Rethinking Education for the Informal Majority in the Age of AI

Education for Life — A BridgeWorks Working Essay

Francis E. Madojemu

I have been thinking about a question that may be much bigger than education.

How do we help millions of Nigerians continue learning, thinking, adapting and prospering when most of their lives are lived outside formal educational institutions?

The question became particularly urgent during a recent Kingdom Conversations discussion on security.

Our guest, Pastor Servio Gbadamosi, moved the conversation unexpectedly towards education. He spoke about Cuba’s experience with mass literacy, the possibility of using something like Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps to take practical learning into communities, and the importance of teaching people what they actually need for the lives they are already living.

His point was simple.

A market trader does not necessarily need physics before she needs arithmetic.

If she buys a basket of tomatoes for ₦30,000, divides it into smaller portions and sells each portion for ₦500, she needs to understand enough mathematics to calculate cost, change, margins and profit.

A mechanic needs learning that helps him become a better mechanic.

A driver needs learning that helps him drive, operate and manage his work better.

A tailor needs learning that strengthens the work she is already doing.

Servio called it functional education.

That conversation has stayed with me.

Because perhaps we have been approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

MOST NIGERIANS ARE ALREADY SOMEWHERE

They are not waiting in a classroom.

They are already working.

According to the International Labour Organization’s current Nigeria country profile, 92.8% of employment in Nigeria was informal in 2024.[1] (ILOSTAT)

Think about the implications.

The overwhelming majority of working Nigerians live economically in markets, workshops, farms, transport systems, construction sites, homes, small businesses and other forms of informal enterprise.

They are traders.

Mechanics.

Tailors.

Farmers.

Drivers.

Artisans.

Security personnel.

Craftspeople.

Food vendors.

Technicians.

Micro-entrepreneurs.

Apprentices.

Many have learned primarily by watching, doing, practising, failing, adapting and learning from somebody who came before them.

And they are not waiting for us to educate them.

They are already learning.

The question is whether we can help them learn better.

PERHAPS NIGERIA’S BIGGEST CLASSROOM IS THE COUNTRY ITSELF

Years ago, in my own work on education, I distinguished formal education from informal education.

Formal education happens through structured institutions.

Informal education is the broader social process through which people acquire the knowledge and skills required to function within their culture. In pre-literate societies, people learned how to find food, build shelter, make tools, speak their language and transmit values long before modern schools existed.

That older insight suddenly feels extraordinarily contemporary.

Because perhaps the challenge before us is not simply:

How do we get more people into educational institutions?

We certainly need good schools.

But there is another question:

How do we build learning into the places where people already live, work and belong?

Markets can become learning environments.

Workshops can.

Trade associations can.

Cooperatives can.

Churches and mosques can.

Transport groups can.

Professional associations can.

Families can.

And increasingly, the mobile phone in someone’s hand can.

WHAT CUBA ACTUALLY DID

Servio’s reference to Cuba deserves serious attention — but also careful fact-checking.

In 1961, Cuba undertook a remarkable National Literacy Campaign. UNESCO describes it as a landmark mass cultural and educational mobilisation whose influence extended into later literacy movements across Latin America and beyond.[2] (UNESCO)

One of its important features was that learning did not wait for people to arrive at conventional schools.

Young volunteers, teachers and other educators went out into communities.

Learning travelled.

That is the principle that interests me.

I am not suggesting that Nigeria copy Cuba’s political or economic system.

Nor should we romanticise the Cuban experience.

The useful question is narrower:

What can we learn from a society that deliberately mobilised people and took learning to those who needed it?

That principle may be transferable even when the political system is not.

AND THEN WE ALREADY HAVE NYSC

This is where the idea becomes especially interesting.

Nigeria does not necessarily need to create an entirely new national volunteer structure.

NYSC already describes Community Development Service as one of its four cardinal programmes and calls it the face of the scheme in rural communities.[3] (NYSC)

NYSC has also previously worked with development partners using corps members as peer educators in areas such as reproductive health and HIV/AIDS prevention.[4] (NYSC)

So perhaps the question is not:

Should we reinvent NYSC?

Perhaps it is:

Could we strengthen one part of NYSC into a national capability service?

Imagine selected corps members trained not merely as teachers but as community capability facilitators.

Their first task would not be to arrive and lecture.

It would be to listen.

What does this community actually need?

What problems do people face?

What do they already know?

What tools do they already use?

What language do they understand best?

Then learning could become practical.

Numeracy.

Communication.

Record keeping.

Digital literacy.

AI.

Basic financial capability.

Health information.

Insurance.

Legal awareness.

Entrepreneurship.

Safety.

Civic responsibility.

And whatever else genuinely improves people’s ability to live and work.

AI CHANGES THE ECONOMICS OF THIS IDEA

This is where 2026 is profoundly different from 1961.

We no longer have only teachers, printed manuals and classrooms.

We now have artificial intelligence.

For the first time, millions of ordinary people can increasingly have access to something that can explain, translate, simplify, demonstrate, draft, calculate and converse.

That does not mean AI is equally capable in every language or every context.

It is not.

Nigeria’s major languages still remain relatively low-resource languages in contemporary natural-language processing, and researchers continue to document important gaps in datasets, speech recognition, accents, orthography and translation quality.[5] (arXiv)

But progress is happening quickly.

Recent initiatives such as NaijaVoices have collected large amounts of speech data from native speakers to improve recognition in Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo.[6] (https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/)

And importantly, Nigeria is not starting from zero.

Dr. Tunde Adegbola and Alt-I worked with Microsoft on the localisation of Windows and Office into Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, alongside wider work in African-language technology.[7] (Dawn Commission)

That history matters.

Because our long-term ambition should be radical:

A Nigerian should not have to master English before gaining access to useful knowledge.

The technology should increasingly come to the learner.

Not the learner always having to travel linguistically towards the technology.

BUT AI ALONE IS NOT THE ANSWER

A smartphone does not automatically produce wisdom.

Neither does schooling.

Neither does literacy.

Neither does AI.

We can make people more capable and still make society worse.

A more technologically sophisticated fraudster is not evidence of national development.

An educated person who exploits others is not necessarily helping society flourish.

This is why I believe character must sit inside the architecture from the beginning.

Our older education work already identified the danger of separating education from culture, moral context and real life.

So Education for Life must also address questions such as:

What is honesty?

What is responsibility?

What does it mean to keep one’s word?

What does service look like?

How should we treat a customer?

What is stewardship?

How do we think about consequences?

What does respect for human dignity require?

My own worldview is deeply Christian, and I have spoken about the Beatitudes as one possible moral architecture.

But a national programme cannot simply become Christian catechism.

Nigeria’s Christian, Muslim and indigenous moral traditions, together with constitutional and civic values, contain significant areas of ethical agreement.

The challenge is to identify those shared virtues and build them deliberately into practical life.

Capability answers:

What can I do?

Character asks:

What should I do?

We need both.

ORGANISING PEOPLE MAY BE AS IMPORTANT AS TEACHING THEM

Servio made another observation that has profoundly influenced this thinking.

He pointed to platforms such as OPay and MAX and what happened when technology began organising previously dispersed motorcycle riders and transport operators.

The precise history of each platform differs, and we should be careful not to overstate what any single company achieved.

But the broader principle is visible.

MAX today explicitly describes its model as helping African transport operators gain access not only to vehicles but also to financial services, training, health and vehicle insurance.[8] (MaxDrive)

That is important.

Because once people become part of a trusted network, other things become possible.

Training.

Insurance.

Healthcare.

Savings.

Finance.

Identity.

Standards.

Market information.

Government services.

Collective purchasing.

Community accountability.

This suggests that what we are building may eventually be much bigger than a curriculum.

It could become a community capability platform.

EDUCATION THEN BECOMES ONE BRIDGE AMONG MANY

Suppose a market community joins because members want help with record keeping.

Once a trusted relationship exists, perhaps they can also receive:

Fire-risk education.

Basic insurance.

Preventive healthcare.

Financial literacy.

Digital payments.

AI support.

Legal guidance.

Solar-energy information.

Business development.

Cooperative purchasing.

Access to markets.

Suddenly education is no longer an isolated activity.

It is connected to life.

That is what I mean by Education for Life.

AND GOVERNMENT MUST SEE VALUE TOO

If this becomes merely another well-meaning social programme, it will struggle to scale.

Government also needs to see the benefit.

A more capable informal economy can potentially mean:

Higher productivity.

Better business survival.

Improved public health.

Greater financial inclusion.

Better regulatory compliance.

Improved data.

Safer working practices.

Higher-value skills.

New industries.

And eventually a broader and healthier tax base.

That changes the proposition.

We are not asking government merely to pay to educate people.

We are asking:

What would become possible if Nigeria systematically increased the productive capability of the majority of its working population?

SOMETIMES THE TALENT IS ALREADY HERE

I once reflected on a situation in which Nigeria needed specialist deep-sea welding capability and had to look abroad for expertise.

Whether that particular example ultimately withstands detailed historical verification is less important here than the question it raises.

If we need underwater welders, should our first instinct always be to import them?

Or should somebody also ask:

Where are our divers?

Where are our welders?

Where are our marine technicians?

What communities already possess adjacent capability?

What training, certification, technology or connection would move them into higher-value work?

This principle can apply everywhere.

Solar installation.

Electric mobility.

Agricultural technology.

AI.

Healthcare.

Manufacturing.

Cybersecurity.

The future may depend less upon asking:

What skills don’t Nigerians have?

and more upon asking:

What capability do Nigerians already possess that we have failed to recognise, develop and connect to opportunity?

THIS IS WHERE THE PROSPERITY PARADOX MATTERS

Clayton Christensen, Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon’s The Prosperity Paradox has significantly shaped my thinking.

Their argument challenges conventional development thinking by focusing on market-creating innovation: innovations that make previously inaccessible products and services affordable and available to people who were formerly unable to consume them. Such innovations can create new markets, jobs and supporting institutions rather than waiting for perfect infrastructure to arrive first.[9] (Google Books)

Our question sits slightly earlier in that chain.

Who creates those innovations?

Capable people do.

People who can see problems.

Think.

Learn.

Collaborate.

Use tools.

Build.

Serve.

And create value.

That is why building human capability may be one of the most consequential forms of economic development.

PERHAPS WE NEED A DIFFERENT STARTING POINT

For years we have asked:

How do we improve education?

I am increasingly interested in another question.

How do we help people flourish?

Education is part of the answer.

But so are:

Character.

Community.

Health.

Technology.

Finance.

Work.

Relationships.

Opportunity.

Purpose.

This line of thinking has now led us to something we are tentatively calling:

BridgeWorks

Building Bridges for Human Flourishing

Connecting People, Ideas and Opportunity.

BridgeWorks is still being built.

We do not yet have all the answers.

And I am deliberately sharing the idea before we do.

BECAUSE SOME OF THE ANSWERS ARE PROBABLY READING THIS

Someone reading this understands Cuba’s literacy campaign far better than I do.

Someone has run adult-learning programmes that succeeded.

Someone has run programmes that failed — and knows why.

Someone understands Hausa-language AI.

Yoruba.

Igbo.

Or another Nigerian language entirely.

Someone knows the informal insurance market.

Someone has successfully organised artisans.

Someone understands NYSC from inside.

Someone has built cooperatives.

Someone knows how market associations actually work.

Someone knows what traders will reject immediately.

Someone understands community healthcare.

Someone knows the technology that could make this work offline.

Someone sees the flaw in the entire argument.

I want to hear from you.

Not merely encouragement.

I am looking for:

Research.

Contradictions.

Case studies.

Failures.

Technology.

Partners.

Ideas.

People willing to experiment.

Because perhaps the next great education system will not look like a system of schools at all.

Perhaps it will look like millions of people continuously learning inside the communities where life is already happening.

And perhaps one of the most important things we can do for Nigeria is simply this:

Take knowledge, tools, character and opportunity to where people already are — and build bridges that help them move from survival towards flourishing.

That is the conversation I would like us to begin.

Acknowledgements

This essay grew from a Kingdom Conversations discussion with Pastor Servio Gbadamosi, whose observations about Cuba, functional literacy, NYSC and the organisation of informal workers provided the immediate catalyst for this enquiry.

I also acknowledge Dr. Tunde Adegbola, whose decades of work in language technology, education and African-language computing provide an important intellectual and technological foundation for aspects of this proposal.

The economic argument is significantly informed by Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon, authors of The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty.

The thinking also builds upon my earlier work on the future of education, informal learning, culture, technology, entrepreneurship and the relationship between learning and real life. My 2019 Future of Education Summit was already asking what we needed to “unlearn and relearn in order to thrive” and exploring technology, lifelong learning and the complete learning lifecycle.

This remains a working proposition. It is being published precisely because I believe the next stage requires wider knowledge, criticism and collaboration.

Francis E. Madojemu
August 2026

Endnotes

1. International Labour Organization, ILOSTAT. Nigeria Country Profile. Informal employment rate (SDG 8.3.1): 92.8% for 2024. (ILOSTAT)

2. UNESCO. The National Literacy Campaign, its International Legacy; see also UNESCO’s comparative study Campaigning for Literacy: Eight National Experiences, which includes the 1961 Cuban campaign. (UNESCO)

3. National Youth Service Corps. Community Development Service and Special Projects. NYSC identifies CDS as one of its four cardinal programmes and its principal community-development interface. (NYSC)

4. National Youth Service Corps. Projects and Collaborations. NYSC records previous partnerships in which corps members have served as peer educators in public-health initiatives. (NYSC)

5. Isa Inuwa-Dutse. “NaijaNLP: A Survey of Nigerian Low-Resource Languages” (2025); Marie Maltais et al., “NaijaS2ST: A Multi-Accent Benchmark for Speech-to-Speech Translation in Low-Resource Nigerian Languages” (2026). Both describe continuing resource and performance gaps affecting Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and other Nigerian languages. (arXiv)

6. NaijaVoices. A large speech-data initiative involving approximately 1,800 hours of recordings from about 5,000 native speakers to improve speech recognition for Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. (https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/)

7. DAWN Commission / Dr. Tunde Adegbola. Adegbola’s Alt-I worked as a Microsoft Local Language Program partner on localisation of Windows, Office and related software for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba; his work also includes machine translation, speech recognition and Yoruba keyboard development. (Dawn Commission)

8. MAX. The mobility company’s current operator proposition includes vehicle access, health and vehicle insurance, driver training and financial empowerment. (MaxDrive)

9. Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo & Karen Dillon. The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty (Harper Business, 2019); see also Christensen Institute material on market-creating innovation in emerging economies. (Google Books)

POSTSCRIPT: THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES

One of the reasons I have chosen to describe this as a working essay is that I do not believe the ideas are finished.

They are meant to provoke thought, invite challenge, attract better ideas and, hopefully, move us closer to things that can actually be tried.

Shortly after reading Where Nigeria Already Learns, Garelina Teddy NG sent me a thoughtful response that pushed the argument further.

He wrote:

“You have pinpointed what might be Nigeria’s true competitive advantage: stop trying to fix the venue, and start empowering the human where they already are.”

But Teddy then raised two questions that deserve to become part of the Education for Life conversation.

DIGNITY MUST COME BEFORE — AND ALONGSIDE — SKILLS

Teddy pointed out that there is a psychological problem beneath the educational problem.

For generations, our educational culture has subtly created a hierarchy of respectable outcomes. The university graduate appears to have succeeded. The artisan, mechanic, trader or technician is too often perceived as someone who ended up there because the preferred educational journey did not work out.

If that remains our cultural narrative, taking education into the informal economy will not be enough.

We cannot educate the informal economy while continuing to dishonour the people who constitute it.

Teddy pointed to Jamaica’s experience with a “Respect Agenda” as an example worth investigating: the deliberate use of education to shape character, civic responsibility, respect and social attitudes.

The precise lessons for Nigeria require further research, but his larger point is compelling.

What if dignity of labour became part of education from the earliest years?

What if a five-year-old Nigerian encountered the mechanic, farmer, carpenter, fabricator, tailor, trader, technician and entrepreneur not as examples of people who “didn’t make it,” but as people who possess valuable capabilities and contribute to building society?

This also connects with something I believe strongly: education cannot merely produce economically useful people. It must help form good people — people of character, honesty, responsibility, service, stewardship and respect for others.

We therefore have two generations to reach at the same time.

Children must learn not to despise productive work.

Adults already doing productive work must discover that their work can carry dignity, mastery and possibility.

BUT TEDDY’S SECOND QUESTION GOES EVEN FURTHER

If we take education to where people already are, should we only teach them to become better at what they are doing today?

Consider our tomato trader.

Teaching her margins, inventory, bookkeeping, digital payments, insurance, customer management and the intelligent use of AI could significantly improve her business.

That matters.

But what if the same distributed learning infrastructure could do something more?

What if it could also make visible the capabilities Nigeria will need tomorrow?

Renewable-energy installation and maintenance.

Modern agricultural processing.

Cold-chain logistics.

Advanced fabrication.

Repair and maintenance.

Technology-enabled manufacturing.

Digital commerce.

AI-assisted services.

And other capabilities that will emerge as the economy changes.

Then Education for Life would not simply help people survive today’s economy.

It could help Nigerians build tomorrow’s economy.

The question therefore changes from:

What does this person need to know to do today’s work better?

to two questions:

What capability would improve this person’s life today?

and

What capabilities will this community, region and country need tomorrow?

That is a significant expansion of the idea.

FROM EDUCATION INFRASTRUCTURE TO CAPABILITY INFRASTRUCTURE

Imagine if, over time, an Education for Life platform could identify what people in different communities already know how to do, what additional capabilities would increase their productivity, and where new economic opportunities are emerging.

A community might have thousands of electricians but very few people trained to install and maintain modern solar systems.

Another might have generations of welders and fabricators but no accessible pathway into more specialised industrial applications.

A major agricultural region might produce enormous quantities of food while lacking technicians, entrepreneurs and operators in processing, packaging, refrigeration and cold-chain logistics.

Suddenly, education becomes connected to national capability intelligence.

Not government deciding what everybody must become.

Not pushing people into predetermined occupations.

But making opportunity visible:

Here is where opportunity is emerging.

Here are the capabilities it requires.

Here is a pathway from where you are to where that opportunity is.

And perhaps this gives us an even larger way of thinking about Nigeria’s informal economy.

What if the informal economy is not simply a problem that development must eventually eliminate?

What if it is an enormous distributed human-capability network that we have never systematically learned how to upgrade?

That question deserves considerably more work.

And perhaps that is precisely why these are working essays.

The first essay should not end the conversation.

It should start one.

Thank you, Garelina Teddy NG, for reading carefully enough not merely to agree, but to extend the thinking.

This is exactly the kind of conversation I hope BridgeWorks can create:

ideas meeting ideas,

people finding one another,

possibilities becoming visible,

and eventually — experiments beginning.

Because the ultimate purpose is not to produce better papers about Nigeria.

It is to discover things worth trying.