Across Africa, 98 million children cannot get into a classroom — not for lack of will, but for lack of money. When a family in rural Niger or eastern DRC must choose between feeding children and schooling them, feeding wins. When the cost of transport to the nearest school exceeds a daily wage, children stay home. When a girl’s safety cannot be guaranteed on a five-kilometre walk, she does not make the walk. These are not failures of parental love or ambition. They are rational responses to impossible economic conditions. The price of educational exclusion — in lost human potential, in foregone economic growth, in preventable suffering — is incalculable. The 98 million children currently out of school are not a statistic. They are individuals whose lives will be defined, in significant part, by whether the adults and institutions around them choose to act with the urgency this crisis demands.