In a recent article, I argued that Africa doesn&039;t have a reading problem. I got a few honest follow-up questions after that: if the problem isn't reading, and books do exist, why aren't there enough of them in children's hands? My answer is that we have a book ecosystem problem, shaped by financing, printing costs, and thin distribution rather than any lack of appetite among readers. That argument came from years inside a bookshop and a publishing house. This one extends the same logic to a much larger canvas.

The numbers back the wider claim up, the World Bank's "learning poverty" measure, the share of ten-year-olds who cannot read and understand a simple text, sits at roughly 87 percent across Sub-Saharan Africa, among the worst rates of any region on earth. That is not a reading crisis in the way we usually describe one. It is what happens when policy, financing, publishing, and classrooms fail to function as a single system.

During my time as a teaching and learning materials (TLM) market systems facilitator, I spent months mapping Rwanda's teaching and learning materials ecosystem, speaking with curriculum developers, schools, teachers, and government agencies. At first, I believed the exercise was about improving the textbook supply chain but by the end, I had learned something larger: a market system is not merely a framework for teaching and learning materials. It is a framework for building an entire learning economy.

Across the continent, education reforms tend to focus on individual interventions: classrooms, teacher training, curriculum revision, digitized content. Each investment matters, yet many fail to deliver lasting impact because they address only one part of a far larger system. Learning begins with policy and research long before it reaches a classroom, and culminates, well after, in employment so when one link weakens, the learner feels it.

A learning market is the network of relationships, incentives, and investments that allow knowledge to be created, distributed, and continuously improved: governments that set policy, institutions that create and finance content, teachers who transform it into understanding, and employers whose demand sustains it all, none can transform learning alone; the market succeeds only when they work in concert.

Rwanda's own experience shows why this coordination matters, the TLM mapping process showed that improving learning materials was never solely about producing more books; it required understanding incentives, procurement, financing, and collaboration between public and private

institutions. The African Union has pointed the same way: its Continental Education Strategy for Africa emphasizes partnerships and stronger education systems, whilst Agenda 2063 places knowledge and human capital at the heart of the continent's development. Education cannot remain the responsibility of ministries alone; it must become an ecosystem to which governments, businesses, universities, and communities contribute.

Regional bodies have already proven that integration is possible through trade, labor mobility, and harmonized standards, and this logic can extend to learning.

An East African learning market could let resources move across borders with minimal friction, publishers sell across member states, and qualifications be mutually recognized. Freer movement of educational content under the African Continental Free Trade Area would build a genuine continental learning economy rather than a patchwork of fragmented national markets.

A handful of actions could accelerate this shift: national observatories tracking knowledge flow to the learner; blended financing for education enterprises alongside public systems; fewer barriers to cross-border content; and indicators that measure the market itself, not only the school.

The African Union estimates that more than 400 million people on the continent are aged between 15 and 35, a figure projected to nearly double by 2050. That is either the greatest advantage of this century or the greatest missed opportunity, and the difference comes down to something less dramatic than it sounds: how efficiently ideas move from researchers to publishers, from publishers to teachers, and from teachers to learners. If Africa succeeds in building learning markets rather than isolated education projects, we will build a continent capable of producing, sharing, and exporting knowledge to the world.

The writer is an author, publisher and market systems expert.