Sharing Singapore's Education Success with Africa
It started with a casual conversation about textbooks. It ended with 115 African policymakers visiting Singapore, a major conference in Tunisia, and four published books. That is how knowledge sharing works when the right people get involved.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 29 is written by Tan Jee Peng, who spent 32 years at the World Bank. She tells the story of a collaboration between Singapore and the World Bank’s Africa Region that ran from 2006 to 2009. The goal was to help African countries learn from Singapore’s experience in building an education system that supports economic growth.
How It All Started
In the early 2000s, Tan Jee Peng had just transferred to the World Bank’s Africa Region. A colleague found out she grew up in Singapore and attended school there. The colleague asked for help finding speakers for a 2003 conference in Dakar, Senegal, aimed at African educators and policymakers.
Textbooks were a big problem across the continent at the time. Most schools depended on imported books. So they invited someone to speak about how Singapore went from relying on imported textbooks to having its own capacity to write, publish, and even export them.
The presentation was a hit. Many attendees asked the World Bank to organize a study visit to Singapore. But the request sat for several years before anything happened. During that time, the focus shifted. African policymakers realized that textbooks were only part of what interested them. What they really wanted to understand was the bigger question: how did Singapore manage to align investments in education and training with its goals for economic growth?
Here is what made the question urgent. In the 1960s, many African countries had per capita GDP levels that were comparable to or even higher than Singapore’s. Since then, the paths completely split apart. African leaders wanted to know why, and what lessons they could take home.
What the Collaboration Produced
Getting the World Bank to sponsor study visits is not easy. It takes significant resources, time, and effort. But a bunch of favorable conditions came together, and the result was impressive:
- Three study visits over four years, attended by 115 African policymakers from ten countries, 30 World Bank staff, and 30 guests including journalists
- A high-level policy conference in Tunis, Tunisia in 2009, attended by 44 African ministers of finance and education from 28 countries
- Four published books about the experience
The Key People Who Made It Happen
Tommy Koh, Ambassador-at-Large at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, immediately saw an opportunity when the idea was presented to him. He opened doors and helped make the first visit happen in 2006.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam, then Finance Minister, gave the keynote speech at the 2009 Tunis Conference. In his earlier role as Minister of Education, he had also made himself available for serious discussions with the first group of African policymakers who visited in 2006. The fact that the Tunis Conference happened during the global financial crisis actually made Singapore’s story of steady investment in education more relevant, not less.
On the World Bank side, several senior leaders showed up and participated personally. Obiageli Ezekwesili, Africa Region’s Vice President, and Shanta Deverajan, the Region’s Chief Economist, both engaged directly. Yaw Ansu, Director of the Africa Region’s Human Development Department, saw the strategic importance of the effort and participated in all three visits.
What the Visits Looked Like
Each visit had a slightly different focus, but they built on each other.
The first visit gave participants an overview of Singapore’s experience in education development. It included a side trip to Vietnam and workshops with experts from other Asian countries.
The second visit went deeper into operational details: teacher training, curriculum development, student learning, and school management.
The third visit focused on how education and skills development support industry and economic growth.
A key feature of every visit was actually going to real places. Participants visited schools, the Institute of Technical Education, Nanyang Polytechnic, and industrial complexes like the Port of Singapore Authority, Jurong Island, and Keppel Offshore and Marine. They got to talk directly with Singapore officials, including permanent secretaries who hosted them for working lunches.
Singapore professionals also traveled in the other direction. Senior people involved in the programme made fact-finding visits to Ghana and Madagascar to better understand what participating countries actually needed.
Who Made the Logistics Work
The World Bank’s main partner in Singapore was International Enterprise Singapore (IE Singapore). A unit set up under Alphonsus Chia managed connections to the right people across Singapore. G. Jayakrishnan later took over and led a team that handled the substance and logistics of the visits.
Several Singapore education leaders were especially important: Professors Leo Tan and Lee Sing Kong from the National Institute of Education, Chan Lee Mun from Nanyang Polytechnic, Dr Law Song Seng from the Institute for Technical Education, and Lionel Yeo from the Civil Service College.
The Singapore government covered local costs through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs Technical Cooperation Programme. The Norwegian government covered travel and other expenses through its Education Trust Fund at the World Bank. Both saw the study visits as a real way to build capacity and inspire African policymakers.
What African Policymakers Learned
Several lessons from Singapore stood out to the visitors.
First, making education serve economic growth means the whole government has to work together. You cannot have the education ministry operating in a silo separate from economic planning.
Second, when a country has limited resources, investing in a strong foundation in basic education is the priority. You can expand into higher-level skills later, but only if the basics are solid first.
Third, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) needs to be treated as a genuine, valued part of the education system, not as a dumping ground for students who did not make it academically. Singapore’s approach to TVET creates real pathways to jobs for all young people.
Fourth, paying attention to implementation matters. Good policies on paper mean nothing if they are not followed through in practice.
Finally, learning by doing is essential. Pilot new ideas, learn from the experience, improve, and then scale up. That cycle is what builds a country’s capacity for real reform over time.
Did It Make a Difference?
Measuring the impact of capacity building is always hard. But there are concrete results. The visits informed the design of subsequent World Bank education projects in Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania. Managers in the Africa Region started paying more attention to skills development in their work with partner countries.
The connections kept spreading. At the 2012 Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank in Tanzania, Dr Law Song Seng from Singapore’s Institute of Technical Education found himself on a panel talking about Singapore’s approach to TVET. On the same panel were Mozambique’s Minister of Science and Technology, Sweden’s Minister of Finance, and a leading Ghanaian businessman. In the audience were African economic policymakers, international development experts, and journalists.
One casual conversation about textbooks in the early 2000s had rippled outward for a decade.
About the Author
Tan Jee Peng retired from the World Bank in December 2013 after 32 years. In her last role as Education Advisor, she led analysis of workforce development under the Systems Approach for Better Education Results initiative. Earlier, she spent a decade in the Africa Region where she created tools for policy analysis, facilitated policy dialogue between African policymakers and counterparts in China, India, Singapore, and Vietnam, and created EdStats, a platform for knowledge and data sharing. She studied at the London School of Economics and Princeton University.