By Albert Nsengiyumva, Executive Secretary, ADEA
Keynote Address at the 1st KEMI International Conference, Nairobi, Kenya, 13 April 2026
Distinguished guests, colleagues, fellow believers in the transformative power of education.
I want to begin with a number. Not a target, not a projection — a fact. By 2040, Africa will be home to the largest youth population the world has ever seen. More than one billion young people of working age. One billion minds that will either be equipped — or abandoned. One billion futures that will either flourish — or be lost.
The question — the only question that matters — is this: What must governments concretely do now to transform the leadership of those systems?
Drawing on the 2025 ADEA Triennale Synthesis Report and the Continental Education Strategy for Africa — CESA 2026 to 2035 — I present to you eight pillars, and one cross-cutting dimension, where political commitment and institutional courage must converge if we are serious about transformation.
Pillar 1: Governance and Institutional Reform
Let us start where every education system either stands or falls: governance.
Decentralisation is not transformation. Decentralisation without accountability is merely dispersal. The Triennale was unsparing on this point — it identified middle-tier leadership: district officers, school support officers, instructional coaches — as the chronically under-resourced link where policy transformations most often fail.
We need Afrocentric professional standards for school principals. We need career pathways with teeth — licensing requirements, performance standards, and real consequences for persistent failure. And we need to invest in and formally recognise the African Centre for School Leadership as the institutional home for this work.
CESA 26-35 is explicit: Objective Six of its Strategic Area on Teachers, Educators, and Caregivers calls directly for investing in school leadership, including the share of female leaders. Not as a footnote. As a strategic objective.
School leaders are not administrators. They are the single most powerful lever in a school system after the quality of teaching itself. And yet in some African countries, a teacher can become a principal without any leadership training. That is not governance..
Governance must also anticipate the unexpected. Crisis management units embedded at every tier — national, district or county, and school — are not a luxury. They are the infrastructure that determines whether a system bends or breaks when emergencies arrive.
Pillar 2: Sustainable and Equitable Financing
The numbers in CESA 26-35 are sobering. Between 2016 and 2022, the median African country saw education spending fall from 16% to 14.5% of total government expenditure. Moving in the wrong direction. Against a benchmark of 20%. Against a UN recommendation of 6% of GDP. Against a continent that allocates barely 3.7%.
Africa does not have an education financing problem. It has an education financing priority problem.
The Triennale’s most politically significant contribution was to name this clearly: governments must start treating education as a strategic investment, not a cost.
For leadership specifically, this means budget lines for principal training academies, CPD infrastructure, and middle-tier coaching must be protected — especially during fiscal pressure, when they are the first to be cut.
One final point on financing that must be said plainly: education budgets are most vulnerable to cuts precisely when they are most needed — during fiscal crises, conflicts, and emergencies. Ring-fencing leadership development expenditure against these pressures is not a technical matter. It is a test of political commitment.
Pillar 3: Leadership Capacity Strengthening
I want to be direct: capacity strengthening in Africa has a credibility issue.
Too many of the “capacity strengthening” programmes are single workshops in hotel conference rooms, attended by nearly the same people, producing reports that are hardly read, and changing little.
The Triennale put it plainly: continuous professional development (CPD) needs to be made mandatory, systemic, and embedded in policy. For education leaders, this means annual CPD hours as a licensing requirement. Competency-based micro-credentials replacing generic certificates. Digital platforms that track participation and tie it to career progression.
We must anchor these national systems to the continental architecture that the African Union has already built: the African Continental Framework of Standards and Competencies for the Teaching Profession, the African Continental Teacher Qualification Framework, the Teacher Mobility Protocol. These instruments are not optional extras — they are the foundation on which credible national systems must be built.
Capacity strengthening must also prepare leaders for the unexpected. Trauma-informed leadership, emergency pedagogy, and psychosocial support are not specialist add-ons — they are core competencies for any education leader working in Africa today.
And leadership development must begin earlier. Not with the principal, not at the district, county, or provincial office. But in the classroom. This means leadership modules in pre-service teacher education, mentorship programmes pairing experienced leaders with emerging ones, and professional learning communities that operate with a coaching orientation — not an inspection one.
Pillar 4: Collaborative and Community-Centred Leadership
There is a leadership model deeply embedded in African philosophical tradition that the world is only now beginning to appreciate. Ubuntu. I am because we are.
And yet our school governance structures often contradict this entirely — communities consulted only ceremonially, School Management Committees with no real authority, parents informed rather than involved.
The Triennale called for governments to empower communities to participate actively and sustain the learning process. Not advise. Not consult. Participate. Sustain. That is a fundamentally different mandate.
And beyond communities — multi-stakeholder education compacts. Ministries, civil society, traditional leaders, the private sector, and learner bodies co-designing national strategies. South-South collaboration platforms through the African Union, ACSL, RTIA, and the AU Regional Economic Communities.
We are not short of African wisdom on education leadership. We are short of the institutional structures that let that wisdom flow from communities into policy.
Pillar 5: Data-Driven Leadership and Research
You cannot lead what you cannot see. And you cannot improve what you do not measure.
But let me be clear: this is not a call for more data for Ministries. It is a call for quality data — data that reaches leaders. Data that empowers principals to make instructional decisions. Data that enables officers at central and sub-national levels to target support. Data that gives School Management Committees and Parent-Teacher Associations real visibility into how their school is performing.
CESA 26-35 calls this EMIS 2.0 — the shift from aggregate statistics to individual learner tracking. Real-time. Disaggregated. Actionable. Designed not to produce annual reports, but to drive daily leadership decisions.
And alongside robust data systems, we need African research on African leadership. Not imported models that we take as is, but those which we can contextualise. We need African universities and think tanks, resourced to generate the evidence base that informs African leadership.
Because data without political accountability is just a dashboard nobody looks at, the Triennale called specifically for empowering political leaders and policymakers to use available data in meeting the promises they made to citizens. Annual school performance reports that are public. Parliamentary briefings that are regular. Community scorecards that are binding.
Pillar 6: Technology and Innovation
AI is already here. It is in our classrooms whether we have planned for it or not.
The question is not whether to embrace technology in education leadership. The question is whether we will design it for the last mile — the rural school with intermittent electricity and a principal who has never opened a dashboard — or only for the well-connected urban schools that need it least.
EdTech equity means offline-first tools, local language interfaces, and bandwidth-aware design. Digital CPD platforms that track professional development must work in the schools where leadership is most needed, not only in capitals.
And we must prepare education leaders for responsible AI. Not to fear it — to govern it. To ask: whose values does this AI algorithm reflect? Whose children does this system serve? These are leadership questions. They belong in every leadership development programme on this continent.
Pillar 7: Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice
In most African school systems today, a child’s chance of being taught by a skilled, supported, motivated teacher — and led by a competent, empowered principal — depends almost entirely on where that child was born. Representation at leadership level shapes every other equity outcome in a school system.
CESA 26-35’s Strategic Area Six — Gender, Equity, and Inclusion — makes the case not only morally but economically. Female school leaders are associated with better learning outcomes for all children. They reduce gender stereotypes. They serve as mentors for girls. And yet in most countries, women remain dramatically underrepresented in school leadership — despite, as the data shows, staying in the profession longer than their male counterparts.
Gender-disaggregated leadership data. Published promotion criteria. Mentorship programmes for women leaders. Quotas where underrepresentation is severe. These are not radical asks. They are basic governance hygiene.
And beyond gender — school leaders must be held accountable for equity outcomes: for learners with disabilities, for conflict-affected youth, for displaced and refugee learners, for girls who are at risk of dropping out.
Pillar 8: Regional and Continental Harmonisation
We are one continent. Fifty-four nations. Hundreds of languages. Different school systems.
But our biggest challenges — teacher shortages, leadership skill gaps, financing deficits, learning poverty — do not respect national borders. Neither do refugee crises, displacement flows, or the learning losses they leave behind. And our solutions should not either.
CESA 26-35 provides the overarching continental framework. ADEA provides the convening architecture. The African Continental Teacher Qualification Framework provides the portability mechanism. Initiatives like ACSL and RTIA, and the RECs platforms, provide the regional exchange platform.
What is needed now is for governments to actively align national leadership frameworks to this continental architecture — not as an external compliance exercise, but because the continent’s diversity of leadership experience is our greatest untapped resource.
A principal in Kenya who transformed her school’s learning outcomes has something to teach a district officer in Senegal. A Minister in Ghana who built a national leadership academy has something to offer a counterpart in Mozambique. We must build platforms that make this exchange systematic, not accidental.
The Cross-Cutting Dimension: Resilience, Crisis and Conflict Readiness
I have spoken of eight pillars. But there is a ninth dimension — one that does not sit alongside the others but runs through all the pillars. And on a continent where 244 million children and young people are currently affected by armed conflict, climate-induced disaster, or forced displacement, it is a dimension we cannot afford to treat as an afterthought.
The question is not whether African education systems will face crisis. They already are. The question is whether our leaders will be prepared.
Large class sizes are the daily reality for the majority of African school leaders. Distributed leadership — where teachers lead within their classrooms and communities within their schools — is not a compromise. It is the only model that can work at scale.
Emergency situations demand that crisis-sensitive planning be embedded in normal governance — not built from scratch when disaster strikes. Every dollar invested in preparedness saves up to fifteen dollars in recovery. And risk data must be in EMIS — not only achievement data.
Conflict and displacement test the very soul of educational leadership. Crisis-affected teachers and community members are the most knowledgeable about their context — and the furthest removed from the decisions that affect them. International actors must support local leaders, not bypass them. Trauma-informed leadership is not a specialist skill. It is a baseline requirement.
Local leadership is not a principle to aspire to in times of crisis. It is the only thing that works.
Resilience is not a separate strategy. It is what all eight pillars must be built to deliver.
Finally: Let Us Walk the Talk
The 2025 ADEA Triennale chose its words carefully when it named its outcome document Walk the Talk. Because the gap between what we know and what we do in African education is not a knowledge gap.
We know what works. We have known for decades. We have the research, the frameworks, the continental strategies, the regional platforms. What we too often lack is the political will to implement — and the accountability systems to ensure that what is promised is delivered.
None of these eight pillars is new. None of them is beyond the capacity of African governments to implement. And none of them will happen automatically — not from a strategy document, not from a conference resolution, not from a keynote speech.
They will happen when a Minister of Finance agrees, in a budget negotiation, to protect the line for leadership development.
They will happen when a district, provincial, or county officer, for the first time, has real-time data on which schools are failing — and the authority to act on it.
They will happen when a female principal in a rural school in the Sahel has the training, the support, and the authority to lead — and knows that her government sees her, and is investing in her.
Education leadership transformation is not a technical problem awaiting a technical solution. It is a political commitment to equity. A cultural investment in African identity and knowledge systems. And a generational responsibility to the one billion young people whose futures depend on the decisions we make — and the actions we take — in rooms exactly like this one.
Africa does not need more policy documents. It needs the political will to implement what is already known.
The headwinds are real. But the direction is clear. Let us walk the talk. Together.
Albert Nsengiyumva is Executive Secretary of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) and a champion of the African Centre for School Leadership (ACSL). This address was delivered as the keynote speech at the 1st International Conference of the Kenya Education Management Institute, at the Safari Park Hotel, Nairobi, 13 April 2026. ACSL is a coalition of partners coordinated by ADEA, ESSA, FAWE, and VVOB.
