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Accepted Paper:
Measuring SDG 4: experiences from designing and implementing an international citizen-led assessment in Africa
Muhammad Usman (People's Action for Learning Network) Modupe Adefeso-Olateju
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.
Knowledge networking within Africa [initiated by EMU Maputo; also involvement by PAL]
Session 1