Educational Innovation and Inclusion in Constrained Contexts in Africa

In many African contexts, constraint is not the exception: it is the ordinary condition of educational practice. Overcrowded classes, teacher and textbook shortages, poor connectivity, insecurity, climate shocks, and forced displacement, as in the Lake Chad Basin, weigh on schools and training institutions.

Yet it is often at these margins that fruitful responses emerge: large-class pedagogy, peer tutoring, radio and mobile learning, community schools, instruction in national languages, and accommodations for learners with disabilities. These ‘ordinary’ (Alter, 2000) or frugal (Radjou et al., 2012) innovations remain poorly documented, rarely evaluated, and difficult to scale up.

Innovation, however, does not in itself amount to inclusion. An intervention that presupposes connectivity, equipment, or a language beyond the reach of some learners may widen the very gaps it seeks to close; transferred without regard to context, ‘good practices’ seldom deliver on their promise (Schweisfurth, 2011). Conversely, inclusion, understood as ‘all means all’ (UNESCO, 2020), remains mere rhetoric without realistic, sustainable arrangements grounded in local realities.

Hence the central question: under what conditions does innovation, whether born of constraint or confronted with it, become a lever for inclusion rather than a new source of exclusion? Who innovates, for whom, and with what effects? Without making a virtue of scarcity or a panacea of technology, the study day seeks to document and debate these innovations in order to produce situated knowledge that can inform both practice and policy.