Dr. Obiageli "Oby" Ezekwesili is Founder and President of Human Capital Africa, an accountability and advocacy organization devoted to Africa's foundational learning crisis — getting every child reading, writing and counting by age 10. An economic policy expert and chartered accountant by training, she was a co-founder of Transparency International and later served in the Nigerian government as Minister of Solid Minerals and then as Federal Minister of Education. She led the public procurement reform agenda that earned her the nickname "Madam Due Process."

She went on to serve as Vice President for the Africa Region at the World Bank, overseeing operations across 48 sub-Saharan countries. She co-founded the #BringBackOurGirls movement, ran for President of Nigeria in the 2019 elections, and founded the School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG), an unconventional school now operating in Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya, with Ghana opening this year, whose graduates are already running for and winning public office. She also advises Club de Madrid, the forum of former democratic heads of state and government democracies and economic development including on AI regulation and governance.

In this episode, Oby talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Human dignity as the through-line of a career spanning Transparency International, two ministries and the World Bank — and why she now calls education "a living thing"
• Africa's demographic pivot — average age 18.9 years, and 85% of global workforce growth by 2050 — and why it leads to either a dividend or a disaster
• Why she stopped "wasting her voice on incorrigible leaders" and built a school to manufacture better ones instead, refusing national accreditation to escape captured systems
• The foundational learning crisis as a matter of life and death — nine in ten children in sub-Saharan Africa unable to read a simple sentence by age 10, and why she refuses to call a spade an agricultural implement
• What actually causes it: no early-childhood preparation, teaching in languages children don't speak, curricular overload, untrained and uncoached teachers, and ministries with no learning data
• What works and has been proven at scale — structured pedagogy, teaching at the right level, teacher coaching, and the question she puts to presidents: "Mr President, what did our children learn today?"
• Sobral in Brazil and India's NIPUN Bharat — a 20% improvement in learning outcomes in four to five years — as evidence that political will, not technical solutions, is the binding constraint
• Why the mobile telephony leapfrog (Nigeria: 500,000 landlines in 50 years, 200 million mobile lines after liberalisation) is the right mental model for AI in Africa
• The agency divide, not the digital divide — a child can have the most advanced AI system and still lack the knowledge and capability to use it purposefully and critically
• Data sovereignty, AI sweatshops on the continent, and why AI must free teachers for individualised attention and values — never replace them

Her three game changers for Africa: young people, African women, and technology as their enabler.

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship