Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Morocco, which all have French as an official language, could become emerging markets for the UK.

This is especially timely due to them having very young populations and it being an election year for Senegal, for Cote d’Ivoire in 2025 and Morocco the year after, explained Jamie Hastings, founder and CEO of MyIO.

“When looking at education policy and speaking to university partners and pathway providers shows that the latter are [actively] operating in these regions, whereas institutions are beginning to map entry qualifications, academic experience and the like.

“While the biggest barrier is the language, there are huge swathes of the populations across these countries whose English is better than mine. There are a lot of English speakers,” he told delegates at The PIE Live Europe.

“We all know that there’s a very strong desire, with the Francophone students, to associate themselves with the English language curriculum,” posited Lanre Kesiro, regional director – Africa at QA Higher Education.

Kesiro mentioned that the national association of private schools in Morocco has given a deadline in 2025 to integrate the English language curriculum as part of the Moroccan system.

Using the country as example, Kesiro noted just under 69,000 Moroccan students left the country to study in 2022. Some 1,255 of those went to the UK to study, but 50% of those leaving Morocco are studying in France – some 34,961.

“What I do see here is an opportunity. We’ve already established that those in Francophone countries want to further associate themselves with the English language curriculum.

“What that tells me is that in the next couple of years the majority of those students could potentially end up in an English language speaking country in Europe. And in terms of priority, which country do you think they would actually look at? The UK,” Kesiro suggested.

A 2021 British Council report suggested that the majority of young Moroccans believe English is overtaking French as the country’s primary foreign language.

UK institutions, including Coventry and Cardiff Metropolitan, have already set up transnational education agreements in Morocco, as further opportunities open up.

In 2023, early in the year and in November, 15 partners joined Hastings and Emma Tayou Tarrant, director at Graduate Guidance Group – who both run the agency SUB Afrique – on trade missions.

They met with stakeholders in ministries of higher education, notably in the Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, who are “implementing changes in policies at much younger level to get English language throughout schools”, and within government departments.

“There’s a huge shift [in demand],” noted Hastings.

Emerging from the pandemic, Canada was seeking to deepen its ties with Morocco amid its place on the country’s markets-of-focus list in its international education strategy.

When it comes to English language teaching and testing in the countries, the three countries’ provision for the practice is “quite fragmented”, but the British Council is very present in Senegal and Morocco.

“There are huge swathes of the populations across these countries whose English is better than mine”

Working to better those provisions there and in the Cote d’Ivoire could present better opportunities for “doing business in the region”, Hastings noted.

“We’ve done a lot of work with the international schools in the region, and where we’ve seen the most success is recruiting direct students from some of the partner schools,” Hasting said.

Those students are essentially doing the IB and then taking an IYO program or going through a pathway provider into institutions, he noted.

He also said he initially thought the region would be a postgraduate market – but due to the growing number of international schools in the region, especially in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire, there is another opportunity for the UK to capitalise on the region for undergraduate recruitment, he added.