GEEAP Recommendation on SDGs 4.1.1a Measurement

Adopted from GEEAP press release

The SDGs are important milestone for achieving sustainable solutions, in education SDG 4 - Ensuring lifelong learning opportunities for all, from early childhood to adult education; Ensuring equity, inclusion and gender equality; Ensuring effective learning and the acquisition of relevant knowledge, skills and competencies, the global community has committed to quality education. 

one of the main challenges has been how countries are measuring the SDGs not that we are half-way point and issues associated with collecting data to measure progress and achievements of the global goals.

The Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, co-hosted by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, UNICEF, USAID, and the World Bank fills a need in the education sector.  The Panel is releasing its first recommendations on the Smart Buys in education for low- and middle-income countries.

To inform countries’ decisions about where to allocate their budget and reform efforts, the report groups education programmes into the following tiers of cost-effectiveness:

• “Great buys”— these interventions are highly cost-effective and are supported by a strong body of evidence.
• “Good buys” — where there is good evidence that these interventions are cost-effective.
• “Promising but limited evidence”—for these approaches, there are some rigorous studies that show high levels of effectiveness, but evidence on cost-effectiveness or examples of implementation at scale are lacking.
• “Effective but Relatively Expensive” – interventions with good evidence that they are effective, but they are a relatively expensive way to deliver learning outcomes. They might be appropriate for school systems with larger budgets or to achieve non-education objectives.
• “Bad buys”—cases where strong, repeated evidence shows that these programmers have not worked in the past in many situations or are not cost-effective.

The Panel’s previous report on Prioritizing Learning During COVID-19 focused on the most effective interventions to keep children learning during and post-pandemic

Its first report on Smart Buys in education for low- and middle-income countries was published in 2020.

The world is grappling with a deep global learning crisis with 70% of 10-year-olds unable to read a simple
written text (World Bank, 2023). Children who fail to acquire basic numeracy and literacy skills by the age of 10
find it hard to benefit from future educational opportunities, drop out of school earlier while they and their
children are more likely to live in poverty. Regular monitoring of progress on achieving these foundational
skills is critical to help governments understand where they are making progress and where further action is
needed. If gaps are caught early there are interventions that enable children to catch up (GEEAP, 2023). The
decline in basic numeracy and literacy outcomes as a result of school disruptions during Covid-19 makes
monitoring foundational learning even more urgent (GEEAP, 2022).
As members of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, an interdisciplinary group of global experts on
education evidence, we are extremely concerned by the downgrade of the foundational learning indicator
(SDG4.1.1a) due to concerns of lack of data coverage. As researchers, policy makers and practitioners, we have
decades of experience measuring foundational learning, implementing instruments and using learning data for
policy analysis and policy design, experience that spans Africa, Asia, North America, and Latin America. While
we recognize that there is a need to substantially improve learning data quality and coverage, a stock of
credible assessments do exist, especially when it comes to the mastery of basic skills, a key focus of the SDGs.
Our professional opinion is that several of the current surveys which measure learning across multiple low- and
middle-income countries are of sufficient quality (and have been used to produce sufficiently credible data in
recent years) to contribute to a valid stock of learning data, and hence, to be counted against the requirements
of the Technical Cooperation Group (TCG) chaired by UIS. Many surveys currently under consideration
including MICS, EGRA, EGMA, ASER, and ICAN have been extensively used in the academic peer reviewed
literature. In our own research many of us have tested, validated, and/or published research on the basis of
these indicators. These surveys use a similar approach to measure literacy and numeracy, for example in the
use of a small number of questions they use to test whether a child can comprehend what they read. We have
used this approach in our published research and can attest to its reliability.
A failure to use all available good quality data generates the risk of downgrading and dropping the
Foundational Learning indicator. It would have a large negative impact on the visibility of foundational learning
goal and indicators, potentially reduce the interest of countries and agencies in producing more and better
learning data in future, and risks delaying progress on the learning crisis. We therefore call on the global
education community to take a pragmatic approach and leverage the existing measures to continue to monitor
foundational learning while simultaneously expanding international collaboration and assisting national efforts
to improve the coverage, comparability, reliability and quality of data, to support countries to measure what
matters to improve educational outcomes. Importance of Measuring Foundational Learning (SDG 4.1.1a)