Whose Knowledge, Whose Agency? A Ghanaian Practitioner’s Response to Reconceptualising the Learning Crisis in Africa

In this blog post, which is part of NORRAG’s #TheSouthAlsoKnows blog series, Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem reviews the book Reconceptualising the Learning Crisis in Africa: Multi-dimensional Pedagogies of Accelerated Learning Programmes by Kwame Akyeampong and Sean Higgins and argues that the so-called learning crisis is not just about African children’s deficiencies but also about the failure of “education development” to recognize and build upon existing knowledge, agency, and pedagogical wisdom.

In my years working in education development across Ghana, I have repeatedly confronted three questions that the global education architecture seems to overlook – Whose knowledge counts when we design education systems? Whose agency shapes learning environments? And what approaches genuinely support inclusive learning rather than merely paying lip service to it?

For too long, these questions have lingered uncomfortably in practitioner spaces yet acknowledged in private conversations. Reconceptualising the Learning Crisis in Africa: Multi-dimensional Pedagogies of Accelerated Learning Programmes by Prof Kwame Akyeampong and Prof Sean Higgins confront them head-on. Their book does more than critique the prevailing “learning crisis” narrative, it also offers evidence-based alternatives grounded in what African children, teachers, and communities already know and do. 

This book feels like finding words for tensions I and many others carry in our practice. It validates what many of us working in the Global South already sense, that the so-called learning crisis is not just about African children’s deficiencies. It also is about the failure of systems to recognize and build upon existing knowledge, agency, and pedagogical wisdom.

Whose Knowledge Counts? 

I find the book’s attempt to challenge the ​problematic, yet ​persistent​,​ framing of African children’s knowledge as “deficient” (Valencia, 2010; Sriprakash et al., 2020) very powerful. It argues that instead of out-of-school children being perceived as empty vessels needing to be filled with knowledge, Complementary Basic Education (CBE) integrates children’s funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992; as applied by Akyeampong & Higgins, 2025) and the practical skills, awareness, and community wisdom they already possess.

This is not romanticizing poverty. It is recognising that also children from poor backgrounds come to learning with sophisticated knowledge about agriculture, kinship systems, seasonal patterns, and local economies. When education builds on rather than dismisses this knowledge, learning becomes meaningful, relevant, and effective. The longitudinal data presented in the book shows that CBE students who transition into mainstream schools often outperform their peers, not despite their backgrounds, but because their earlier learning honoured their starting points.

This raises a paradoxical question, that if locally grounded pedagogies have evidence of working well, why do they remain confined to “alternative” programmes? Why is a child from rural Northern Ghana still expected to relate to πr² before understanding the circular patterns in the calabashes made by their grandmother? Global education frameworks continue to privilege Northern epistemologies, treating local knowledge as supplementary at best, primitive at worst. 

Whose Agency Matters? 

The book’s treatment of teacher agency is equally provocative, challenging the pervasive characterization of African teachers as “underprepared,” “incompetent,” or “resistant to change”, labels that justify increasingly technocratic interventions like scripted lesson plans that strip teachers of professional judgment.

What strikes me is the evidence of how teachers exercise agency despite, not because of, system design. In the Ethiopian Speed Schools and Liberian Second Chance programmes documented in the book, facilitators adapt their methods using songs, oral storytelling, code-switching between languages, and materials from children’s immediate environments. These are not deviations from “proper” teaching, they are contextually intelligent responses to ​multilingual, resource-constrained classrooms. 

I have witnessed similar practices in my work with educators in low-fee private schools across Ghana. They innovate constantly, yet these pedagogical innovations are rarely documented, celebrated, or scaled because they do not fit the templates international consultants may bring to teacher training workshops. 

This contradiction exposes the subtle bias about how power operates in global education. When Northern teachers exercise professional judgment, it is called pedagogical freedom. When African teachers do the same, it is called lack of fidelity to the programme. The question whose agency matters? is ultimately a question about whose knowledge and judgment we trust. 

What Approaches to Learning do We Need? 

The chapters on Accelerated Learning Programmes (ALPs) across Ghana, Ethiopia, and Liberia offer compelling evidence about what works when education is designed with, rather than for communities, and in spite of this evidence that community-rooted approaches work, mainstream education systems continue to treat them as temporary fixes for “hard-to-reach” populations rather than as models that should fundamentally reshape how we think about education provision. 

Finding this book as a practitioner working within the very systems it critiques has been both affirming and discomforting. Affirming because it validates what many of us have long observed, that effective education in African contexts requires approaches that centre local knowledge, languages, and values. Discomforting because it forces me to confront the ways I may have, at times, reproduced the deficit assumptions I claim to reject. 

How many times have I used phrases like “capacity building” without questioning whose capacity is supposedly lacking? How often have I presented “global best practices” in workshops without adequate attention to how they might need fundamental adaptation or even rejection, in Ghanaian contexts? When have I privileged the voices of international experts over local educators whose daily practice contains sophisticated pedagogical knowledge? 

These questions matter because the book’s argument is not just directed at distant policymakers or international organizations. It challenges all of us working in education development to examine our own practices, assumptions, and complicity in systems that marginalize the very communities we aim to serve. 

The way forward requires more than adding African case studies to global reports or including community members in consultation meetings. Here needs to be a rethinking and reordering of whose knowledge shapes education policy and practice. 

An Unfinished Conversation 

Akyeampong and Higgins conclude their book with a call for Afrocentric policy responses and a renewed postcolonial agenda for Education for All. These are not abstract academic aspirations. They are urgent practical necessities if we are serious about the millions of children across sub-Saharan Africa who remain educationally marginalized not because they cannot learn, but because systems have failed to create conditions where their learning can flourish. 

The book has given me language for tensions I have carried throughout my practice. More importantly, it has strengthened my conviction that transformation is possible not because of some future breakthrough innovation, but because the knowledge, approaches, and values needed to transform African education already exist within African communities. Our task is not to import solutions but to recognize, resource, and scale what is already working when given space to thrive. 

Perhaps the learning crisis will truly be addressed when global education frameworks finally recognize that the South also knows and that what it knows might offer more transformative possibilities than decades of failed interventions from elsewhere. 

The Author 

Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem is a practitioner with over a decade of experience working in the education sector. She is currently Assistant Director, Programmes at The Education Collaborative at Ashesi University, where she supports collaboration and learning within the higher education ecosystem across Africa. She is also a co-founder of Think Education, an organisation that works with school leaders and educators in low-cost private schools to strengthen school leadership and education practice. Nana Ama holds an MA in Educational Planning, Economics, and International Development from the University College London as a Commonwealth Scholar. Her research interests include the political economy of education, decolonisation, and rethinking education policy, planning and practice through African epistemologies. Email: namponsem@ashesi.edu.gh