Education in Africa: Home

This guide highlights publications and research tools on the study of African education, with a supplementary section on African immigrants and education in the United States. Resources listed here are primarily for readers with library borrowing privileges at Columbia University. The guide also includes links to open access databases, repositories, finding aids, citation management tools, journal articles, dissertations, and research reports.

The focus is on educational research in Africa ***published in English***, although many of the texts cited are comparative and interdisciplinary, and the recommended tools link to sources in French, Portuguese, and other languages. We recommend the use of a variety of formats and types of sources.

For more about African studies research at Columbia, see: African Studies

• African Union on Education (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia)
  • Continental Education Strategy for Africa, 2016-2025
  • Documents on Education and Youth
  • Education, Science, Technology, and Innovation
• Education Policy Data Center--Archive (2020) (FHI 360, Washington, DC)
  • From 2003 to 2020, EPDC served as a resource for education data, profiles, and data reports on education status at the country and subnational level, research papers on issues and challenges in education in developing and transitional countries, as well as medium-term education projections.
• Education Research in Sub-Saharan Africa: Quality, Visibility, and Agendas (2020). In Comparative Education Review. (August 2020) Vol. 64, no. 3: 363-83.
  • This article combines large-scale bibliometric analysis of publications on education by researchers based in sub-Saharan Africa with researchers’ accounts of their priorities and practice. Patterns in the thematic foci of the research from 48 countries in the region are considered from the perspective of international policy statements (the Education Sustainable Development Goal and the African Union’s Agenda 2063), alongside analysis of funding, coauthorship, and citations..
    --For more on general educational research and policies in Africa, see: "Policies: Books, Journal Articles, and Reports"
• UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization -- Country Reports and Statistics (Paris, France)
  • UNESCO Field Offices
  • UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report
    --See especially: Country Profiles -and- 2015 GEM Report on Sub-Saharan Africa
  • UNESCO Health and Education Resource Centre--Resources Library
    --Search for downloadable resources --in English or in French-- by country or by region.
  • UNESCO--Teaching of the General History of Africa, A Vision for the Future - Non-formal & Informal Education
  • UNESCO Institute of Statistics: Education in Africa (Montréal, Québec, Canada)
  • UNESCO International Bureau of Education on Africa (Geneva, Switzerland)
  • UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa
• The World Bank--Education Statistics (Washington, DC)