Samuel Maley

Across the windswept plains of Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth-largest country by land area, opportunity often depends on location and geography. In Astana and Almaty, students at well-funded public schools enjoy the luxury of robotics labs and trilingual instruction. In the western steppe, however, children gather in aging buildings where electricity flickers and textbooks are passed from sibling to sibling. The nation’s vastness has quietly become its most stubborn barrier to educational...

In Kenya, at every major transition point, whether it's primary school, secondary school, or university, students are filtered through high-stakes national examinations that determine who advances and who is left behind. While these exams are intended to ensure fairness and merit, they have instead become a mechanism through which inequality is reproduced. This system has produced what many scholars and educators describe as an “exam economy,” in which enormous social, financial, and...

Thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa’s classrooms still bear its scars. A child in Johannesburg’s affluent suburbs attends a school with robotics labs and digital libraries. Meanwhile, in Eastern Cape, another studies under a leaking roof, with no access to the internet. Despite constitutional guarantees of equal education, the legacy of segregation persists through economics. Roughly 70% of South African schools lack adequate libraries, and nearly half still rely on pit...