Our Views

Education systems are being asked to do two contradictory things at once: expand access and raise outcomes, often under tighter fiscal ceilings and growing expectations from parents, employers, and voters. New school initiatives—whether public builds, PPP campuses, or network expansions—are back on the agenda in many countries, driven by urbanisation, demographic shifts, school-age migration, and post-pandemic learning losses. Yet too many projects still begin with a site and a political promise, not an investment-grade view of demand, operating capacity, and long-run affordability. A feasibility study is not a formality; it is the project’s first governance instrument.

For decision-makers, the timing matters. Interest rates have reset higher in many markets, construction costs remain volatile, and teacher labor markets are structurally constrained. At the same time, education has become a proxy battle for productivity, social stability, and competitiveness—meaning project risk is rarely confined to the construction phase. When a school opens late, under-staffed, or misaligned with local needs, the value leakage persists for decades. A credible feasibility study is therefore less about proving that a school can be built than about proving that it can be operated well, at scale, through political and economic cycles.

Treat schools as operating systems, not buildings

A school is a service-delivery platform with a very specific production function: learning outcomes depend on teacher quality, leadership, time-on-task, and instructional materials, all mediated by governance. Capital expenditure is visible and fundable; operating performance is harder to procure and even harder to sustain. The feasibility question is fundamentally operational: can the system run this school to standard? If the answer is unclear, the project is not “high risk”—it is simply under-designed.

This reframes what “need” means. Enrollment pressure is real, but it is not uniform. Feasibility requires a view of catchment dynamics: where households are moving, how transport networks change commuting patterns, and whether policy choices (zoning, fee waivers, scholarship schemes) shift demand between public, private, and non-state providers. Overbuilding in the wrong place is not benign; it reallocates scarce teachers and budgets away from higher-return interventions. Conversely, underbuilding in high-growth corridors locks in overcrowding that erodes learning and drives dropouts—especially for girls where safety and travel time are decisive.

Demand is forecastable; equity must be designed

Good feasibility work makes the demand case credible without pretending it is certain. Demographic projections should be triangulated with administrative data (enrollment, repetition, transition rates), household survey patterns, and local development plans that reshape population density. But the most common forecasting error is treating the current system as static. If a new school improves quality, it attracts students; if it introduces fees or stricter admissions, it repels them. Demand is partly endogenous to the design.

Equity is not an afterthought either. New schools can widen gaps if they are “best” on paper but inaccessible in practice due to transport costs, safety risks, disability access barriers, or cultural constraints. Feasibility should test scenarios where enrollment targets are met but equity outcomes worsen—and whether the project has levers to prevent that. The cost of inclusion is predictable; the cost of exclusion is political. For investors and governments alike, that political risk becomes credit risk when projects depend on sustained public support.

The hidden constraint: teachers, leaders, and the incentives that keep them

Most feasibility studies over-index on classrooms and under-index on workforce. Teacher supply cannot be assumed; it must be mapped as a labor market. That means understanding training pipeline capacity, certification rules, wage competitiveness, and the geographic friction of deployment. A school without a staffing strategy is a stranded asset, however modern the building. The same applies to school leaders: principal quality is one of the strongest in-school predictors of learning outcomes, yet leadership recruitment and development are often missing from project design.

Incentives matter as much as headcount. If staffing allocations are centrally controlled, a new campus may inherit absenteeism and misaligned posting incentives. If the operator is a private partner, performance regimes must be enforceable and data-supported. Feasibility should therefore stress-test governance realities: who hires, who evaluates, who can remove underperformers, and what happens when political pressure conflicts with performance management. Operating rules, not architectural drawings, determine whether quality is repeatable.

Procurement and delivery: where education projects commonly fail

Education projects frequently stumble at the seam between capital delivery and service delivery. Construction contracts reward completion; education outcomes require adaptive operations over years. When procurement separates these worlds, handover becomes a cliff: buildings arrive late, equipment is incompatible with curricula, and maintenance responsibilities are unclear. Feasibility must be procurement-aware, not procurement-agnostic.

This is where capacity constraints become decisive. Ministries and municipalities may have strong policy teams but weak project management offices. School agencies may manage payrolls well but struggle with complex works contracts. Feasibility should map the real delivery apparatus: engineering oversight, safeguards management, community engagement, land acquisition processes, and the cadence of approvals. The fastest way to miss a deadline is to assume approvals will behave like a Gantt chart. A pragmatic design may involve phased delivery, standardized designs to reduce rework, and realistic contingencies for permitting and utilities.

Affordability is not a spreadsheet; it is a political commitment

Too often, affordability is reduced to whether a capital budget exists. The real test is whether recurrent costs can be carried without degrading quality elsewhere. Teacher salaries, learning materials, utilities, transport subsidies, school feeding, and maintenance accumulate—and maintenance is routinely underfunded, creating a slow decay that turns new schools into old problems. If operating costs are not ring-fenced and owned, the project is fiscally cosmetic.

Value-for-money analysis has to reflect education’s long cycle. Returns are measured in earnings, productivity, and social outcomes, but financing decisions are made within annual budget constraints. A robust feasibility study translates long-term benefits into decision-ready trade-offs: is building a new secondary school the best use of funds versus upgrading existing campuses, extending shifts, or investing in teacher coaching? The best project is the one that crowds in learning, not concrete. For private capital, this also clarifies revenue logic—whether through availability payments, performance-based components, or blended finance structures tied to verified delivery metrics.

Data is the control system, not the reporting burden

A new school initiative lives or dies on visibility: enrollment flows, attendance, teacher deployment, and early learning indicators. Yet data environments in many systems are fragmented, late, and hard to trust. Feasibility should audit data maturity and specify what is minimally required to manage performance—unique student identifiers, basic EMIS interoperability, and reporting routines that schools can realistically execute. Measurement that cannot be operationalized becomes theater.

This is also where safeguards and resilience become practical, not rhetorical. Climate risks—heat, flooding, water scarcity—affect not just buildings but learning time and attendance. Health shocks and security disruptions can force rapid modality shifts. Feasibility should incorporate resilience options that are proportional to risk and maintainable by local institutions. Resilience is only real if it survives the maintenance budget.

The credibility test: does the plan still work when politics change?

At Aninver, we approach education feasibility as an investment discipline that links strategic intent to delivery capacity—grounded in operating reality, not optimistic assumptions. We bring the same rigor we apply in multi-stakeholder, policy-constrained assignments for development partners—such as the World Bank–commissioned Creative Economy Diagnostic and Toolkit for Sierra Leone and the Green Investment Climate Diagnostic in The Gambia, where reform recommendations had to be feasible within real institutional and market constraints. 

We also work on bankability-driven preparation and due diligence, including the feasibility study for establishing the Karachi Infrastructure Fund (Government of Sindh, under the World Bank–supported CLICK program) and the World Bank–supported pre-feasibility study for first-mover solar mini-grid PPPs in Lesotho, where risk allocation, procurement design, and implementation capacity determine whether projects reach financial close. 

On the execution side, we have delivered data and monitoring platforms that improve transparency and delivery control, including a regional project monitoring and information management portal for the SADC Secretariat and the ongoing management and enhancement of the Africa Energy Portal to improve data quality, visualization, and user experience. If your education pipeline must survive political turnover, the feasibility work has to be defensible, financeable, and operable from day one. Readers can explore Aninver’s Projects section for relevant references—or reach out for structured support in turning school initiatives into executable, investment-ready programs.