Prominent world development leaders including Bill Gates and the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons  have called for a “Data Revolution for Development”.  Bill Gates has noted, “From the fight against polio to fixing education, what’s missing is often good measurement and a commitment to follow the data. We can do better. We have the tools at hand.” The High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons highlighted, “We also call for a data revolution for sustainable development, with a new international initiative to improve the quality of statistics and information available to citizens. We should actively take advantage of new technology, crowd sourcing, and improved connectivity to empower people with information on the progress towards the targets.”

At the same time, governments have data needs beyond what’s implied by international agreements and goals. For some adult literacy or technical-vocational education are high priorities, but are not reflected in international goals and monitoring frameworks. NGOs are advocating for specific areas of education (girls’ education, special needs education, among many others) and are calling for data that allow tracking of efforts especially for disadvantaged groups. Finally, donor agencies are beginning to gear up.  Importantly, for many of these actors the agenda is shifting towards greater focus on access plus quality, and within quality, learning outcomes. But is the education sector prepared to provide the necessary data for all of these needs?

Better data drive funding

Is the education sector sufficiently geared-up to respond to a data-driven funding environment?

In the past 20 years or so, the international focus on health (as tracked by the amount of foreign assistance funding), has more than doubled compared to the funding for education.

While the sectors are different, it is clear that major investments have helped the health research sector in many ways: First, they could produce more statistics. A single donor, USAID, supported some 280 household surveys focused on health, compared to five on education. Secondly, they could produce better statistics. Better because they are outcome-focused, good at showing progress, and able to demonstrate how much more efforts are needed. As a result, the health sector has received significantly more funding. The education sector must step up and change those statistics in its favor.

The education sector needs a data makeover

The global educational community must respond.  This will require some important changes:  better specification of the technical content to match high priority policy concerns and the nature of the data we collect and use; new approaches toward addressing the institutional set-up (who’s in charge, who collaborates, who funds?);  and a more clearly defined role for new technology and innovation. The sector must also identify the cost of a “down payment” for getting started, and what might be next steps to join the data revolution.

Subsequent blog posts will go into each of these issues in greater depth. Here are some of the guiding questions as a starting point. We invite opinion and responses on the Education for All Blog of the Global Partnership for Education.

What data do we need?

Education, as a sector, could do a better job of gathering and providing basic data, such as numbers of schools. While data revolutions and “Big Data” capture the imagination, there are more mundane, less complex efforts that can make better use of relevant and accurate “Little Data”.

So how can we measure, talk, and advocate about increasingly relevant education issues? Learning outcomes, the needs of the most marginalized children, needs of early childhood, and others, are important drivers of an equity and quality agenda that embraces the importance of access to learning but goes beyond Given the growing list of data needs, how do we decide what issues and indicators to prioritize? How do we determine the best data collection strategies for some of the more specialized indicators, like those on learning and disability or school safety? What is the role of household and school surveys as opposed to administrative records and Education Management Information System (EMIS)? How can we use other administrative data?

How can countries better collect and use data?

Ensuring more and better data requires that we understand the institutional and financial incentives to produce and use data. What are the constraints for improving the supply of data? Is there really demand for data? Do countries already produce more data than they can effectively use, and if so, what will happen if they, and the international community, ask for even more data? Is there demand for data and are sufficient resources available to fund quality information systems in countries and institutions to produce the data that’s needed?  What is the role for EMIS within ministries? And, who should fund the development and dissemination of data? Can NGOs and the private sector help to demonstrate more agile ways of doing things using tools such as crowd-sourcing (see High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons report)?

Making best use of technology

Technology is disrupting many sectors. At the same time it creates new possibilities in data-gathering and transmission: one can now do mobile banking even with very “dumb” cell phones, farmers can get price quotes, and parents can locate school budget data. Some NGOs in the education sector are reacting, beginning to use technology in interesting ways for learning assessments or supporting parental organizations. But official systems have been relatively slow to catch up. Many systems are based on what worked in the West 50 years ago. Can developing countries “leapfrog” these EMIS legacy systems and actually improve the EMIS and other legacy systems at the same time? In short, how can we take advantage of existing and developing technologies?

What does innovation cost?

Innovation will have a cost. Agreeing, for instance, on how to measure the relationship between education and special needs education will require expert meetings, pilot surveys, discourse and dissemination of new standards. Who will pay for this? What might it actually cost to get started in at least 20 countries? And, tying back to the institutional issues,: who will coordinate, or at least make sure emerging lessons are being shared, if true coordination is impossible?

What’s next?

This post is part of a series of six blog posts sketching out what a data revolution for education should look like. They will be posted  in various blogs (listed below).  In the last post of our series, we will take into account the feedback and opinions that we receive, and come back to this blog to summarize the reactions and suggest possible next steps.

The authors are writing based on their own opinions and not necessarily representing the views of their home institutions or their institution’s funders.

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This blog sets out the main themes for a series of six blogs which sketch out what a data revolution for education should look like. The successive blogs will be found at the Global Monitoring Report (http://efareport.wordpress.com/), the Brookings Institution (http://www.brookings.edu/about/centers/universal-education), UNICEF (www.unicef.org), World Bank (http://blogs.worldbank.org/education/), and Global Partnership for Education (http://www.educationforallblog.org)