Contextualise the Global Evidence Base for Teachers and Policymakers in the Lake Chad Basin.

• In Event: Global Evidence Architecture: consolidating a fragmented landscape

Proposal

In 2019, an initiative was launched to contextualize global educational evidence for the Lake Chad Basin, aiming to make international research more relevant and actionable for local teachers and policymakers. This effort focused on adapting the pedagogical strategies found in a widely recognized global evidence base, originally developed to support teaching and learning improvements. The process began with extensive stakeholder engagement and contextual analysis to assess the relevance of 30 school-based pedagogical approaches. Based on this consultation, several strategies were excluded from the localized evidence portal due to limited applicability in the regional context. These included one-to-one tuition, teaching assistants, learning styles, school uniform, and setting and streaming.

For the strategies retained, a complementary evidence search was conducted to identify research from Sub-Saharan Africa. This regional evidence was used to supplement the global impact data, ensuring that the recommendations were grounded in both international and local contexts. The goal was to enhance the practical utility of the evidence for decision-makers in the Lake Chad Basin.

In addition to refining the existing evidence base, the stakeholder engagement process surfaced three critical topic areas not previously included in the global toolkit: menstrual hygiene management, cash transfers, and corporal punishment. These topics were identified as highly relevant to the local educational environment but lacked representation in the original database. To address this gap, global impact evidence reviews were conducted for each of these topics.

The review of cash transfers found a small but positive effect on student attainment, leading to its inclusion in the localized portal. For menstrual hygiene management, although the topic was deemed important, the review revealed an insufficient number of rigorous studies to support a meta-analysis on its impact on academic outcomes. Nevertheless, the topic was included in the portal due to its contextual relevance. In contrast, the review of corporal punishment found no rigorous studies that could support evidence-based recommendations, highlighting a significant gap in the research literature.

All findings were disseminated in an accessible and transparent manner to ensure usability by educators and policymakers. The evidence was made available through an online portal and summarized in bilingual (English and French) poster formats to maximize reach and comprehension. This initiative was part of a broader effort to build a global evidence ecosystem for teaching, supported by international development and education foundations.

Author

• Patrick Okwen, Effective Basic Services (eBASE) Africa