Measuring What Matters: A Community-Driven Approach to Holistic Learning in the Global South

• In Event: Reimagining SEL from the Margins: Measuring, Teaching, and Learning SEL for Holistic Outcomes

Proposal

As the global education community expands its focus beyond literacy and numeracy, the question is no longer whether to measure Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), but how to do so in a way that is meaningful, equitable, and rooted in the lived realities of children. For the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network, this means building on our Citizen-Led Assessment (CLA) approach, conducted at the household level by trained community volunteers, to reimagine learning measurement as a tool not just for data, but for equity, empowerment, and advocacy.

Citizen-led assessments are uniquely positioned to capture a fuller spectrum of learning. By operating at the household level, they reach children who are too often invisible in official statistics—those who are out of school, displaced, caring for siblings, or living through emergencies. Beyond providing data, this approach sheds light on the child’s broader ecosystem: the influence of gender norms, economic pressures, family dynamics, and crisis exposure. When local volunteers carry out assessments, the process becomes a movement. Communities gain awareness of learning gaps, engage in dialogue, and begin to demand change. In this way, the act of measurement becomes an act of advocacy.

PAL’s core tools remain simple, scalable, and inclusive. They are adaptable across countries and languages, while holding constant the central goal: to understand whether children are acquiring the foundational skills they need to thrive. Building on this foundation, PAL is now advancing a holistic learning measurement agenda that integrates three interconnected layers:
- Foundational skills in reading and mathematics.
- SEL competencies, defined in locally relevant yet globally informed ways.
- Household and environmental factors, including gender roles, family support, and economic or crisis-related stressors.

At the center of this framework is the child’s wellbeing, viewed not in isolation but as part of a dynamic ecosystem. By weaving together cognitive, social-emotional, and contextual domains, the model seeks to illuminate how children’s learning and development are shaped by intersecting influences.

Importantly, PAL’s approach is designed as a feedback loop: communities assess; data is gathered; findings inform programs, policy, and advocacy; and results are returned to communities to catalyze local action. In this way, measurement itself strengthens agency, builds demand for accountability, and equips stakeholders with evidence to push for inclusive and responsive education systems.

Through ongoing pilots in Uganda and Bangladesh, PAL is testing SEL tools that are context-responsive, gender-sensitive, and crisis-aware, while also addressing the tension between cross-country comparability and local relevance. This work demonstrates that it is possible to generate insights that inform both system-level accountability and community-driven change.

At CIES 2026, PAL Network will share lessons from these efforts and invite dialogue on what it takes to measure the full spectrum of learning in the Global South. Our experience suggests three imperatives: measure where children live and learn, embed equity and agency within assessment frameworks, and design with communities as partners. Only then can learning measurement become a force for inclusion, justice, and transformation.

Authors

• Najme Kishani, PAL Network

• Armando A Ali, PAL Network