Reflections from the 2026 Yidan Prize Conference, Dakar, by Dr Fay Hodza, Global Senior Director of Programmes
Last week, in Dakar, a government minister made me rethink a word I thought I already understood: inclusion. For three days, I took part in the inaugural African edition of the Yidan Prize Conference in Senegal. It brought together ministers, researchers and practitioners to celebrate Mamadou Amadou Ly for winning the 2025 Yidan Prize for Education Development and explore how to unleash Africa’s potential through education. Across all these conversations, one thing became clear to me: the education budget should never be seen as a cost, but as an investment in securing our inclusive future.
I was particularly moved by the keynote address from Dr. David Moinina Sengeh, Chief Minister and Chief Innovation Officer of the Government of Sierra Leone, when he spoke about what he called “radical inclusion.” He grounded it in Sierra Leone’s decision to end its ban on pregnant girls attending school.
Radical inclusion is not a policy line in a strategy document, but something uncomfortable, costly, and deliberately chosen. We learnt that radical inclusion means identifying exclusion, listening, defining our role in addressing it, and then building the coalitions needed to deliver change. His speech was both inspiring and provocative, and it sent me straight back to our own work at Promoting Equality in African Schools (PEAS).
In our work, radical inclusion is not just a values statement. It is our decision to keep a pregnant teenager, a child with a disability, or a girl in a remote, hard-to-reach rural community inside the classroom when the system’s default is to let her drop out quietly. This echoes the charge from Dr. Laila Macharia, Vice President of Imaginable Futures, that inclusion will have lasting impact only if our programmes are designed for hard-to-reach populations from the outset. Inclusion must not be an afterthought. Our programmes must be inclusive by design.
With over 200 delegates sharing what works in African education, this was not an abstract gathering. The key conference question: How can Africa’s innovations in education fuel transformation across the continent and contribute to global well-being? is the exact question PEAS answers in practice by unleashing the potential of Africa’s children and youth through radical inclusion in secondary and primary education. Over the past 18 years, PEAS has embraced radical inclusion not as a slogan but as a set of deliberate operational choices: in how we design our schools and facilitate teaching and learning, who we enrol, and in how we listen.
Inclusion as design, not decoration. PEAS learned early that designing schools around safeguarding, water, sanitation and menstrual hygiene management makes them safer and more effective for everyone, including students with disabilities. A 2022 National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) study found that gender-sensitive teaching and wellbeing practices in PEAS-supported schools improved girls’ enrolment and attendance.
Enrolment is never based on grades or performance. PEAS enrols poorer students, more girls, more students with special educational needs and more students with weaker primary results than comparable schools, and they still progress faster. An independent three-year evaluation by Uganda’s Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC) found that PEAS schools take on more socio-economically disadvantaged students, and more students with weaker primary-leaving results, than any other school type. Yet in the most recent 2025 national examinations, 92% of PEAS students in Uganda achieved A–C grades in at least five subjects, and virtually all, 99.9% of the 3,300-plus who sat, passed, despite many starting further behind. The same pattern holds in Zambia, where PEAS schools have performed consistently above the national average every year since 2016, and across the network girls have outperformed boys by 11 percentage points, a reversal of the national trend, where boys often outperform girls. Girls make up 51% of PEAS students in Uganda and 55% in Zambia.
Listening as a strategy. Every year, PEAS collects anonymous feedback from its school communities (students, teachers and staff) across teaching and learning, child protection, welfare and skills development. These surveys let us test, refine and improve our interventions from the vantage point of the people closest to the classroom, before adapting them for government schools. We also look inward: a recent, externally facilitated Participatory Gender Audit revealed that male and female staff often view gender equity quite differently. Most female staff felt men hold greater societal advantages and that more must be done to reach equality, while many male staff saw fewer disparities. We treat this as radical inclusion because it turns the same scrutiny we apply to the communities we serve onto ourselves: inclusion must interrogate the organisation, not just the people it serves. It commits us to real-time, disaggregated data and honest conversations about where support is needed and why.
Where we must go further. Of the radical inclusion framework, the least comfortable step – and the most necessary – is what is called “adapting to the new normal”: building the workforce and systems capacity so inclusion outlasts the initial push and becomes simply how a system operates. This, to me, is where the real investment must go if radical inclusion is to stick for good.
Beyond this, disability data remains thinner than gender data. Boys at risk of disengagement remain a footnote when they also need support. The most isolated learners within our already disadvantaged population need to be named, funded and supported.
For our PEAS teams in Uganda, Zambia, and Ghana, two action points follow directly from Dakar: first, treat disability data collection with the same rigour as gender data within the next planning cycle; second, design a comprehensive, resourced response for disengaged boys rather than leaving it as commentary. To achieve these and more, we will continue to collaborate with funding partners, governments, parents, communities, students and other education implementers.
Radical inclusion is not a slogan we adopt. It is a choice we keep making, and the next test, for PEAS and for everyone involved in education transformation in Africa, is whether we audit our own blind spots as rigorously as we audit our impact.