Education in the Global South this century: Educational deficits, digital learning, and the future of human capital and polycrisis resilience.

This report argues that the central educational challenge in the Global South is no longer primarily access to schooling, but the failure of many school systems to convert enrollment into learning. While substantial gains have been made in school participation and completion over recent decades, learning outcomes have stagnated, with large shares of children unable to read or perform basic numeracy tasks despite years of schooling. The report distinguishes between an enrollment clock, which measures participation, and a learning clock, which measures proficiency, arguing that resilience to twenty-first century challenges depends overwhelmingly on the latter.Drawing on data from UNESCO, the World Bank, UNICEF, WHO, ITU, and major educational assessments, the report examines regional differences across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and other low- and middle-income regions. It highlights how learning deficits emerge long before formal schooling through nutrition, health, language, and early childhood conditions, and how teacher shortages, fiscal constraints, weak instructional quality, and poor alignment between education and labor market needs perpetuate a widening capability gap. The analysis argues that human capital should be measured not by years of schooling alone but by the skills those years actually produce. The report further evaluates the role of digital learning technologies, finding that devices and online platforms can amplify learning where foundational skills, qualified teachers, electricity, connectivity, and appropriate language support already exist, but rarely substitute for their absence. Evidence from randomized trials suggests that interventions targeted to a learner’s actual level, including adaptive instruction and structured tutoring, produce meaningful gains, while technology deployed without instructional design typically has limited impact. Finally, the report situates education within a broader polycrisis framework encompassing climate change, environmental degradation, infectious disease, infrastructure stress, and state-capacity challenges. It proposes three illustrative scenarios to 2100: an accelerated learning transition, a split-clock future in which progress remains geographically uneven, and a stalled-learning pathway. The central conclusion is that long-term resilience will depend less on expanding enrollment or deploying new technologies than on building foundational literacy, numeracy, technical skills, and the professional cadres capable of maintaining critical social and economic systems. The century’s most important educational race is whether learning gains can arrive before the growing burdens imposed by demographic, environmental, and institutional pressures.