Education & AI for Africa

FROM THE ARCHIVE

The Baseline Results

Published Thursday, 13 August 2026 · 2-minute read

Last time I shared how we put 36 questions, drawn from Nigeria's standards and the world's best, to 125 children from Basic 1 to SSS3. Now let me share what we discovered.

Our children can read. A passage was read, understood, and answered. Eighty-four to one hundred percent, at every level, on questions drawn from England's standards.

Our children know our values. The flag. The capital. Duty. Honesty. Strong across the board.

Our children understand logic. But only when it looked like logic. Bola's pencil is longer than Abu's. Abu's pencil is longer than Ekaete's. Who has the longest pencil? Most got it. NCEE aptitude formats. Our students have seen this genre. They perform in it.

Then.

Circle, square, circle, square ... What comes next?

A three-year-old's question. No vocabulary. No arithmetic. Nothing to recall. It is the only kind of question where memory contributes exactly nothing. Completely abstract. You either see the structure or you do not.

A third of our students missed it. Secondary students among them.

Then the fractions. One half of a loaf, plus one third of a loaf. How much loaf? On our exam's fraction question, the most chosen wrong answer was exactly what the add-the-tops-add-the-bottoms rule produces.

Not a guess. A memorised procedure, firing confidently in a place where it does not belong.

Of every child our fraction question was shown to, fewer than one in four could do it.

And the money problem. Amina has four hundred naira. She buys a book for one fifty and a pen for seventy. How much is left? Two subtractions, one after the other. Nothing more.

But the moment the arithmetic took two steps instead of one, more than half the students lost the thread. The same students who compute a single subtraction almost perfectly.

Honestly, when I met the fraction question, I added the tops and the bottoms too. I only delved deeper when I read it was wrong.

OAU. LSE. Kellogg. Years in finance in New York. The rule I was drilled on at seven fired first. Forty years later.

Off the top of your head, how much loaf? Now draw it and see what you get. See the difference. This is one of the key tools Singapore uses to be the best at maths in the world.

Can we blame our children?

In Part 3 we discuss the shape all of this makes and the name I have given it.

In the meantime, why don't you take the baseline. Fifteen minutes, free. Invite others.

The Baseline