Idowu Biao

Professor Idowu Biao has enriched the field of adult education in West and Southern Africa for more than three decades. Over the course of his career, he has facilitated the implementation of adult education courses and projects in Nigeria and Botswana. In the university context, he has played leadership roles and trained thousands of students who now hold important positions across Africa. Biao has published more than one hundred articles in cutting-edge national and international journals in adult and continuing education. He effectively combines scholarship with practical adult education projects, of which he has led or participated in about sixty. Biao’s work has helped develop adult education policies that have benefited organizations and governments across Africa.

Biao’s career in adult education started in his home country of Nigeria, where he implemented projects of impact. From there, he gradually emerged as an international leader and educator, serving in higher education institutions in Nigeria, Lesotho, and Botswana. An activist and roving bilingual scholar in French and English, he served as the lead for many internationally funded projects in several African higher education institutions. In June 2022, Biao was a lead member of UNESCO’s CONFINTEA VII in Morocco, focusing on global adult and lifelong learning initiatives. He also headed the Global Challenge Research Fund projects at the University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin, in 2020 and 2022, and led the DVV Alpha Development adult facilitators’ workshops in Cape Town in South Africa, Accra in Ghana, and Bamako in Mali from 2004 through 2007. 

In this and Biao’s other work, Africa is central. Nearly all of his contributions to adult and lifelong learning have been made with the aim to employ learning as a tool for advancing the social, economic, and psychological emancipation of the continent. More than one hundred of his publications bear testimony to the centrality of Africa within his work, including “African Values as Natural Drivers of Global Citizenship” (2024) in the Journal of Adult and Continuing Education and his edited volume Learning Cities, Town Planning, and the Creation of Livelihoods (2019).

Throughout his career, Biao has steadily contributed to adult and lifelong learning in a practical way. He served as consultant to the Women Farmers Advancement Network in 1998 as they sought help from international nongovernmental organizations and succeeded in shifting agency to scores of women across northern Nigeria. He helped promote nutritional and informational self-help strategies that ultimately increased these women’s economic and individual independence. He also assisted Nigeria’s National Commission for Adult Literacy and Botswana’s Ministry of Education to develop national policy documents in adult education.

Biao’s efforts have increased the visibility of adult education to other disciplines and areas of practice both at the University of Calabar and the University of Botswana and in venues across Africa. For example, his elective undergraduate course in adult education at the University of Calabar in 2008 became so popular and enrollment so large that it was scheduled in the university’s mini stadium instead of a regular lecture hall. The topics of his presentations at high-level international forums go beyond adult and continuing education as well.

Biao embodies scholarly and community achievement in the realm of adult education and lifelong learning. His blending of community participation with high-caliber scholarship and service will benefit people and governments across the African subcontinent for years to come.