Agenda 2030: Making Data Work for Education in Africa
One of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is Quality Education, with the aim to ‘’ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’’. According to an Education World Forum 2015 article, 2015 recorded about 33 million children as out-of-school in Africa, down from 44 million in 2000. Achieving the targets of quality education in Africa makes the institutionalisation of data gathering and reporting mechanisms on education essential. It is even more so, to record outcomes that are higher than those of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The United Nations General Assembly’s Resolution on the SDGs acknowledges that ‘’Quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregated data will be needed to help with the measurement of progress and to ensure that no one is left behind’’ because ‘’such data is key to decision making.’’ Education is strategic to achieving sustainable development, competitiveness and peace, and informs this examination of the role of science-policy approaches to transforming education in Africa.
Accessing data is a major challenge in Africa, making it difficult for effective decision-making across sectors including education. Where education data exists, it is usually defective. Also, there are deficiencies in the continent’s capacity and resources to harness, report, monitor and use these indicators to inform education planning. Although the continent recorded an increase in primary and secondary education enrolments as the MDGs ran their courses, African states can no longer afford to exclude timely data from their administration of all levels of education.
Empirical evidence-based education systems enable effective and timely identification of staffing and infrastructural needs in schools; enrolment rates (by demographics) for ensuring inclusion; improved quality of curriculum design and delivery; and monitoring and assessing of outcomes of education initiatives. In addition to improved transparency, effective policies and programmes can be quickly identified and replicated. Education ministries and international development partners can also easily detect problem areas and gaps in education delivery in Africa that need to be addressed.
In view of the above, the adoption of electronic record systems is necessary to effectively bridge education data gaps at national levels. Public-private partnerships at local and international levels for the transfer of statistics technology and expertise are also crucial to improving domestic capacities to scientifically generate, report, analyse and monitor progress in education.
Regular knowledge-sharing and peer reviews at the regional level is important for aligning data-informed policy agendas for the development of education in Africa. Tripartite cooperation frameworks should be adopted to operationalize empirically-driven education policies, where African states lead, with technical support from intergovernmental organisations, and states with advanced science-policy interface programmes. This will strengthen statistical capacities in African countries.
