Liberia has been rated among the worst countries in the world for education access and quality in a damning new global assessment, placing the West African nation near the bottom of international rankings for literacy, school completion rates, and learning outcomes. The ranking places Liberia alongside a handful of sub-Saharan African nations where basic education infrastructure has failed to recover from years of civil conflict and chronic underfunding.
The assessment measures factors including teacher availability, infrastructure quality, learning materials, and outcomes in reading and mathematics, painting a picture of a system that is not merely struggling but visibly collapsing under the weight of multiple pressures simultaneously.
Children Sitting in the Dark
On the outskirts of Monrovia, in the township of Congo Town, a secondary school that once served several hundred students now operates with a single textbook for every six pupils. Teachers — many of them unpaid for months — continue to arrive, but the conditions they work in would be unrecognisable to educators in any functioning system. There is no running water. There are no walls on one side of the main building. The headmaster estimates that nearly 40 percent of enrolled students drop out before their third year.
My children want to learn, said Massah Kamara, 44, whose two daughters attend the school. But when they come home and cannot read properly, when they tell me the teacher has no books — what are we supposed to do? We cannot afford private school. This is what we have.
Liberia education crisis is not new. The civil war that devastated the country between 1989 and 2003 destroyed an estimated 70 percent of school infrastructure and displaced or killed a generation of trained teachers. Since then, reconstruction has been slow, donor funding has fluctuated wildly with shifting international priorities, and successive governments have struggled to attract the fiscal space needed for long-term systemic reform.
The Teacher Crisis Nobody Talks About
At the heart of the problem is a teacher shortage of catastrophic proportions. Liberia has one of the lowest teacher-to-student ratios in the world, with some rural counties reporting a single teacher for every 120 students. Many of those teachers have received minimal pedagogical training. Professional development is rare. Salaries, when they arrive, are often below the threshold needed for basic survival in Monrovia informal economy.
The government has acknowledged the crisis and committed to recruiting and training 5,000 new teachers by 2027, but implementation has been hampered by budget constraints and the persistent migration of qualified Liberian professionals abroad — a brain drain that affects every sector from healthcare to engineering.
The International Response Falls Short
International partners, including the World Bank and UNICEF, have programmes in place targeting education access in Liberia most underserved counties. But experts say the funding is fragmented, coordination is poor, and the scale of the problem exceeds anything currently in place. Liberia own national budget allocates roughly 10 percent of total expenditure to education — below the 20 percent target set by the African Union and well below what is needed to reverse decades of decline.
What is required, according to education advocates in Monrovia, is not merely more money but more coherent strategy — a long-term commitment to teacher training, school construction, curriculum reform, and digital literacy that outlasts the political cycle of any single administration.
Until then, children like those in Congo Town will continue to sit in overcrowded classrooms, without books, without adequate teachers, and with limited prospects beyond what the system they inherited was never designed to provide.