Photo credit: Sabre Education

Africa knows a great deal about education. It knows what happens in classrooms when teachers are under-resourced and overextended. It knows what it takes to get a child to school and keep them there. It knows how communities relate to the schools in their midst, what languages children think in, what systems have tried and what has held. This knowledge has been built over decades by researchers, by practitioners, by people who have designed programmes, written curricula, run interventions, and sat with the data long enough to understand what it is actually saying.

That knowledge exists. It is substantial, it is rigorous in the ways that matter, and it is grounded in the realities it speaks to. The question now is whether this knowledge travels. Is it reaching the people trying to make decisions in similar contexts? The policymakers who need evidence they can trust, the students entering the field, and the organisations building the next generation of education programmes. Most of the time, it does not travel nearly far enough.

Some of this knowledge ends up in academic journals and databases. Initiatives like ESSA’s African Education Research Database and NORRAG’s The South Also Knows initiative have done important work in making African-produced research more findable. What gets documented in these spaces are outputs, conclusions and publications. What we miss is everything that surrounds the output, that is, the question behind the question, the constraints that shaped the methodology, the things that surprised the researcher, the tensions within the findings that the word limit did not allow for, the dimensions that determined what counted as evidence and what did not.

These dimensions, which do not always make it into final outputs, are often what make knowledge usable. A program manager in Kigali, trying to decide whether a community education program from Freetown is relevant for what they are building, needs to understand the conditions under which it was implemented. A policymaker in Uganda needs to know not just what the evidence says about the program on literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills he wants to enact into policy, but what it cannot yet say.

And beyond research, there is this whole other category of knowledge that rarely circulates at all, such as the knowledge embedded in toolkits, manuals, and frameworks developed by practitioners who have spent years working with specific communities and schools. This knowledge is often practical, contextual, and relevant to the important questions on the ground. They have no obvious home in the existing architecture of knowledge sharing.

What Africa Knows is a podcast and a space where African knowledge producers can speak about their work in full and as a complete account of what they built, why it matters, what it cost to produce, and what it means for the people who use it in their daily work. By knowledge producers, we mean anyone whose work generates a grounded understanding of education in African contexts. This includes researchers producing empirical evidence on learning, teaching, and education systems. Practitioners who have developed resources, toolkits, and frameworks built on sustained engagement with communities and schools. What is important about each of this work is that the knowledge is rooted in realities.

Each episode centres on a person or a team and a specific body of work. The conversations are substantive and engage what was produced, what it found, what it means. They also discuss the process, what the work was trying to understand, what was encountered along the way, what decisions had to be made, what the work can and cannot tell us. These are questions that formal publications may not always answer, and at the same time, these make knowledge discussable and transferable across contexts.

For practitioners and educators, this is knowledge about contexts like their own, produced by people who understand those contexts. It is evidence they can engage with in the way they want to. For policymakers, including those working on what education systems should look like as the SDG era closes and a new global agenda takes shape, this knowledge and perspectives should be part of that conversation.

We are four years from 2030, and the conversations shaping what comes next in global education are already happening. New frameworks will be written, new agendas set. In these post-2030 conversations, knowledge produced in Africa, by Africa, matters for setting an agenda that includes Africa.————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————Want to be part of the conversation? If you are producing knowledge on education in African contexts, through research or practice, and are interested in contributing to What Africa Knows, please reach out at whatafricaknows.podcast@gmail.com

About the author: Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem is an education practitioner with over a decade of experience working across education systems. She is currently Assistant Director, Programs at The Education Collaborative at Ashesi University, where she supports collaboration and learning within the higher education ecosystem across the continent.

She is also a co-founder of Think Education, an organisation that works with school leaders and educators in low-cost private schools to strengthen school leadership and education practice. You can contact her at nanaama.b.amponsem@gmail.com

Nana Ama holds an MA in Educational Planning, Economics, and International Development from University College London, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. Her research interests include political economy of education, post-aid futures, and decolonial approaches to education policy, planning, and practice, with a particular focus on African epistemologies.

Acknowledgements: The author(s) is solely responsible for the content of this article, including all errors or omissions; acknowledgements do not imply endorsement of the content. The author is grateful to Charity Chisoro for her guidance in preparing and finalising this article, as well as her editorial support.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in published blog posts, as well as any errors or omissions, are the sole responsibility of the author/s and do not represent the views of the Africa Evidence Network, its secretariat, advisory or reference groups, or its funders; nor does it imply endorsement by the afore-mentioned parties.

Suggested citation: Boa-Amponsem N A (2026) What Africa Knows, and Who Gets to Hear It. Blog posting on 20 April 2026. Available at: https://africaevidencenetwork.org/what-africa-knows-and-who-gets-to-hear-it/2026/04/20/