Effective School Leadership is Central to Africa’s Education Transformation Agenda
By Dr. Leila Abdullahi and Ms. Chantal Kabanda Dusabe
This blog draws on reflections and discussions from the 13th AFTRA Conference and 15th Roundtable, Gaborone, Botswana, and on ongoing work under the African Centre for School Leadership (ACSL). ACSL is coordinated by ADEA, and implemented in collaboration with ESSA, FAWE, and VVOB – Education for Development.
From 5th to 7th May 2026, education leaders, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners from across Africa gathered in Gaborone, Botswana, for the 13th AFTRA Conference and 15th Roundtable. The conference was officially opened by His Excellency Duma Gideon Boko, President of the Republic of Botswana — a signal of the political weight the country places on education, youth development, and continental collaboration. We attended as representatives of the African Centre for School Leadership. We came to the event with questions. We left with a stronger sense of both urgency and direction.
Across three days of discussions, one message recurred with striking consistency: effective school leadership is not a technical sub-issue within the education reform conversation. It is a central determinant of whether reform actually works.
This is not a new argument. The evidence has been building up for years. Effective school leaders shape school culture, strengthen teaching quality, support teacher motivation, improve accountability, and create enabling conditions in which learning can thrive. Leadership is, in many ways, the bridge between policy ambition and classroom practice. And yet, across much of the continent, it remains insufficiently institutionalized. Leaders are appointed without adequate preparation. Standards and competency frameworks are weak or inconsistent. Professional development is fragmented, donor-dependent, and often disconnected from the day-to-day realities of leading a school. The result is a persistent gap between what policy intends and what implementation delivers.
What was encouraging in Gaborone was seeing that gap named explicitly — and at the highest levels. In the communiqué from the Ministerial Session held on 5 May 2026, Ministers of Education across Africa affirmed that effective school leadership is a key determinant of teacher retention, professional performance, improved learner outcomes, and competency acquisition, and committed to strengthening school leadership training as a specialised professional pathway across the continent. Botswana’s Minister of Child Welfare and Basic Education, Hon. Mrs. Kebuang Nono Kgafela-Mokoka, reinforced this, underlining the importance of leadership, policy alignment, and continental collaboration in strengthening education systems. When ministers use a communiqué to name school leadership as a strategic professional track rather than an administrative function, something is shifting in how the agenda is being understood.
Our contribution to the conference drew attention to what that shift must mean in practice. Effective school leadership cannot be understood as the responsibility of individual principals working in isolation. It must be understood as a system function, one that requires coherent structures at every level, from ministries and district offices to teacher development institutions, school communities, and the professional networks that connect them. One of the framings we offered, which generated genuine discussion, was the move from talking about instructional leadership toward talking about leadership for teaching and learning. The distinction matters. The first locates the work at the level of the principal. The second distributes responsibility across the whole system and acknowledges the relational, collaborative nature of leadership as it operates in African contexts.
The conference also brought into sharp focus something we encounter in ACSL’s work continuously: the professional development of school leaders cannot remain a project. It cannot be short-term, donor-driven, or disconnected from national systems. Meaningful leadership development requires continuity — coaching, mentoring, peer learning, reflective practice, certification pathways — embedded within institutions that will sustain them beyond the next funding cycle. Several African countries are already moving in this direction, and their experiences show that progress is possible when governments, practitioners, researchers, and development partners align around shared priorities rather than parallel agendas.
Research was a recurring theme throughout the conference, and rightly so. Much of the global literature on school leadership originates from contexts that look very different from African education systems. International evidence has value, but African systems need stronger, locally generated evidence capable of informing policy and practice on their own terms — on leadership in low-resource settings, on inclusive and gender-responsive leadership, on what works in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, on the relationship between leadership and teacher wellbeing. ACSL’s expanding research agenda is a direct response to this need. But it is also clear that research must not end in publication. Evidence must find its way into policy dialogue, into leadership standards, into the decisions that shape how school leaders are prepared, supported, and held accountable. The link between research, policy, and practice is where the long-term work of system transformation actually happens.
The AFTRA Conference reflected real momentum. The ministerial communiqué matters. The conversations matter. But momentum is not transformation, and commitments are not yet systems. What Africa’s school leaders need — and what learners across the continent deserve — is sustained institutional investment: in leadership policy frameworks, in professional development ecosystems, in coaching and mentoring structures, in evidence systems, and in collaborative platforms capable of holding this agenda across borders, cycles, and changes in government.
Education reform is ultimately experienced in classrooms, schools, and communities. The quality of that experience depends heavily on the quality of leadership — not leadership as administration, but leadership that supports teachers, enables learning, advances inclusion, and builds the environments in which every child can thrive. Gaborone reminded us that more people across the continent understand this. Turning that understanding into sustained action is the work that remains.