Why is Learning Mindset growing in Africa?

Why Africa? Because Africa's youth has the future. Because we can learn so much from engaging with African teachers and students. And because universities across Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria are actively leaning into the future by designing innovative education that fits their local realities. Learning Mindset (LM) is partnering with them - not to export ready-made solutions, but to co-create the next generation of teaching tools that help young people around the world cultivate their autonomy.

Our key partners in the three countries are:

• University of Ghana;

• Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research in Nairobi, Kenya

• development Projects and Research Centre in Abuja/Kano, Nigeria

LM and its home institute, Leiden University, has full partnership agreements with all three partners, covering both the co-design of innovative education and research to evaluate its impacts. Together with our partners, we are collaborating with many universities and other knowledge institutes in two key LM programmes:

1. Small Grants Programme: Teachers as Designers, Implementers, and Researchers

Lecturers receive seed funding to adapt, redesign, or invent LM-inspired tools for their own classrooms - whether in autonomous learning, game-based learning, or AI literacy. Each project is implemented in the upcoming semester, studied systematically, and supported through a shared series of LM webinars on co-creation, research design, implementation, analysis, and writing. By 2027, participating teachers will have publishable studies grounded in their own contexts and students. Beyond the university context, in Nigeria we are also working with the dRPC to implement a CSO capacity strengthening program component. Working with new cohorts of local CSOs in the humanitarian sector and to associations of youth, the dRPC will implement a LM CSO-facing model using participatory approaches in CSO training, feedback, cross-learning and documentation.

2. LM Academy: Students as Innovators and Facilitators

Universities nominate student-trainers who will be coached to deliver LM tools - such as Skills Passports, Make This My Course, LM Planners, Field Journals, Angela Ignatius and Game of Games - within their own institutions. But they do more than deliver workshops: they adapt, expand, and redesign the tools themselves or even create brand new ones, ensuring they work for the learning cultures they know best. In this way, student-trainers become co-authors of LM’s evolving toolset.

Across both programmes, one principle guides us:

Learning tools should be shaped by the people who use them.

We are thrilled to learn alongside our new partners in Accra, Nairobi, Narok, Kano, Lagos and Bayero - and to see the LM tools grow in directions we could not have imagined alone.