Strengthening African capacity for quality national assessments

• In Event: Enhancing transparency and quality in educational assessments: The role of the international education community

Proposal

Inequities in funding and resource access have historically left African organizations with limited capacity to drive sustainable change, while Northern institutions have led many key agendas, including those addressing learning poverty and the quality of national assessments. This creates a legitimacy issue and undermines efforts to build a locally-driven ecosystem for improving educational assessments. Strengthening the organizational capabilities, infrastructure, and sustainability of African institutions and the broader research ecosystem is therefore critical to ensuring long-term success in addressing foundational learning challenges across the continent.

This presentation will introduce an example of how international partnerships can effectively support local infrastructure and local capacity building efforts. The initiative is an African hub dedicated to foundational learning data, measurement, research, and capacity building. The hub’s goal is to strengthen data quality and capacity throughout the data life cycle, from collection to impact, by improving data infrastructure and research, offering technical expertise, and fostering capacity for data-driven policymaking and evidence-based advocacy.
The hub operates across four interconnected areas:

1. Data Access: The hub provides a comprehensive, open-access repository of African foundational learning data. Beyond curation, it enhances the usability of data through harmonization and standardization efforts.
2. Data Training: The hub offers capacity-building training for African researchers, advocates, policymakers, and NGOs through residential workshops, hybrid master classes, and ongoing support.
3. Data Research: The hub leads and supports research addressing data quality, comparability and measurement issues. It also offers month-long residencies for African scholars.
4. Data Advisory: The hub engages with data producers to improve assessment design and data collection, offering technical expertise on sampling and measurement issues.

It is important to emphasize that African institutions already possess the capacity to lead this work. The host organization of the hub has a long history of rigorous data research and capacity building, particularly in development economics. What is lacking is sufficient and sustained investment in infrastructure, knowledge transfer, and capacity-building initiatives within these African institutions to leverage existing expertise and resources for foundational learning.

This presentation will offer an overview of the hub’s activities and share case studies from ongoing projects to demonstrate how the international education community can better support local capacity for high-quality educational measurement in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

A particular focus of the presentation will be on a project aimed at developing sustainable strategies to improve the validity and reliability of national assessments. The hub is convening a series of engagements with African and international thought partners, bringing together experts with deep technical expertise as well as an appreciation for the local capacity and resource constraints prevalent in many African education systems. A key goal is to explore how technical assistance can be provided in a way that strengthens the capacity of local education agencies, ensuring long-term improvements in national assessments.

Author

• Cally Ardington, University of Cape Town