The continental education strategy for Africa 2026 to 2035:A decolonial critique

This article offers a decolonial critique of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa 2026 to 2035 (CESA 26-35), adopted by the African Union in 2025. It reads the strategy as a policy discourse and situates the African Union as a regional actor embedded in the wider architecture of global education governance. On this reading, CESA 26-35 reproduces colonial epistemic hierarchies even as it presents itself as an African-led framework aligned with Agenda 2063. The strategy is anchored in a human capital approach. It privileges foundational, STEAM and labour market skills, confines African languages to the early grades and ties its monitoring to the indicators of Sustainable Development Goal 4. African epistemologies and intellectual traditions are almost entirely absent from its text. The article argues that these limitations are systemic rather than rhetorical. They arise from the conditions under which the strategy was produced and from Africa’s position within global epistemic and political-economic orders, and they cannot be resolved by policy adjustment alone. The article advances a systemic approach to epistemic justice, understood as a set of conditions for epistemic plurality rather than a substitute set of policy prescriptions, and identifies the existing struggles on which such an approach could build.