Opening Remarks by Ms. Toyin Akinniyi, Regional Portfolio Director, Luminate at the Bold Action Session on Education: “Building Blocks of the Future: Education Financing for Sustainable Outcomes”
(A Day Zero event of the 2026 Africa Social Impact Summit) on 21 July 2026.
Protocols.
Good morning distinguished guests, the board and CEO of the Sterling One Foundation, representatives of the Business Coalition for Education; distinguished partners, members of the media, ladies and gentlemen. Permit me to stand on existing protocol.
Thank you, Sterling One Foundation, for putting this important Bold Action Session on Education, and to together explore the intersection of education and the future, and interrogate the question of how to finance education in a way that it produces sustainable outcomes.
Education, on its own, is one of the clearest levers we have for the future we say we want. It is how a continent with the youngest population on earth turns that demographic reality into dividend. Technology, on its own, is reshaping every one of our economies, our labour markets, our governments, faster than most institutions can adapt to.
Either topic alone would justify attention. But where they intersect should really keep us up at night – and give us hope in equal measure. It is because the technology we build today will decide, in large part, who gets educated well over the next generation, and the way we educate this generation will decide who gets to shape the technology of the next. Get that intersection right, and we compound progress. Get it wrong, and we compound our current socio-economic challenges.
Recognising this critical intersection is why Luminate partners with the Sterling One Foundation to advance the mission of the Business Coalition for Education.
At Luminate, we’re working to ensure that technology serves people’s needs and wellbeing. Across Africa, our work sits at the intersection of technology and socioeconomic justice. This means we ask a simple but pertinent question of every digital tool, every platform, every algorithm shaping public life: does this expand opportunity, or does it gradually narrow it for the people least able to push back?
Education is one of the clearest tests of that question. Technology has real power to close learning gaps — in foundational literacy and numeracy, in reaching out-of-school children, in giving teachers tools they need. But it can just as easily entrench the divide it promised to close.
As I always say, technology is not neutral. It reflects the priorities and the power of whoever builds and finances it. That is why “how” we finance education matters just as much as “how much.” We give to it.
Partnering with Sterling One Foundation was thus a natural decision. The Foundation has spent years building a track record of turning coalitions, evidence, advocacy into sustainable action. Through the Africa Social Impact Summit itself, and now through the Business Coalition for Education and the Nigeria Foundational Learning Fund, Sterling One is doing the hard, unglamorous work of getting government, business, and philanthropy to actually co-invest in our future.
Through the Business Coalition for Education, I believe, we can ensure that as private capital and technology flow into education financing, they flow toward inclusion and sustainable outcomes for children and young people. That means ensuring we can design and deploy tools to enhance education for the Nigerian child.
But it is also ensuring that, at the design stage, no one gets left out of a digital learning platform before it scales. It means insisting that data collected on children is protected. It means backing financing models where technology is a tool for reaching the last mile – the out-of-school child, the girl in a rural community, the learner with a disability – rather than a shortcut that skips over them because they’re harder to reach.
This is also, fundamentally, why we believe in coalitions like this one. No single funder, no single company, no single foundation can make all these happen on its own. It takes business leaders willing to direct capital with societal good conditions attached. It takes foundations willing to bring evidence and support guardrails. It takes government willing to make room for that infrastructure. The Business Coalition for Education is designed to hold all three in the same room and pointed at the same outcome.
So, Sterling One Foundation has built the platform for collective action on education financing that Africa needs. Our collective role is to help ensure that financing truly advances the mission it is meant to serve: sustainable, inclusive learning outcomes for every child.
That is the future we are laying the foundation for. We’re glad to be building it with Sterling One, and with all of you.
Thank you.
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Speech read by Ms. Toyin Akinniyi, Regional Portfolio Director, Luminate
