Opinion: Quality Education Cannot Exist Without Quality Libraries

“A university may award degrees, but only a quality library equips graduates to keep learning, adapting and innovating throughout their lives”.Mohamud Mohamed Siad

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Somalia’s higher education system has expanded faster over the past decade than at almost any point in its history. More schools are open, more universities are enrolling students, and more young people are graduating than a generation ago. This is real progress, and it deserves recognition.

But access was never the finish line. A harder question now needs to be asked, calmly and without blame: are these graduates equipped not only with degrees, but also with the ability to keep learning after graduation?

The evidence suggests that, too often, the answer is no. Somalia has substantially narrowed its access gap, but it has not closed a second, quieter gap between what students are taught and what they can independently do with what they know.

This article argues that quality education cannot exist without quality libraries because libraries—not lectures—teach graduates how to evaluate evidence, adapt to new technologies, and continue learning long after formal instruction ends. That capacity increasingly determines who gets hired, who creates businesses rather than waits for jobs, and who becomes part of Somalia’s next generation of researchers and innovators.

The reason this gap persists is structural, not a reflection of poor teaching. It is tempting to believe that better lecturers, improved curricula, or more classroom hours will solve the problem. Those improvements matter, but they address only part of it. A lecture delivers a fixed body of knowledge on a fixed schedule; it answers the questions the instructor chooses to ask.

What it cannot do is teach students how to find and evaluate answers to questions that were never raised in class. The ability to search, compare sources, weigh conflicting evidence, and reach independent conclusions is developed through sustained engagement with a library—not through additional lecture hours.

This challenge is not unique to Somalia. UNESCO and the World Bank have both described what is widely known as the global “learning crisis”: education systems that have successfully expanded access to schooling without achieving comparable improvements in learning outcomes.

Access and quality are not the same achievement, and confusing the two comes at a cost. A graduate who can repeat what was taught but cannot independently investigate a new problem is poorly prepared for a labour market being reshaped by rapid technological change.

Technological change makes closing this gap urgent rather than merely desirable. Graduates are entering workplaces where new software, artificial intelligence applications, and industry practices evolve faster than university curricula can be updated.

The most valuable graduate is therefore not the one who knows the most on graduation day, but the one who has learned how to keep learning. Academic libraries cultivate that habit by exposing students to continuous inquiry, evidence-based learning, and independent exploration beyond the classroom.

The same capacity that makes graduates employable also enables them to create opportunities rather than simply apply for them. Somalia’s economy, like many others in the region, will not generate enough formal jobs to absorb every graduate.

Many young people will need to build opportunities for themselves. That requires exposure to diverse ideas, the ability to research markets independently, and the confidence to test and refine solutions without waiting for instructions.

This is where a library’s value extends beyond employment. A quality library prepares students not only to compete for jobs but also to create them. Exposure to books, research findings, market analyses, biographies of innovators, and entrepreneurial case studies expands imagination and encourages innovation.

Entrepreneurship begins with ideas, and libraries remain among the few places where students can encounter thousands of ideas beyond the limits of their prescribed curriculum.

None of this is possible unless libraries themselves meet genuine standards of quality. A quality library is far more than a room filled with books. It requires professionally trained librarians who teach information literacy as a core skill, collections aligned with academic programmes rather than dependent on donations, access to digital research resources, and structured collaboration between librarians and faculty so that library use becomes an integral part of coursework rather than an individual choice.

Information literacy is central to this standard. In an age dominated by search engines and artificial intelligence, students must know how to locate reliable information, evaluate its credibility, cite it ethically, and transform information into knowledge.

Information literacy is no longer an optional library service; it is a graduate attribute essential for higher education, employment, research, and responsible citizenship.