Evidence Hub: Education Partnerships between the State and Non-State Sector

• In Event: Bridging the Research to Policy and Practice Gap – Evidence to Impact

Proposal

Problem statement, relevance and context

Governments in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) face significant pressure to find and implement innovative education policies with limited resources in order to address the learning crisis (UNESCO, 2018; World Bank, 2018). Yet, it is challenging for Governments and those supporting them, to access and understand the evidence on education policies in different contexts to inform their decisions. Evidence platforms have been identified as key tools for knowledge brokering through “building the evidence architecture to institutionalise the use of evidence” as they offer a user-friendly range of evidence products to decision-makers (White, 2019).

This presentation discusses how an academic institution and a non-profit organization that partners with Governments in LMICs to strengthen their education systems have been working together to help tackle this issue by conducting and updating a systematic review of evidence and making it accessible to policymakers through an Evidence Hub. The Evidence Hub is an online platform that aims to help make high-quality evidence more accessible to policymakers by bringing it in one open-access, searchable database with user-friendly summaries.

Inquiry and findings

The focus of the review of evidence are collaborations between the state and non-state sector in education. This topic is highly relevant as UNESCO has announced that the upcoming 2021 Global Education Monitoring report will focus on non-state actors in education. Though at times controversial, these types of collaborations have attracted interest from several governments who see their potential for improving access to quality education (Patrinos, Barrera-Osorio & Guáqueta, 2009; Aslam, Rawal & Saeed, 2017). Our aim is that education reformers considering these types of collaborations can be guided by evidence, particularly in regard to potential effects on disadvantaged groups and equity issues, such as poverty, gender, and disability.

This presentation will describe the framework used, including the criteria and rigorous search methods and protocols used to conduct and regularly update the systematic review of evidence and will present the contents of the Evidence Hub. Importantly, the presentation will raise a critical remaining challenge: ensuring that those who need this evidence know about this resource and use it to inform their decisions. This panel will provide a unique opportunity to exchange with other panellists and the audience on strategies to make this a reality.

Contribution to the field

The Evidence Hub platform offers a contribution as a tool to translate peer-reviewed evidence into knowledge accessible for all through open-access, user-friendly summaries, and search terms. The platform currently contains more than 70 pieces of research, that can be filtered by topic, country, education level, and more. It also offers the potential to highlight important evidence gaps, which can pave the way for further research and encourage researchers, especially those based in low-, middle-income countries, to focus on under-studied types of collaborations and their impact on learning and equity. With the Evidence Hub, we hope to contribute to spreading knowledge to better inform governments and policy makers to improve education.

Authors

• Julie Bélanger, Ark Education Partnerships Group

• Pauline Rose, University of Cambridge