Opinion: Quality Education Cannot Exist Without Quality Libraries

“Quality libraries transform students from recipients of information into independent learners capable of adapting, researching, and innovating.”

—Mohamud Mohamed Siad

Somalia’s higher education system has expanded faster in 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 just with degrees, but with the ability to keep learning after their degrees end?

The evidence suggests the answer is often no. Somalia has substantially closed its access gap; 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 — are what teach graduates to evaluate evidence, adapt to new technology, and keep learning once formal instruction ends.

That capacity increasingly determines who gets hired, who builds a business rather than waits for a job, and who becomes part of Somalia’s next generation of researchers and innovators. The sections that follow examine why lectures alone cannot close this gap, what a genuinely “quality” library requires, and what universities, government, and employers can each do about it.

The reason this gap persists is structural, not a failure of teaching quality. It is tempting to treat the problem as one to be solved with better lecturers, better curricula, or more classroom hours. Those things matter, but they address only part of the picture.

A lecture, by its nature, delivers a fixed body of information on a fixed schedule; it answers the questions the instructor chose to ask. What it cannot do, structurally, is teach a student how to find and evaluate an answer to a question nobody asked in class.

That capacity — searching, comparing sources, weighing conflicting evidence, and reaching an independent judgment — is built through sustained engagement with a library, not through additional lecture time.

This pattern is not unique to Somalia, and it is well documented elsewhere. UNESCO and the World Bank have each described what is now widely referred to as a global “learning crisis”: education systems that have successfully expanded access to schooling without a matching expansion in what students actually learn while enrolled.

 Access and quality are not the same achievement, and conflating them has costs. A graduate who can recite what was taught but cannot independently investigate a new problem is poorly positioned for a labour market being continuously reshaped by new tools and new demands.

Technological change is what makes closing this gap urgent rather than merely desirable. Graduates are entering a labour market where new software, artificial intelligence applications, and industry practices emerge faster than university curricula can be revised.

The most valuable graduate is therefore not the one who knows the most at graduation, 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 a graduate employable also makes her capable of creating a job rather than simply applying for one. Somalia’s economy, like many economies in the region, will not generate enough formal jobs to absorb every graduate; a significant share of young people will need to create opportunities themselves.

That kind of entrepreneurship depends on exposure to diverse ideas, the ability to research markets and problems independently, and the confidence to test and revise an approach without a supervisor providing the next step.

This is precisely where a library’s value extends beyond employment. A quality library does not simply prepare students to compete for jobs; it also prepares them to create jobs. Exposure to diverse books, research findings, market analyses, biographies of innovators, and entrepreneurial case studies expands a student’s imagination.

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

None of this works, however, unless libraries themselves meet a real standard of quality. A “quality library” is not simply a room with books. It requires professionally trained librarians who teach information literacy as a distinct skill; collections aligned with the curriculum rather than dependent on donations; access to digital research resources; and structured collaboration between librarians and faculty so that library use is built into coursework rather than left to individual initiative.

Remove any one of these components, and what remains is a storage room, not an academic library — a distinction accreditation frameworks should examine as closely as they examine laboratories or governance.