Bilingual education that incorporates a local language alongside the official language has become an increasingly common approach in sub-Saharan Africa for improving literacy rates and learning outcomes. Evidence suggests that bilingual instruction is largely associated with positive learning and literacy outcomes globally (Bühmann & Trudell, 2007; Takam & Fassé, 2020). However, the adoption of bilingual education does not guarantee positive learning outcomes (Ball et al., 2022). The quality of bilingual education programs may be constrained by various factors, including implementation challenges, such as inadequate teacher training and classroom resources, and socio-cultural challenges, such as negative perceptions of local languages in education. This paper reviews bilingual programs in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on programs in Francophone West African countries. We examine some factors that constrain and contribute to effective bilingual programs. We hope these insights on which factors contribute to high-quality bilingual education may help inform policy-makers and others seeking to improve bilingual education programs in these and other contexts.

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Child labor disrupts education, but there is scant research on the reciprocal relationship: education disrupting child labor. We examined the link between school quality and child cocoa agricultural labor in a sample of 2168 fifth-grade children from forty-one primary-schools in rural Côte d’Ivoire. Children attending a higher quality school were less likely to work on a cocoa plantation. Specifically, quality infrastructure and teaching materials were associated with reduced cocoa labor, but not with domestic and economic work. Against the backdrop of a global focus on improving education quality, and 2021 being the International Year of Elimination of Child Labor, we suggest that investments in quality education may serve the dual purpose of reducing child labor alongside improving children’s learning outcomes.

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