Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the findings of the global mapping study and the utility of Citizen-led assessments in non-PAL Network member organizations in Africa and the flow of learning assessment methodologies; lessons from the citizen-led assessment approach in the context of South-South cooperation.

Paper long abstract:

Measuring learning outcomes has long been associated with the global North and flow linearly to the Global South. According to Brookings Institute (2016), assessment methodologies, approaches, and tools in the global south have borrowed mainly from the global North, where systems are presumably developed. In other cases, national systems are relied upon to measure learning and determine program effectiveness where learning interventions happen.

The citizen-led approach started in 2005 in South Asia when India's largest non-governmental organisation (Pratham) conducted an assessment of learning in 600 plus districts in rural India. The study was later christened the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). This Citizen Led approach involving the use of citizens to assess children in basic reading and numeracy later spread across the global South in Africa, South Asia, and Central America. A Network of organizations and programs implementing these assessments was formed in 2015 named the PAL Network.

The horizontal flow of by adapting and adopting this methodology has been evident in Africa. However, questions arise on the extent of this flow, patterns, and the motivations for adopting and adapting the Citizen led approaches (for assessment and in some cases interventions) in Africa among countries and organizations that are non-members of the PAL Network. Furthermore, there is limited knowledge on the utility of these approaches in responding to the local assessment needs and program delivery is worth interrogating. Besides, the enablers, as well as the barriers to this horizontal flow of assessment approaches, is another glaring knowledge gap.

In an attempt to respond to these questions, PAL Network conducted a global mapping study on the spread and utilisation of the Citizen led approaches in non-member organisations in both PAL Network countries and non-network member countries. This paper presents the findings of the global mapping study and the utility of Citizen-led assessments in non-PAL Network member organizations in Africa. The paper reveals that global south methodologies for learning assessment such as the citizen-led approaches flow horizontally. Furthermore, the approaches flow for different purposes and take different forms of adoption and adaptation.

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Paper long abstract:

With the World Development Report (World Bank, 2018) placing a significant proportion of children at risk of not learning in Africa, the prospects of realizing SDG 4 remain uncertain. According to Global Education Monitoring Report (2015), all the countries in Africa are spending over 10% of their national budgets to finance education coupled with private sector support, household expenditure, and official assistance flows. Comparable assessments for learning throughout Africa is necessary to create regional responses to solve the learning crisis within the global south context.

Since 2005, developed countries in the global south within the People's Action for Learning (PAL) Network have implemented country-specific, household-based, citizen-led assessments using simple instruments. These assessments have sought to establish the basic reading and numeracy competencies of children. However, the absence of comparable, contextually relevant, and robust international metrics is one challenge in measuring the progress towards achieving SDG 4. Even with the up-gradation of the indicator 4.1.1(a) from tier three to tier one, the lack of appropriate methodologies to track the achievement of the same is a source of concern. It is for this reason that the PAL Network designed and implemented a common citizen-led assessment of numeracy in its then-thirteen member countries (seven from Africa) from 2019 into early 2020. The assessment implemented in one rural district in each of the 13 participating countries focused on numeracy while utilising over 700 local volunteers who visited over 15,000 households in 779 villages to assess 20,088 children aged 5-16 years.

This paper presents the experiences of designing an internationally comparable assessment of learning as an effort to measure progress towards the achievement of SDG 4 in the global south. The paper also presents the preliminary findings from the study, outlining the numeracy competencies of children across various age groups as well as grades. This paper concludes that it is possible to design and implement an internationally robust and comparable assessment of learning outcomes in Africa and beyond.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates the experience of PAL Network in fostering knowledge exchange, adaptation and creation in Africa through adaptation of Citizen Led Assessment of literacy and numeracy competencies among children aged 5-16 years, through PAL Network.

Paper long abstract:

Africa is culturally diverse, eventually affecting education and knowledge creation. Knowledge in its acquisition through observation, sharing, or and phenomenologically that adds value by benefiting learning.

Formal education delivery in modern Africa complies with international commitments, recently the SDG 4. Measuring learning in many countries has long been associated with measuring children's mastery of curriculum content than competencies that are useful for knowledge application in daily life.

In 2008 a team of education experts from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania visited Pratham organisation in India to learn about the citizen led assessment approach that involved assessing literacy and numeracy competencies among children aged 6-16 years (ASER, 2008, Uwezo East Africa, 2013,2015). The visit birthed the CLA approach in East Africa through adaptation. (Jones et al. 2014, Uwezo 2013). The findings of the assessment became a wake-up call for respective governments by revealing the learning crisis. The assessment revealed that many children lacked foundational skills in reading and numeracy. Even 5% of the primary school completers could not read a grade two text. (Jones et al. 2014; Uwezo 2017).

In 2015, Peoples' Action on Learning (PAL) Network was established to coordinate all countries that are implementing Citizen Led Assessment and related actions to improve learning outcomes. Within few years, PAL network facilitated the hosting of many organizations from African countries (Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Malawi, Mozambique and Botswana) in East Africa for knowledge sharing and capacity building to adapt and conduct CLA. The adaptation of CLA in Africa took many forms and processes to make CLA relevant and appropriate to the African context as guided by education policies and school curriculum. Through citizen-led assessment, we have become a generator of sound, innovative and appropriate policy ideas to guide policy and curriculum changes and planning for delivery of quality and equitable learning for all.

This paper presents systematic adaptation and spread of the Citizen Led Assessment took place and in Africa with a focus on citizen involvement process, tools, language in specific countries, government consultation process, and data management for cross country comparability. The paper reveals that these connections within and outside Africa bred contextual assessments, new knowledge, collaboration, and coherence, resulting in a community of practice.

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Paper long abstract:

Recent developments in African higher education have called for decolonization of knowledge, curriculum (syllabi) (Baijnath, 2017; Sidoji & Rasedile, 2017) and other real or perceived forms of colonial legacy in African universities (Mbembe, 2016; Shay, 2016; Essop, 2016; Kamanzi, 2016; Le Grande, 2016). These discussions - for example, echoed in protests in South Africa since 2015 calling for the removal of colonial symbols from university campuses - have questioned the ethos and values of the university in Africa, including the need for "Africanization" (Nkoane, 2006)- a notion which also requires scrutiny as to what it means in practical terms (Mbembe, 2016). Despite the rising concerns with decolonizing African higher education, there is paucity of research which focus on the internationalization aspect of the decolonization discourse. In the global landscape of international education, Africa maintains structural features inherited from its colonial past, including a mismatch between inbound and outbound student mobility, with former colonies and more recently China becoming the major destination of African students. The tradition, in most African countries, is that universities would send their students to pursue further, if not entire, studies in the former metropole. This trend continues, even years after independence. Elites from former British, French and Portuguese colonies, even after developing their national higher education systems for over half a century, continue to send their kids to study in their former metropole using mainly the language, curriculum and knowledge tradition of these higher education. This trend implicitly - and sometimes explicitly - raise the question of what it meanings to internationalize, Africanize and decolonise for African higher education in "post-colonial" times. The focus of this paper revolves around the question of whether internationalization of African higher education needs decolonizing.

Paper long abstract:

Development projects in the Global South often continue to be led by partners from the Global North. As such, knowledge systems and practices of local communities can easily remain marginalized. At the same time, the field of international development studies has become increasingly concerned with the marginalization of local knowledge in policies of modernization and economic growth, and critical development scholars have emphasized the need to focus on the epistemic resources of marginalized stakeholders (e.g. Chambers 1983, Long 2001).

Contestation of international development commonly emphasizes epistemic issues that range from the critique of hegemony over local knowledge systems to positive models of transdisciplinary knowledge integration. This article situates these debates in philosophical debates about 'epistemic injustice' (Fricker 2007), 'epistemic oppression' (Dotson 2014, and 'epistemic blindness' (Ramose, forthcoming) that interact with the ambition to articulate alternative orders such as 'Epistemologies of the South' (Santos 2014).

Focusing on this increasing concern with knowledge diversity, we emphasize the need for explicit epistemological reflection that avoids overly harmonious ideals of transdisciplinary knowledge integration (Nadasdy 2003, Ludwig and El-Hani 2019). Making transdisciplinarity work requires more than just the recognition of knowledge diversity; it faces the challenge of articulating procedures of negotiation between vastly different epistemic communities. In practice, transdisciplinary processes involve more than a combination of propositional knowledge as different knowledge systems are entangled with different material practices and are shaped by diverging aspirations, economic needs, ontologies, and values. Building on the notion of 'trading zones' in philosophy of science (Galison 1997, 2010), and transformative dialogues as form of intercultural philosophy (Kimmerle 2011) we explore an epistemology of inclusive development and innovation.

As such, the article highlights the importance of South-South cooperation as process of negotiation between diverse knowledges on the African continent. The article will be illustrated with case studies from Lusophone countries in Africa - e.g. Mozambique - and outside Africa - e.g. Brazil - based on research projects of the authors. Both authors have a cultural and educational background in Western Europe, thus it requires critical reflectivity on their positionality and (potential) contribution to South-South cooperation.

Paper short abstract:

A comprehensive response from public and private sector frames three suggestions as imperative steps in urgent response to COVID-19 Pandemic within 2030 SDGs and corporate ESG framework: Urgent Public Health Safety Measures, Knowledge exchange and Remote Education Services, Economic stimulus.

Paper long abstract:

This paper builds an argument which supports a comprehensive response from public and private sector supporting three suggestions as imperative steps in urgent response to COVID-19 Pandemic: Urgent Public Health Safety Measures, Knowledge exchange and Remote Education Services, Economic stimulus. This research demonstrates the potential of implementing nationwide mobile phone texts message communicating public safety alerts, web-based health education for rapid dissemination of Ministry of Health security measures, and an adaptation of Social Cash Transfers (SCTs) to bolster emergency health service preparedness and health security sustainable development goals (SDGs). This paper also introduces the concept of CCTs in the Private sector to respond to the corresponding economic crisis accompanying the COVID-19 Pandemic. These policy recommendations consider Mozambique's main challenges affecting prospects of reaching these specific SDGs. These problematic factors include underdeveloped institutions, foreign dependency for market development, climate challenges, and a bifurcated state as a legacy of the late Colonial era.

Some of the strategies that have been proven to be effective for this response are a nationwide mobile phone texts message communicating public safety alerts; web-based health education for rapid dissemination, and an adaptation of Social Cash Transfers (SCTs) to bolster emergency health service preparedness and health security sustainable development goals (SDGs). These strategies would be more effective by incorporating the private sector into a collaborative effort to meet the challenges of COVID-19. The suggested framework to do so is ESG, meaning that this response would be environmentally sustainable, while upholding human rights, labor rights, and other social factors which are strongly related to the 2030 sustainable development goals.

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