At the turn of the new millennium, the United Nations listed education as one of its millennium development goals (MDGs). The Organization aimed “to ensure that by 2015, children everywhere … are able to complete a full course of primary schooling” (www.un.org/millenniumgoals). In 2015, “the MDGs were succeeded by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” One of the goals of SDGs is “[to] ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Missing from both MDGs and SDGs is a mention of the medium of instruction through which education will be imparted, nor is language given any significant role at all to achieve the projected SDG in education. This paper makes the case for Africa’s indigenous languages, especially regional lingua francas, to become partner media of instruction throughout the entire educational systems (primary, secondary, and tertiary), along with former colonial languages (e.g. English, French, Portuguese, Spanish). It argues that education through the medium of former colonial languages, practiced over the past 200 or so years, has failed to deliver literacy in Africa as the continent has the highest illiteracy rates in the world. Drawing on the notions of prestige planning (Haarmann 1990), linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991), and language economics (Grin, Sfreddo & Vaillancourt 2010), the paper suggests ways in which African lingua francas could become a viable medium of instruction in the schools without undermining the privileged status of former colonial languages. In particular, it calls for an education through the medium of African indigenous languages to be associated with economic returns so that the speakers of these languages can view them as an instrument for upward social mobility, much as they do an education through the medium of former colonial languages.