By UMEZURIKE EMEKA TAYE
In April 2025, the Federal Government of Nigeria launched a major reform ef-fort in the education sector: the HOPE EDU program. The initiative, officially named HOPE for Quality Basic Edu-cation for All, arrived with big prom-ises and even bigger numbers, $552.2 million in combined funding from the World Bank and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). It targets over 29 million schoolchildren, 500,000 teach-ers, and 65,000 public primary schools, focusing on long-neglected areas like foundational literacy, teacher quality, and school infrastructure.
What sets HOPE EDU apart is not just the size of the funding, but the method of disbursement. The program follows a results-based financing model: funds are released only when participating states meet specific, measurable targets called Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs) which are verified independently. In the-ory, this ensures that money goes where it’s needed and only when progress is proven.
In a country where well-meaning gov-ernment programs have often collapsed under the weight of poor execution, po-liticization, or corruption, HOPE EDU feels like a breath of fresh air. Yet, even the most promising reform can falter if we do not address two critical issues: the intrusion of politics and the lack of a long-term sustainability plan.
One of the most stubborn barriers to reform in Nigeria is the tendency for politics to overshadow everything else. HOPE EDU is not immune to this. While the program is designed to oper-ate based on performance metrics and independent verification, the reality on ground can be very different.
It is one thing to design a technically sound program; it is quite another to implement it as Nigeria has been a place where appointments are usually made based on political loyalty rather than competence, and resource distribution is too often shaped by political calcula-tions instead of educational need. De-spite the structure and safeguards built into HOPE EDU, the program could still be derailed if political interests are al-lowed to interfere with monitoring, data integrity, or the allocation of funds.
And here lies the irony: only the po-litical class can keep politics out of ed-ucation. Only politicians have the power to protect national programs like HOPE EDU from partisan hijacking. Until our leaders begin to value and protect and create non-political spaces and areas in our national life especially in sectors such as education, health, and the ju-diciary we will continue to announce reforms with fanfare and deliver them with disappointment.
Even if HOPE EDU is executed with integrity, there’s another question we must ask and urgently: what happens after the funding ends? Out of the to-tal $552.2 million package, $500 million is a concessional loan from the World Bank, and $52.2 million is a non-repay-able grant from Global Partnership for Education (GPE). The loan is expected to be repaid over several decades, most likely under terms typical of Interna-tional Development Association (IDA) financing, 30 to 38 years, with a grace period of five to ten years. The program is designed to run for about five to seven years.
But what happens after that window closes? This is the heart of the sustain-ability question. If textbooks are deliv-ered and teachers trained only while donor funds flow, what becomes of those systems once the external support dries up? Will states have the internal capac-ity and budget discipline to continue driving improvements? Will school in-frastructure be maintained? Will digital platforms like Nigerian Education Data Initiative (NEDI) remain active and ac-curate?
We cannot afford to treat HOPE EDU as a one-off intervention. The future of Nigeria’s education system depends on what we do during and after the pro-gram ends. If we do not start planning now for post-funding continuity, all the progress we make could slowly erode and we may find ourselves applying for another loan to fix the same problems years from now.
For us to be serious about sustainable reform, we must move from dependency to ownership. That means committing a greater share of national and state budgets to basic education, improving public financial management, and in-stitutionalizing systems that will out-last any external funding cycle. It also means investing in the people who make education work such as teachers, admin-istrators, and communities and giving them the tools, funding, remuneration and autonomy to carry these reforms forward. Sustainability is not just about money. It is about culture, commitment, and continuity.
HOPE EDU is an important step for-ward, but hope alone is not a strategy. To make the most of this opportunity, Nigeria must do three things: shield the program from politics, ensure transpar-ent and accountable implementation, and lay the groundwork for long-term sustainability. The politicians who launched HOPE EDU must now rise to the more difficult task of protecting it not just during its funding cycle, but be-yond. They must recognize that some areas of national life should be immune to partisanship. Only then can we truly break the cycle of reform, relapse, and repeated borrowing. HOPE EDU can be more than a good idea. It can be a turning point but only if we choose to make it so.
Dr. Taye is a microbiologist, public health re-searcher, and university lecturer at Lead City University, Ibadan