Introduction
The Continental Education Strategy for Africa 2026 to 2035 (CESA 26-35) is the African Union’s most recent attempt to articulate a shared, long-term vision for education across the continent (AU, 2025). Framed as a “Framework for Action”, it positions education as central to Africa’s social, economic and cultural renewal. It situates itself within the Pan-African narrative of Agenda 2063 (AU, 2015) and its aspiration for an Africa “led by its own citizens and occupying the place it deserves in the global community and in the knowledge economy” (AU, 2025, p. 30). In doing so it appears to respond to long-standing critiques that African education systems have remained epistemically dependent on Western models inherited from colonial rule (Mamdani, 2019; Rodney, 1972).
This article argues that CESA 26-35 reproduces a familiar paradox evident in its predecessor (AU, 2016) and in earlier continental agendas (Tikly, 2019a). While it gestures towards African values, history and languages, it remains anchored in policy assumptions, governance mechanisms and epistemic hierarchies that privilege Western ways of knowing. Rather than marking a break with the colonial legacy, CESA 26-35 reworks that legacy within contemporary global education regimes shaped by human capital theory, skills-for-growth discourses and internationally sanctioned measures of quality (Robertson et al., 2007; Verger et al., 2018). The central claim is that these limitations are not simply matters of policy incoherence or weak implementation. They reflect the conditions under which the strategy was produced, the African Union’s position as a regional mediator of global education policy, and the coloniality of knowledge that structures the field within which both operate (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Quijano, 2007; Tikly, 2019b, 2026).
The analysis that follows interprets CESA 26-35 as a policy discourse rather than as a set of neutral technical recommendations. It attends to four dimensions of the text, namely, how the purposes and value of education are framed and justified; which forms of knowledge and curricular domains are prioritised; how language is positioned; and how evidence, monitoring and accountability are constructed. These dimensions were chosen because they are the principal mechanisms through which, as decolonial scholarship has shown, epistemic hierarchies are institutionalised in education systems (de Sousa Santos, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). The reading is supported throughout with page-referenced evidence from the strategy. It is complemented by an account of how the strategy was produced, drawing on the document’s own description of its authorship, consultation and funding. This is an essay rather than a full discourse-analytic study. Its aim is to stimulate debate about the epistemic settlement that CESA 26-35 embodies.
The article is framed by a decolonial understanding of epistemic injustice as a historically produced and structurally sustained feature of education systems in Africa. Epistemic injustice concerns not only whose knowledge is recognised as valid, but also whose ways of knowing, languages and interpretive frameworks are authorised within the institutions that shape learning, assessment and credentialing (de Sousa Santos, 2017; Fricker, 2007). In African contexts, such injustice is inseparable from the coloniality of knowledge, the enduring pattern by which Western epistemologies were universalised while African knowledge systems were marginalised, instrumentalised or rendered invisible (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Quijano, 2007). Colonialism did not merely impose foreign institutions. It reordered the epistemic foundations of education itself, privileging Eurocentric curricula, disciplinary canons and languages of instruction while devaluing Indigenous knowledge, oral traditions and locally embedded ways of knowing (Mamdani, 2019; Rodney, 1972). These hierarchies have proved resilient, persisting through post-independence reforms and becoming embedded within global education policy regimes that define quality, relevance and success in ostensibly universal terms (Tikly, 2017).
Following Fraser’s (2008) understanding of justice as redistribution, recognition and participation, epistemic injustice intersects with broader struggles over economic resources, cultural status and political voice. If justice concerns the conditions under which people can participate as peers in social life, then questions of knowledge and authority are central to educational arrangements. Epistemic injustice is not reducible to curriculum content. It is reproduced systemically through the alignment of curriculum, assessment, language policy, teacher education, governance and financing. Education systems function as epistemic systems. They distribute access to powerful knowledge, regulate whose voices count as authoritative, and shape learners’ capacity to participate as epistemic subjects (Milligan et al., 2025; Tikly, 2024). Policy frameworks such as CESA 26-35 must therefore be analysed not only for what they say but for the systemic logics they reproduce, and for the political conditions that make those logics appear natural.
Producing CESA 26-35 and the African Union as an Epistemic Actor
Critiques of global education policy have focused on multilateral organisations, principally the World Bank, UNESCO and the OECD, whose knowledge tools have shaped national education policy since the Second World War (Ball, 2012; Verger et al., 2018). Regional bodies such as the African Union occupy a different position. They lack the financial leverage and global standard-setting authority of those organisations and operate in a field already structured by them. As I have argued elsewhere, the African Union is best understood as a regional mediator of global education policy. It is a site where continental political and technocratic elites negotiate with, adapt and lend regional legitimacy to agendas whose parameters are set elsewhere (Tikly, 2026). The pattern is not new. An earlier analysis of the “new regionalism” in African education examined the African Union, NEPAD and a range of continental initiatives. It found that all were substantially donor-supported and that regional frameworks remained dominated by global agendas and elite interests. It also suggested that donor enthusiasm for the regional level could function as a more subtle form of influence over national policy (Robertson et al., 2007; Tikly & Dachi, 2009). This makes the question of who produced CESA 26-35, under what conditions and with what resources, central to any account of the epistemic settlement it embodies.
The strategy is unusually candid on this point. It records that the document “was drafted and revised based on feedback from consultations by Quentin Wodon (UNESCO IICBA)” (AU, 2025, p. 53), an economist who spent much of his career at the World Bank. The Commissioner’s foreword thanks UNESCO’s International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa for its “pivotal role in the development of this strategy” (AU, 2025, pp. 53, 3). The acknowledgements express “special thanks” to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Union and the Government of Japan “for contributing, directly or indirectly, to the analysis and consultations” (AU, 2025, p. 7). They list written comments from, among others, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Flemish Interuniversity Council, Plan International, World Vision, UNICEF, multiple UNESCO divisions, the Education Outcome Fund and the mEducation Alliance (AU, 2025, p. 7). The methodology section explains that the drafting team weighed two models of what a strategy should be. One was the approach “now used by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) in supporting countries based on a compact with priorities for support” (AU, 2025, p. 20). The other was “the approach used by the World Bank for its Western and Central Africa Education Strategy” (AU, 2025, p. 20). The literature it draws on is described as “the academic literature and the grey literature emerging among others from international organizations (e.g., UNESCO, UNICEF, ILO, World Bank, AfDB, and others)” (AU, 2025, p. 21). The guidance attached to each objective is drawn overwhelmingly from those sources. The conclusion states that the strategy “will be useful to the extent that its guidance helps inform domestic policy in Member States, including through Education Sector Planning and Compact Development” (AU, 2025, p. 52). Compact development is the instrument through which GPE structures its financing.
The conditions of production reinforced the epistemic framing. The entire process, from the launch of the review of CESA 16-25 to the submission of the new strategy, spanned May to September 2024. It took place within the African Union’s Year of Education and to a timetable set by the November 2024 meeting of the Specialised Technical Committee and the February 2025 Summit (AU, 2025, pp. 11, 21). A strategy drafted in four months by a single external author to meet a political calendar was unlikely to engage meaningfully with the epistemic foundations of education. Implementation is delegated in the same way. The strategy is to be carried out not by the Commission, whose staff and resources it describes as limited, but through thematic “clusters” that “federate AU education partners by areas of focus and expertise” (AU, 2025, p. 15). Fewer than half of these clusters were operational at the time of writing, and their effectiveness is constrained by their capacity to mobilise resources (AU, 2025, pp. 15, 28, 43). Cluster leadership, therefore, in practice, passes to the agencies able to fund them. These include UN bodies and international NGOs alongside African professional associations. Monitoring, finally, rests on a joint mechanism established by the AU’s Pan-African Institute for Education for Development and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, whose first products were reports aligning the CESA framework with SDG 4 (AU, 2025, p. 43). At each stage, in authorship, implementation and measurement, the continental strategy is realised through the institutions of the global regime.
None of this is hidden, and none of it is presented as problematic. That is the point. The strategy also documents extensive consultation, with over 2,500 participants at hybrid events and over 1,700 survey responses. Its task force included representatives of Regional Economic Communities, Member States and African organisations such as the African Curriculum Association and the Association of African Universities (AU, 2025, pp. 6, 11). African intellectuals, officials and civil society actors contributed to producing the text. The Specialised Technical Committee that endorsed it called for “an emphasis on the value of African expertise” (AU, 2025, p. 32). In this sense, the strategy is African-owned. But African ownership of a document is not the same as African authorship of the epistemic frame within which the document was written. The frame was supplied by the drafter’s institutional location, by the models of good strategy against which the document was benchmarked, by the evidence base that counted as legitimate, and by the donors whose support underwrote the process. Within that frame, African participants could shape priorities and emphases, and did. They could not shape the terms on which education’s value would be justified or its success measured.
This is what the coloniality of knowledge means in practice. It is not that “Western” knowledge is imposed on unwilling Africans by outsiders, nor is it about the geographical provenance of ideas. Coloniality is a structural condition. Particular epistemic forms, those associated with human capital economics, the science of learning and internationally comparable metrics, have been universalised to the point that they appear to be the only serious way to talk about education. African institutions and intellectuals reproduce them as a condition of being taken seriously (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Quijano, 2007). From a neo-Gramscian perspective, CESA 26-35 is the product of a hegemonic settlement. On one side stands a transnational education policy bloc comprising multilateral agencies, bilateral donors and philanthropic foundations. On the other side stand the continental and national elites who staff the African Union and its Member State ministries (Tikly, 2026). The settlement is consensual rather than coercive, which is why it is durable.
It is also not monolithic. I have argued elsewhere that the African Union mediates the global regime from a position of aid dependence while projecting its own developmental agenda into it. CESA 26-35 straddles two of the knowledge projects now competing to shape education governance beyond 2030 (Tikly, 2026). One is the technocratic optimisation of foundational learning through metrics and cost-effective interventions. The other is a state-capitalist developmental coordination that aligns skills, STEM and research capacity with the industrial ambitions of Agenda 2063. The strategy’s emphasis on talent retention, technical and vocational education, and research for competitiveness falls under the second project. Its investment case, guidance, and indicators fall under the first. What the two share, and what makes their combination stable, is that neither treats the epistemic foundations of education as a question.
The African Union’s structural weakness reinforces the settlement. The Union’s institutional reform process, launched in 2016, diagnosed a chronic dependence on external partners for the programme budget that funds departments such as Education, Science, Technology and Innovation. It also found a fragmented and under-resourced Commission and weak implementation of Assembly decisions (Kagame, 2017). A decade later, member states financed less than a quarter of the Union’s programme budget. The Commission reported that the great majority of Assembly decisions over the preceding three years had not been implemented (Bakwesegha, 2025). The strategy itself acknowledges that the Union “does not manage large education systems or programs” and “has limited staff and financial resources” (AU, 2025, p. 43). It concedes that its previous strategy suffered from operational plans that “were not drafted or completed” and from monitoring that was “weak” (AU, 2025, pp. 45, 51), and that its guidance must therefore be “indicative” rather than “prescriptive” (AU, 2025, p. 33). An organisation in this position, dependent on external technical and financial support to produce its flagship strategy, has limited capacity to author an alternative epistemic project, even where the will to do so exists.
Decolonial Gestures in CESA 26-35
Against this background, the strategy’s engagement with African epistemologies is thinner than its Pan-African framing suggests. The foreword invokes the “Africa We Want” (AU, 2025, p. 3). The strategy inherits from Agenda 2063 the aspiration that “African cultures and values are explicit and promoted” (AU, 2025, p. 18). It retains the mission statement of CESA 16-25, which speaks of “reorienting Africa’s education and training systems to meet the knowledge, competencies, skills, innovation and creativity required to nurture African core values” (AU, 2025, p. 30). It notes that the earlier strategy “emphasized curricula rooted in African culture and values” in the context of adult literacy (AU, 2025, p. 41). The single most substantive gesture appears under the curriculum objective. That objective states that challenges “such as climate change and AI require adaptations to make curricula more endogenous, including for values (e.g., through Ubuntu and other relevant approaches) and history (e.g., with reference to resources from the General History of Africa)” (AU, 2025, p. 35). The General History is described as “a long-standing project aiming to reconstruct Africa’s history from an African perspective” (AU, 2025, p. 35).
Language policy offers a further, limited opening. The strategy states that “ensuring when feasible that young children are taught in their native language is also a priority” (AU, 2025, p. 35). It lists “teaching in the child’s own language in the early grades” among “promising interventions”, notes the association between home-language instruction and learning, and observes that adult literacy programmes “in the native language of learners tend to work better” (AU, 2025, pp. 35, 38, 41). These commitments align with a substantial body of research demonstrating the epistemic and pedagogical benefits of sustained multilingual education (Clegg & Simpson, 2016; Heugh, 2005, 2006; Milligan & Tikly, 2016; Rubagumya, 2007; Trudell, 2016). They also resonate with broader struggles for linguistic justice as part of epistemic justice (Barrett et al., 2025). The governance principles of “country ownership, leadership, and subsidiarity” (AU, 2025, p. 45), and the recognition that Member States have “diverse development trajectories and therefore diverse needs” (AU, 2025, p. 30), also create discursive space for contextually grounded reform.
It is equally important to record what the strategy does not say. Across its sixty-eight pages, the terms “Indigenous knowledge”, “African knowledge systems”, “African epistemologies” and “decolonisation” do not appear. The humanities and social sciences are not named as fields of investment. African languages are mentioned only in relation to the early grades and adult literacy. They are never mentioned as media of instruction at secondary or tertiary level, or as languages of assessment and scholarship. The mission’s reference to “African core values” is carried over from the earlier strategy rather than developed. The reference to Ubuntu appears parenthetically, as an example of how curricula might adapt to climate change and artificial intelligence, rather than as an epistemic foundation in its own right. The contrast with the framework the strategy claims to implement is telling. Agenda 2063 sets a target that “at least 80 per cent of content in educational curriculum is on indigenous African culture, values and language targeting primary and secondary schools by 2030” (AU, 2015, p. 154). That target did not appear among the strategic objectives of CESA 16-25, which was silent on Indigenous knowledge and on language beyond the early years (Tikly, 2019a). It does not appear in CESA 26-35 either, whose curriculum objective concerns foundational, socio-emotional and labour market skills. The decolonial gestures in CESA 26-35 are therefore real but residual. They are inherited from Agenda 2063 and CESA 16-25, confined to a handful of sentences, weaker than the continental vision’s own stated commitments, and unconnected to the objectives, guidance and indicators that give the strategy its operational content.
Reproducing Colonial Epistemic Dominance
The strategy’s core architecture reproduces colonial epistemic dominance through four interlocking logics, each evident in the text.
First, CESA 26-35 is grounded in an instrumentalist conception of the value of education. Part I, the “investment case”, opens with the assertion that “investing in education is one of the best investments countries can make” (AU, 2025, p. 22). It grounds this in the claim that “human capital wealth, which is based on earnings and is driven in large part by education, accounts for about two thirds of the changing wealth of nations” (AU, 2025, p. 22). It reports the World Bank’s Human Capital Index, which indicates that African children “may reach in adulthood on average only 42 percent of the earnings they could aspire to” (AU, 2025, p. 23). It presents estimates of “labor market returns to education” and calculates a “cost of inaction” for the continent as a share of GDP (AU, 2025, pp. 23–24). Education’s contribution to peace, rights and sustainable development is acknowledged (AU, 2025, p. 22), and the strategy notes that “the purpose of education goes well beyond preparing students for the labor market” (AU, 2025, p. 39). Yet the justificatory weight rests on economic return. The vocabulary of “inclusive growth”, “social cohesion”, “innovation” and “sustainable development” that the strategy shares with SDG 4 and the Transforming Education Summit is the vocabulary of global policy regimes. It is deployed here without any attempt to specify what these terms might mean in African epistemic traditions (Robertson et al., 2007; Verger et al., 2018). The same is true of “learning poverty”, a World Bank construct that entered African Union discourse through the 2024 Year of Education and the continental conferences that accompanied it (AU, 2025, p. 29), and that now frames the strategy’s curriculum objective. Within this frame, knowledge is valued primarily for its productivity. Epistemologies concerned with ethics, history, cosmology, relationality and ecological stewardship, domains in which African knowledge systems are rich, fall outside the calculus of value.
Second, instrumentalism is reinforced through curricular and disciplinary hierarchies. The strategy’s framework for action places “foundational, socio-emotional, and 21st century and labor market skills” at the centre of basic education (AU, 2025, p. 30). Its curriculum objective calls for upgrading curricula to “improve foundational skills to fight learning poverty” (AU, 2025, p. 35), to “strengthen labor market and 21st century skills” (AU, 2025, p. 35) and to develop “skills related to STEAM”. It recommends guidance from “a World Bank report” that “emphasizes cost-effective approaches, including among others structured pedagogy and teaching at the right level” (AU, 2025, p. 35). The objective on labour market skills asserts that “there is a clear wage premium for STEAM education” (AU, 2025, p. 39). The objective on research holds that “research and innovation are key for competitiveness and productivity, and thereby for economic growth” (AU, 2025, p. 40). None of these fields is inherently incompatible with epistemic justice. But their elevation is not accompanied by any parallel strategy to re-centre African intellectual traditions, Indigenous knowledge or the humanities as epistemic foundations of education. The curriculum objective’s ambition to “harmonize curriculum development at the regional or continental level, for example for foundational education standards related to literacy and numeracy” (AU, 2025, p. 35) points towards standardisation. Decolonial scholarship has identified standardisation of exactly this kind as a vehicle for the entrenchment of Western disciplinary canons (de Sousa Santos, 2017; Odora Hoppers & Richards, 2012; Tikly, 2019b).
Third, language policy constitutes a critical site of epistemic reproduction. The strategy’s commitment to home language instruction is qualified (“when feasible”), confined to the early grades and framed as an intervention to improve measured learning rather than as a matter of epistemic right (AU, 2025, p. 35). It says nothing about the languages of secondary and higher education, of examinations and certification, or of research. By default, European languages continue to function as the languages of epistemic authority and upward mobility. This reproduces long-standing linguistic hierarchies in which access to powerful knowledge is mediated through colonial languages. Such hierarchies reinforce elite advantage and exclude large sections of the population from full epistemic participation (Barrett et al., 2025; Brock-Utne, 2000; Milligan et al., 2025; wa Thiong’o, 1986). In decolonial terms, these arrangements perpetuate linguistic injustice as a central mechanism of epistemic domination.
Fourth, the strategy reproduces colonial epistemic dominance through its evidence and monitoring regimes. It defines itself as “evidence-based” and criticises its predecessor for failing to “provide a discussion of the empirical evidence for its recommendations” (AU, 2025, p. 20). The evidence it recognises is that produced by international organisations and by the “what works” literature of impact evaluation. The databases it recommends for tracking research include the 3ie Development Evidence Portal and commercial bibliometric indices (AU, 2025, pp. 21, 50). Its monitoring framework is to focus “on indicators already available under SDG4 monitoring” (AU, 2025, p. 48). Its mid-term review is timed to coincide with “the new framework that would be adopted post-SDGs” (AU, 2025, p. 48). The African Union is enjoined to “pursue its active participation in the SDG4 HLSC, including by ensuring that the HLSC Decisions are implemented at the continental, regional, and country levels” (AU, 2025, pp. 48, 51). “What gets measured gets done, the adage goes”, the strategy observes (AU, 2025, p. 43). The consequence is that the only objectives for which progress can be demonstrated are those that global indicator regimes already measure. The strategy itself concedes that “available data are limited to measure progress in upgrading curricula” (AU, 2025, p. 48). Ways of knowing that are relational, contextual or orally transmitted are not merely unmeasured but unmeasurable within such a regime, and therefore epistemically invisible (de Sousa Santos, 2017; Merry, 2016; Unterhalter, 2019).
Taken together, these logics show that the limitations of CESA 26-35 are not matters of omission that a further round of drafting could correct. They reflect the coloniality of knowledge, the structural privileging of Western epistemic forms within institutions that are formally postcolonial and, in this case, formally Pan-African (Quijano, 2007). The strategy does not break with the colonial legacy of African education. It rearticulates that legacy within the contemporary architecture of global education governance, and it does so with the participation and consent of African actors.
Why Reformist Adjustments Are Insufficient
It follows that the epistemic limitations of CESA 26-35 cannot be resolved by incremental adjustment. Much of the strategy’s engagement with epistemic questions is confined to inherited rhetoric and isolated curricular references. This reflects an assumption that such questions can be addressed within existing institutional and governance arrangements. From a decolonial perspective this assumption is mistaken for three reasons.
Reformist approaches frame epistemic injustice as a technical deficit rather than a political and historical condition. Adding references to Ubuntu or the General History of Africa, or expanding home-language instruction in the early years, does little to disrupt the structures that produce and legitimise epistemic authority. As long as curriculum hierarchies, assessment regimes and certification systems privilege Western epistemologies and colonial languages, such measures function as symbolic inclusion rather than substantive transformation (Tikly, 2019b).
Policy-led decolonisation also underestimates how deeply education systems are embedded in political-economic relations that benefit from existing arrangements. Postcolonial elites, international organisations, private providers and philanthropic actors have a stake in the status quo. European languages retain their value as currencies of mobility. Globally recognised credentials remain gateways to elite opportunity. International benchmarks continue to determine legitimacy and access to finance. The strategy’s own account of its production shows how thoroughly the African Union is tied into these relations. In this context, limited reforms are readily absorbed without altering the underlying logic of epistemic hierarchy. Reliance on performance indicators and system management tools depoliticises questions of knowledge by recasting them as matters of efficiency and quality assurance. Epistemic justice cannot be delivered technocratically. It requires contestation, democratic participation and shifts in epistemic power across multiple scales (Aboderin et al., 2023; Bristol University Decolonial Collective, 2025; Gebremariam et al., 2023; Tikly, 2024).
Finally, reformist approaches neglect the systemic interdependencies through which epistemic injustice is reproduced. Curriculum reform without corresponding change in teacher education, assessment, language policy and governance is unlikely to succeed. Promoting African epistemologies without transforming institutional incentives and accountability regimes places the burden of change on individual educators rather than on systems (Tikly, 2024).
Towards a Systemic Approach to Epistemic Justice in African Education
If epistemic injustice is systemic, responses must be systemic too. But an objection must be addressed before the argument proceeds. The problem with CESA 26-35, on the reading above, is that it imposes a narrow, generic prescription on a continent of fifty-four states, more than a dozen colonial legacies, and between 1,500 and 3,000 languages. A decolonial alternative that proposed its own continental blueprint would reproduce the fault it diagnoses. There is no single African way of knowing to be installed in place of the Western one, and the strategy’s own recognition of the diversity of Member States (AU, 2025, p. 30) is a point in its favour. The systemic approach outlined here is therefore not a substitute prescription. It is a set of conditions under which epistemic plurality can be realised. These conditions shift where authority over knowledge sits, align the various parts of the education system, and leave the substantive content of curricula and language policy to be worked out through contestation at national, sub-national and community levels. On this view, the appropriate role of a continental strategy is to enable and protect plural experimentation, not to harmonise it. The appropriate measure of the African Union’s success is whether it widens the space within which its Member States can depart from global templates, rather than whether it aligns them more closely with SDG 4.
With this caveat, six dimensions of transformation can be identified. Curriculum reform must be reoriented from additive inclusion towards epistemic re-centring. This involves more than inserting African content into existing syllabi. It requires questioning the disciplinary hierarchies and canons that define what counts as powerful knowledge (Odora Hoppers & Richards, 2012). A systemic approach would recognise African epistemologies, histories and intellectual traditions as foundational to curriculum design across subjects and levels. It would revalue the humanities, social sciences and Indigenous knowledge alongside science and technology, particularly in relation to ethical reasoning, social cohesion and environmental stewardship (Asabere-Ameyaw et al., 2012; Tikly, 2019b).
Language policy must be treated as a core epistemic issue rather than a pedagogical intervention. Sustained multilingual education, including the use of African languages as media of instruction beyond the early years and in assessment, is central to enabling learners to access, produce and contest knowledge on equitable terms. This requires alignment between language policy, curriculum, assessment and teacher education. It also requires a willingness to confront the political economy of language in which colonial languages function as gateways to elite status (Milligan & Tikly, 2016). What that means in Tanzania, Senegal, Ethiopia or South Africa will differ, and this should be expected.
Teacher education and professional development are pivotal. Teachers must be positioned not as implementers of “structured pedagogy” but as epistemic agents who mediate between knowledge systems and foster critical, dialogic pedagogies. This requires reforms to initial teacher education, continuing professional learning, and institutional cultures that value teachers’ epistemic judgement and local knowledge, rather than constraining practice through narrow accountability regimes (Milligan et al., 2025; Tikly et al., 2022).
Assessment and certification regimes must be rethought. High-stakes examinations function as filters that privilege particular linguistic and epistemic forms. A systemic approach would develop complementary forms of assessment that recognise diverse ways of knowing, including project-based, community-engaged and formative approaches, while maintaining credibility (Chilisa & Mertens, 2021; Godsell et al., 2024; Sayed & Kanjee, 2013). Without change in assessment, curricular and pedagogical reforms will not be sustained.
Governance and participation are central. Following Fraser (2008), epistemic justice requires parity of participation in defining educational purposes and knowledge priorities. This implies democratic engagement of educators, learners, communities and knowledge holders in curriculum and language policy. It implies reforms to continental, national and institutional governance structures that currently privilege technocratic expertise and externally validated evidence. It also implies a different relationship between the African Union and its funders and technical partners, in which the terms of a continental strategy are set before, not after, the question of who will pay for and draft it. Recognition of African knowledge without redistribution of agenda-setting power leaves the core of the regime intact (Fraser, 2008; Tikly, 2026). This does not mean abandoning measurement, which remains indispensable to claims about educational inequality. It means intervening in indicator design and data governance so that linguistic diversity, community knowledge, and democratic participation count among what is measured, rather than accepting a monitoring framework in which only what SDG 4 already counts can register as progress.
Finally, systemic epistemic justice cannot be detached from wider political-economic transformation. Education systems are embedded in social relations shaped by inequality, elite interests and global power asymmetries. Advancing epistemic justice depends on alliances between policy actors, educators, researchers and social movements, and on linking education reform to broader struggles over language, culture, democracy and development. Continental frameworks such as CESA could play a role in enabling such alliances, but only if reoriented from managerial coordination towards supporting structural and epistemic transformation (Tikly, 2019a, 2019b).
Conclusion
This article has argued that CESA 26-35 embodies a familiar paradox. It articulates Pan-African aspirations and inherits gestures towards African values, history and languages. Yet it remains constrained by epistemic architectures inherited from colonialism and reworked through contemporary global education governance. Its human capital investment case, its skills-centred curriculum priorities, its confinement of African languages to the early grades and its alignment with SDG 4 indicator regimes together reproduce Western epistemic dominance. They do so in a document drafted with the technical and financial support of the very organisations whose knowledge tools decolonial scholarship has criticised. The limits of the strategy are not a failure of will or design. They express the African Union’s position as a regional mediator within a hegemonic settlement it has limited capacity to challenge, and the coloniality of knowledge through which that settlement is naturalised. CESA 26-35 is therefore best understood not as a solution to epistemic injustice but as a contested terrain on which struggles over knowledge, language and educational purpose continue.
The struggles on which a systemic approach could build do not begin from nothing. The 1982 Harare conference of African ministers on education and endogenous development articulated, under UNESCO’s own auspices, a vision of education rooted in African societies (UNESCO, 1982). The subsequent decades of structural adjustment and Education for All largely displaced that vision. The tradition of critical African social science sustained by CODESRIA has kept alive an intellectual project of epistemic autonomy across the continent (Gebremariam et al., 2023). Language policy experiments in Tanzania and Ethiopia, and the advocacy of ADEA and African linguists for additive multilingual models, have demonstrated both the possibility and the political difficulty of extending African languages beyond the early grades (Brock-Utne, 2000; Heugh, 2006; Rubagumya, 2007). The Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements placed the decolonisation of curricula and institutions at the centre of public debate in South Africa and beyond. They generated a body of scholarship that curricular re-centring can draw on (Godsell et al., 2024; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). The Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations has begun to change the terms on which research partnerships between African and Northern institutions are negotiated. It has been endorsed by African higher education associations that are themselves named as continental partners in CESA 26-35 (Aboderin et al., 2023). The regional level has long held the potential for what Mittelman called transformative regionalism, a regionalism from below driven by civil society and grassroots movements rather than by states and donors (Mittelman, 2000; Tikly & Dachi, 2009). Within the strategy’s own consultation, the Specialised Technical Committee’s insistence on “the value of African expertise” (AU, 2025, p. 32) signals an unease that a more ambitious continental agenda could mobilise.
Whether CESA 26-35 becomes another iteration of symbolic reform or a platform for more substantive change will depend less on its textual commitments than on what unfolds around it. It will depend on the extent to which educators, researchers, communities and social movements can contest and reshape the epistemic foundations of education systems across the continent. It will also depend on whether the African Union can be pressed to use its convening authority to protect that contestation rather than to harmonise it away. The struggle for epistemic justice in African education is inseparable from wider struggles over democracy, development and decolonisation. It is also inseparable from the struggle over who writes Africa’s education strategies, on whose terms and with whose money.
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Recommended Citation
Tikly, L. (2026). The continental education strategy for Africa 2026 to 2035: A decolonial critique. On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 9(24).
https://doi.org/10.17899/on_ed.2026.24.6
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