, build more classrooms, hire more teachers, train more teachers. Sounds reasonable, but here's the uncomfortable truth no one really wants to say out loud.
It's actually never going to work.
To meet ideal student-to-teacher ratios, Sub-Saharan Africa needs 15 million more teachers at a staggering cost of almost 40 billion dollars a year. It's just nuts. So why are we still holding on to a playbook that cannot possibly deliver at the cost and urgency and scale required? Well, it's because we have a weird bias. Not that kind of weird, but a weird bias. The idea, the assumption that solutions that work in countries that are western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic should somehow work everywhere else in the world.

**Elise Hu** (3:35)
Hey, y'all, popping in to say that when Rapelang says weird, an image shows up on the screen behind her spelling out an acronym. Next time you hear the word weird, she's referring to this.

**Rapelang Rabana** (3:47)
The assumption that weird countries are the standard, the way the world works, and somehow with more inputs, African schools should eventually look like weird ones. Let's pause right there, because that assumption is at the heart of the problem, and God knows so many others.
We shouldn't have to frame our world like that, and I certainly have outgrown the belief that African schools should fit a borrowed model. Our goal should be to build something brilliant that actually reflects the reality that African children are living in today. At the organization I lead, it's called Imagine Worldwide, we are doing something different. Children like Chisomo, who you will hear about shortly, are now able to experience something else. Chisomo is a typical seven-year-old girl living in rural Malawi with her younger sister and parents who are farmers. It's a pretty happy existence, even without iPhones and ketchup. Every morning, she walks through the green maize fields under the glory of the African sun. But at school, she shares a class with a hundred other kids, sometimes 200, if a teacher is absent. She can barely see the book that the teacher is holding up in an overcrowded, dimly lit room. She rarely gets a chance to ask a question, share an answer, get feedback. And feedback is everything. I remember when I tutored high school math, some kids didn't even get their marked tests back, just a score. So they never knew whether they went wrong or right for that matter. There was no feedback loop, just this vacuum of uncertainty that makes it impossible to get better at anything. And imagine, we are giving children like Chisomo up to an hour a day of high-impact learning on a tablet. I know, I know, I can feel the parents in the room cringing. We are so allergic to the idea of screens that are bad for mental health, hurting attention spans, really not good for your mental and emotional development. I get that, and that's all true. In a few contexts. And this is why context is so important. Chisomo is not living the weird childhood that so many of us are trying to protect our children from. Her reality is not too much tech. It's more closer to none at all, at school or at home.