GENEVA, August 28, 2025 – UNICEF teams are expecting the Giga Initiative, which aims to connect every school in the world to the internet, as a possible means not just to improve the quality of education, but also to educate more children.
In Africa, progress on education has been promising thanks to leadership across the continent, but challenges remain. Climate change, conflict, and sluggish economies mean that almost six in ten adolescents are out of school. Some 9 out of 10 children cannot read and understand a simple text by the age of 10 years old.
“We have 2 million out of school children and this issue is not going to go away soon,” Kenji Ohira, UNICEF’s Head of Education in Mozambique, said.
“We need to find other ways to educate our kids,” he added. “That is why school connectivity and digital learning may be very exciting opportunities.”
UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) established the Giga Initiative in 2019, wanting every child in the world to have access to economic and other opportunities online.
Procurement is at the heart of this initiative in which UNICEF uses its procurement expertise to help countries purchase school connectivity efficiently. Based on the past five years, this expertise can help governments to drop prices of school connectivity by an average 30 to 60 percent.
UNICEF staff see how this procurement expertise can help countries to get their schools online and educate more children.
“In a context where education systems lack physical resources – such as classrooms, teachers, materials – school connectivity might one day contribute at scale to teaching more children,” James Houghton, from the UNICEF country office in Sierra Leone, said.
Digital learning requires less physical resources and may therefore open extra opportunities to teach more children. It might help a school to reach and include those children unable to attend school, because they live too far away, or have disabilities, or must work.
Developed by UNICEF and Microsoft, the Learning Passport provides a range of online educational content. It also shows how school connectivity might one day increase access to education.
This is particularly urgent as Africa’s youth population surges toward 1 billion by 2050. Traditional education infrastructure cannot meet that scale. But digital tools, delivered through connected schools, just might.
“Connectivity isn’t just a technical upgrade,” Jaime Archundia, UNICEF’s Procurement and Market Development lead for the Giga initiative, says.
“It’s a strategic investment in scale. It’s how we get from educating some children to educating all children — especially in the places that have been hardest to reach.”
CHALLENGES REMAIN
Challenges remain, of course. By itself, school connectivity is not enough. Students also need some kind device like a tablet, as well as access to content. Procuring the tablets and maintaining them can be complicated.
But when it works, it works well, however. Lucia Casarin, Giga Data and Country Coordination Officer, described seeing students watching materials that have been created by their teachers and posted via YouTube.
“We went on a visit to see the Kenyan materials and that was very powerful to see.”