Jamie Saavedra, World Bank Education Global Director
“If we don’t have data we are really flying blind. If we don’t have data it’s impossible to know where systems are and it’s impossible to know if the policies that we are implementing are working or not. So we need to focus on the outcome and make sure that kids are in school that they are learning.
If we don’t have data we will never know if what we are doing is being effective or not. So it’s absolutely critical that we close the learning data gap and it’s really immoral that it exists.
We have unfortunately among low and middle-income countries too many countries for which we have no data at all, or we have old data or data that is not comparable or data that is not produced in a consistent and permanent fashion.
So, the establishment of mechanisms to measure learning is critical. Economies cannot think of going ahead and not measuring GDP because they won’t know if they are doing well or not. It’s so obvious that they should measure GDP. Well, it has to be obvious that we need to measure learning.
And we can do it now. We have the technologies, we have global strategies for learning, we have banks of items and in general, we have many tools and many initiatives to measure learning.
One of the key challenges of this…data compact is to precisely coordinate all of the different providers, the national, regional and international, such that in a coordinated way we are sure that all countries close their learning data gap.
One thing that is critical is that closing the gap is not about measuring learning once in a country. Closing the gap implies generating a system that generates comparable data that’s comparable for a long time; you see performance over a long time, data that’s comparable internationally and later that is high quality and studied in a permanent fashion.
This has to be a permanent task at country level, so donors can help and should help and to bring all donors that support national and international efforts.
But the key point is that it is about creating national capacities to measure learning permanently.
That will imply that eventually, all countries will have to invest themselves and measure learning because this is a permanent task in the same way that we pay salaries of teachers. We need to pay for measuring the outcome. If not, you cannot sustain a good system. Finally, this LDC is not only about supporting this Learning Data Compact, it’s not only about supporting the production of data which is critical.
But also we need to support the use of the data, because at the end you can supply, but if there’s no demand if teachers do not use the data to see where their students are, if principals do not use the data to see how much they need to improve their schools, if administrators do not know how their countries or regions in their countries are doing then this will just be a one-off interest in attempt.
So we need to work aggressively in the use of data at the classroom level and in the use of data in order to define better policies.
This is huge homework ahead of us but I think these are fantastic opportunities in which we are putting together in a coordinated fashion all the different players — international organisations and all the different providers and have one map in which we say there are learning data gaps in this country and we need to close them we need to make sure that by 2025 all countries have established a system which they can permanently measure learning that will be crucial in order to make sure that we can provide better education to all our children. “
Taken from a transcript of Jaime Saavedra’s participation in the UNICEF, UNESCO, World Bank Event at the 76th UN General Assembly, “Leveraging Data to End Learning Poverty: Towards a Global Learning Data Compact” September 24th 2021.
