A group of women have transformed a concrete storage room into a preschool somewhere in West Africa, where the closest tarred road is a forty-minute walk away. The walls are covered in hand-painted letters. A couple of plastic seats. A teacher has been unpaid for three months. And about twenty kids, sitting quietly, learning the shapes of words that they will carry with them forever. It is not the type of location that appears in donor reports. However, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has spent decades attempting to safeguard just such a place.
That work is more difficult now than it has ever been. Global education aid is expected to decline by $3.2 billion, or nearly 24% from 2023 levels, according to a September 2025 UNICEF analysis. The majority of these cuts are attributed to just three donor governments. With nearly two million children at risk of completely dropping out of school, West and Central Africa, which already have some of the highest out-of-school rates in the world, stand to lose the most. According to Brookings, UNESCO projects will reduce education funding by 25% before 2027. The figures are astounding and, to be honest, a little depressing.
However, the OMEP chapters in Africa have not become numb. If anything, their methods appear to have become more refined as a result of the funding crisis.
For many years, OMEP has worked throughout Africa, promoting early childhood care as a fundamental right rather than a favor from the government. What many already knew was made evident at their 76th World Assembly in 2024: pre-primary education has the largest financial disparity of any educational level. The Assembly declared that early childhood should receive at least 10% of national education budgets, a standard that the majority of African governments haven’t even approached.
According to a 2025 Human Rights Watch report, only roughly one-third of African nations had met internationally recognized benchmarks for education funding over the previous ten years; by 2022 and 2023, that percentage had fallen to just 25%. In ten years, fourteen nations failed to meet any of the benchmarks. Never once.
The African chapters of OMEP are unique not so much because of their limited resources as because of the way they function without waiting for approval. Observing their networks in action gives the impression that they realized long before the current crisis that outside funding would never be dependable enough to create anything long-lasting. Instead, they built on the trust of the community. on local educators who think their work is important. In these circles, the African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” is frequently cited. When you see what villages actually do when the international system ignores them, the phrase may seem like a platitude.
The extent to which African OMEP affiliates can close the current funding gap through organizational will alone is still unknown. It’s worthwhile to sit with that genuine uncertainty. The difficulties are structural rather than merely financial. There are still many nations without a national ECE policy worthy of the name. Pre-primary school fees continue to exist, making what ought to be universal access a privilege only available to wealthy families. Fifteen African countries are spending more on debt repayment than on education; as a result, teachers are not paid, classrooms lack supplies, and the children who most need those spaces are the first to go.
However, what the headline figures often overlook is what the African OMEP chapters stand for: the tenacious, unglamorous work of individuals who refuse to treat a child’s early years of education as a budget line item. They are urging governments to convert their audacious AU proclamations into real spending. They are clearly stating what is lacking and documenting it. Occasionally, they are simply painting letters on a wall and organizing a storage area.
It’s difficult not to find some clarification in that. These educators are doing what they have always done, which is to show up where no one else has bothered to look, while discussions about global financing architecture take place in conference rooms.
