CollinsAnyona/african-learning-poverty

Africa got children into school - did it get them through it? Enrollment vs completion gap analysis with gender parity trajectories and an honest ML-vs-baseline forecast comparison. # Into School, But Not Through It: Africa's Completion Gap An end-to-end data analysis of the distance between *getting children into school* and *getting them through it* in Sub-Saharan Africa — enrollment vs completion, gender parity, learning poverty, and an honest backtest of whether machine learning forecasts completion rates better than the two simplest baselines imaginable. Built on the World Bank Open Data API (UNESCO Institute for Statistics indicators), 1990–2024. **Why it matters:** the school-access battle in Sub-Saharan Africa has largely been won — gross primary enrollment is near-universal. But enrollment is a promise, not a result. The result is a child who finishes primary school able to read. This project measures how far the region still is from that result, where the distance is shrinking, and where "progress" in the enrollment statistics quietly stopped translating into completed educations. ## Headline findings **1. Enrollment surged; completion crawled — and the gap is *wider* than in 1990.** Sub-Saharan Africa's gross primary enrollment rose from 71% (1990) to 97% (2024), but primary completion went only from 53% to 69%. The region-level enrollment–completion gap grew from 18 to 28 percentage points. The world's gap is 14 pp, half of SSA's, and world completion (88%) is where SSA enrollment was two decades ago. **2. In the median SSA country, roughly a quarter of the enrollment boom never becomes a completed primary education.** Across the 42 countries with recent data (2015–2024), the median enrollment–completion gap is 24 pp. The largest gaps combine mass enrollment with mass repetition and dropout: Rwanda enrolls at 150% gross but completes at 67% (gap 83 pp), Madagascar 133% vs 61% (gap 72 pp), Malawi 139% vs 70% (gap 69 pp). Gross ratios above 100% are themselves a symptom — they count over-age repeaters, so part of each gap is children cycling through grades rather than leaving (see Limitations). **3. The gap is closing in mos …