Climate change is becoming the newest disruptor of African classrooms
By Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi
I talk a lot, in this column, about what’s interrupting children’s learning. Most of that conversation including AI shortcuts, exam culture, underfunded classrooms, assumes the child at least has a school to walk into. The newest UNICEF Children’s Climate Risk Report upends that assumption.
In 2024 alone, at least 242 million students across 85 countries had their schooling disrupted by climate-related hazards, storms tearing roofs off classrooms, heatwaves forcing closures, floods making the route to school impassable. Education, it turns out, has a climate problem long before it has an AI problem.
A second front nobody budgeted for
The report describes this plainly: storms destroy schools, and heatwaves disrupt learning directly, “robbing children of their future.” A heatwave doesn’t just make a classroom uncomfortable; sustained heat exposure has been linked to lower concentration, reduced academic performance and rising anxiety among students, particularly the youngest. A flood doesn’t just close a school for a day; it can destroy the textbooks, generators and water systems that took years to install.
For school systems already operating with thin margins, overcrowded classrooms, underpaid teachers, exam boards stretched thin, this is a second front nobody budgeted for. We’ve spent years debating how to modernize curricula and bring technology into classrooms responsibly.
Increasingly, the more urgent question may be whether the classroom itself will still be standing, dry, and within walking distance.
The report’s country-level data makes a case I think deserves more attention than it gets: the countries facing the highest exposure to compounding climate hazards are disproportionately the same countries already carrying the heaviest education burdens. Nigeria, for instance, scores 4.33 out of 10 on the report’s education service resilience measure, a mid-range score that reflects real but limited capacity to absorb shocks to schooling. Pair that with a near-maximum drought score (10 out of 10) and an extreme heat score of 9.88, and you get a picture of an education system being asked to function reliably through exactly the kind of disruption it’s least equipped to weather.
This isn’t unique to Nigeria, across West and Central Africa more broadly, the report identifies large and growing numbers of children exposed to multiple overlapping hazards and a region where education infrastructure was already fragile before climate stress entered the picture.
Layer in something the report doesn’t measure directly but that anyone working in African education already knows: a region with one of the highest concentrations of out-of-school children in the world doesn’t have much slack left to absorb school closures gracefully.
If there’s a single shift this should provoke in how we plan education policy, it’s this: resilience needs to sit next to access as a design requirement, not an afterthought funded after a disaster makes headlines. That means classrooms built to withstand heat and flooding where possible, contingency learning plans for the weeks a school physically can’t open, and recognition that “keeping children in school” is no longer purely a poverty and access question, it’s increasingly a climate-engineering one too.
We’ve been asking what foundation children need before we hand them AI. The UNICEF report is a reminder that, for a growing number of children, the more basic foundation, a school that’s still there next term can no longer be assumed.
- Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi, CEO of Do Take Action, is an independent consultant on edtech, climate change, public policy, and women’s procurement empowerment
