Half of Ethiopia’s Primary Students May Lack Textbooks as Gains Unravel

Around half of Ethiopian primary school students may be lacking access to textbooks, according to a World Bank survey report set to be published in the coming months, marking a stark reversal from the near-universal coverage achieved just over a decade ago.

The findings from Ethiopia’s Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD), which tracked learning outcomes from 2020/21 to 2025, paint a picture of a system struggling to recover from successive shocks despite ambitious reforms. Excerpts from the full report were presented at the Human Capital Development Forum co-organized by the World Bank and the Ministry of Finance held at the Adwa Museum last month.

The current situation represents a dramatic step backward. Historically, Ethiopia’s textbook distribution peaked during the early 2010s, reaching a textbook-student ratio of 1:1 for many subjects and even 1:1.48 for some, supported by the World Bank-backed General Education Quality Improvement Program (GEQIP). At its height, GEQIP printed more than 78 million textbooks for 20.1 million students.

A 2017 World Bank report on that very program had already warned that these gains were fragile. It highlighted that the system was "not yet on a sustainable foundation" and depended on continued donor funding. The report explicitly cautioned that without the government allocating 6-8% of its yearly education budget to textbooks, the country risked a backslide.

The forthcoming 2025 data collected from 300 representative primary government schools suggest those warnings were prescient. The survey indicates that textbook availability has stagnated at a critically low level, with only about half of students having access, showing little progress since 2021, when the GEPD first established a baseline of 49% textbook availability.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) recently remarked that textbook disbursements to high school students had undergone significant progress over the past two years during a parliamentary address last week. The gains appear not to have translated to primary schools. Part of the problem stems from the lack of capable printing houses. A 2011 survey concluded that no local Ethiopian printing firms could produce textbooks matching the required quality, quantity, and delivery times at a competitive price. 

This lack of materials is mirrored by a crisis in foundational learning. While student attendance has improved from 67% in 2021 to 79% in 2025, this has not translated into significant academic gains. Mastery of literacy and numeracy has inched up from a mere 2% in 2021 to 5% in 2025, meaning 95% of students still lack grade-level proficiency.

In many schools, especially at the primary level from grades 1 to 6 students are forced to share the few textbooks available, says Mohammed Kebede, an English teacher in South Wollo who is nearing retirement after four decades in the classroom.

“Students share one textbook between two or three on a desk,” he told Shega over the phone. “If one of them wants to take the book home, they must bring a parent to sign a commitment form. If the book is lost or damaged, the stakes are high, and other students will also suffer. So, many are also afraid to take books home at all".

The challenges extend far beyond textbooks. The new dashboard reveals a dire and worsening lack of basic infrastructure. The proportion of schools with functioning water and toilets has declined from 20% in 2021 to 16% in 2025. Fewer than one in five schools have WASH facilities, and fewer than one in ten have electricity or internet.

The gaps between rural and urban areas are pronounced and persistent. The survey found that 71% of urban children are "school-ready" upon entering Grade 1, compared to just 41% in rural areas. This disparity is mirrored in infrastructure, where only 9% of rural schools have water and functioning toilets, versus 34% of urban schools. Access to electricity and internet remains a privilege for a tiny few, available in only 5% of schools in 2025, up marginally from 4.5% in 2021.

Members of the research team indicated that the figures likely underrepresented the scale of the challenges due to the inability to access certain schools because of ongoing conflicts. More than 7.2 million children are out of school are estimated to be out of school in Ethiopia due to conflict and insecurity.  

While the upcoming WB report notes some progress in teacher attendance, with absenteeism dropping from 17% in 2021 to 9% in 2025, core issues with teacher capacity persist. Only 16% of teachers mastered the full literacy and numeracy assessment. Furthermore, pedagogical practices exhibit significant drawbacks, with very few teachers effectively providing feedback, building critical thinking, or promoting student autonomy in the classroom.

This echoes the 2017 report, which found that even when textbooks were available, teacher training on how to use them effectively was a major bottleneck. The new data shows that despite reforms like the 2024 Education Bill, the core ecosystem for learning remains critically underpowered.

The combined evidence from 2017, 2021, and 2025 tells a story of impressive gains that were lost to systemic pressures. For millions of Ethiopian students, the promise of a quality education remains locked away, not just in empty classrooms, but in the missing textbooks, absent basics, and a cycle of learning poverty that reforms have yet to break.