Posts categorized IREX

IREX and Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG) are pleased to announce their collaborative work on the USAID-funded Early Grades Education Activity (ASAS) program, which launched in August 2023 and will run through July 2028. This blog explores how the ASAS program will empower teachers, universities, communities, and stakeholders within Jordan’s Ministry of Education and throughout the country to deliver inclusive and holistic early-grade education for Jordanian students from kindergarten to grade three in order to strengthen numeracy and literacy skills.

Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG) and our strategic partner IREX, supported by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, conducted a study of the education data systems in Kenya and Senegal. In our findings from this study, we underscore the necessity of a harmonized approach to education data management and share insights that provide a valuable roadmap for future reforms and investments in education data systems.

Many factors must be considered before investing in a data ecosystem for sustainable development, including the objective of the assessment, the focus level, and specific goals for data outputs. IREX’s Jesus Melendez Vicente and DG’s Carmen Cañas would like to share a few insights and questions to help you get started, including a curated list of tools for data ecosystem assessments.

Development Gateway: an IREX Venture (DG) and IREX, in partnership with the Hewlett Foundation, are pleased to announce a new research program supporting data-driven decision-making in education in East and West Africa. This two-year, $300,000 project to map education data and decision ecosystems in Kenya and Senegal will focus on the variety of administrative, census, and survey data collected to implement and monitor primary and secondary education. The goal is to holistically understand the barriers to more effective data collection, sharing, interoperability, and use. By understanding the barriers, we can better design support for more robust education data ecosystems that drive better learning outcomes.

IREX’s Data Compass and Development Gateway’s CALM are methodologies for assessing data ecosystems. While each methodology produces different outputs based on different needs, both prioritize local collaboration and development to produce insights and outputs that reflect local priorities and actionable recommendations that institutions can own and implement.

Data can be a powerful resource for education reform. Without it, education leaders can be immobilized because they do not have enough information to recognize that problems exist or to make the case for change. However, data only provides value if it is used to inform decisions.  Unfortunately, many education systems struggle with this step.  So, how can education leaders best be supported to use data to make better decisions in support of quality education improvements? In collaboration with local partners, IREX is supporting the development of data systems and tools to improve education systems through better, evidence-based decision-making.