The Lion Must Learn to Write

By Fotso Claude, Researcher, eBASE Africa

Why the people closest to the problem are still the furthest from the pen.

There is an African proverb that stops you in your tracks the moment you hear it.

“Until a lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

A policymaker said this at the closing ceremony of the KIX SEED project. The room went quiet. Not the uncomfortable kind of quiet. The kind that happens when something true lands in the chest before the brain has had time to argue with it.

Every book about the hunt is written by someone who went home. The lion did not go home. And yet we rarely pause to ask: what was the lion's version of that day? What would the story look like if the lion were holding the pen?

In education systems across Africa, this proverb is not a metaphor. It is a daily reality.

The people nobody writes about

Walk into any ministry of education meeting, and you will find decision-makers with charts, frameworks, and policy documents. Walk into a primary school in a rural sub-national, and you will find a teacher with 60 students, no textbooks, a leaking roof, and a data form she has been asked to fill out for the third time this month.

That teacher knows things. She knows which children come to school hungry and which ones do not come at all. She knows that the dropout rate in her class is not because the children are disengaged. It is because three of them are fetching water for two hours every morning before school starts.

But nobody asked her to write the report.

In 1980, the political scientist Michael Lipsky gave a name to people like her. He called them street-level bureaucrats. Teachers. Health workers. District officers. The frontline staff who are technically the implementers of policy but who, in practice, are the ones who decide what policy means on the ground. Every day, in hundreds of small decisions, they are making policy. They are the lions. And for decades, we have been writing about them without writing with them.

The gap between the map and the territory

Here is something that anyone who has worked in education data systems knows but rarely says out loud. The data that goes up the chain is not always the data that exists on the ground.

When teachers and district officers know that reporting low attendance will trigger sanctions but reporting high attendance will bring resources and praise, they become very creative with their forms. When the feedback loop runs in one direction only, from the school upward and never back down, you get a system that is very good at collecting data and very bad at using it.

The street-level bureaucrat knows the gap between the map and the territory. She lives in the territory. The policymaker lives with the map. And because the policymaker is the one holding the pen, the map is what gets published, shared at conferences, and cited in the next policy brief. The lion's story never gets told.

What happens when the lion picks up the pen

Something worth paying attention to is unfolding across the three countries where the Unlocking Data Initiative is at work.

In Kenya, when county officials were brought into conversations about the national learning agenda as partners rather than data collectors, the questions they started asking changed. They stopped asking “what do we report?” and started asking “what does this mean for our schools?” That shift in the question is everything. It means the data is no longer moving in one direction. It is starting to work.

In Malawi, a dashboard was launched that put learning outcome data, dropout trends, attendance patterns, and performance indicators directly into the hands of district and school-level data users. People started looking. Not because they were told to. Because the information was finally theirs to see, in real time, without waiting for a report to travel up the chain and return six months later. When you give someone a window into their own system, curiosity does the rest.

In Cameroon, eBASE Africa built two regional communities of practice and invested in training people on evidence synthesis. The result was not just that people learned how to read research. They started producing it, questioning it, and using it to shape their own learning agendas. Knowledge stopped sitting in documents and started sitting in people. That is a different kind of infrastructure, one that does not crash when the project ends.

None of these is a finished story. But in each case, the moment the lion was handed the pen, something shifted. The story started being written from the inside. And that changes what the story says.

Writing must start now

Education systems in sub-Saharan Africa are at a turning point. Curricula are changing. Data infrastructure is expanding. Countries are making decisions right now about which systems to build, which partnerships to prioritise, and what counts as evidence of success.

Those decisions will be shaped by what is written. By what gets published, what gets presented at conferences, and what ends up in policy briefs on a minister's desk.

If the lions are not writing, the hunters will fill that space. And the hunters, however well-meaning, do not know what the lions know. The communities of practice, the district-level data systems, the conversations between teachers and policymakers that were not happening before all of it need to be documented, published, and put into the hands of people who can use it. Not just as technical reports. As stories. As evidence. As proof that a different relationship between data and decision-making is possible.

The lion has always known things worth knowing. Now is the time to write them down.