A great accomplishment arising from the era following 1990’s World Declaration on Education for All in Jomtein, Thailand, is recognition of the gender gap in education, and the mandate for sex-disaggregated reporting from funders and multilateral agencies. Data on the dramatic access and outcome disparities between male and female learners created demand for programming focused on gender inequity. Twenty-seven years after Jomtien, there is a substantial amount of evidence on solutions that build gender equity in education, and on how education systems need to adapt to help girls and boys overcome gender-related institutional barriers.
The Education Equity Research Initiative, a collaborative partnership led by FHI 360 and Save the Children, seeks to create the same dynamic around other aspects of inequity in education – be it poverty, ethnic or racial disadvantage, migration status, or disability. As a community, we create frameworks, modules, and tools, so that little by little the reams of data that get produced include a consistent set of questions around equity of program participation and equity of outcomes.
My previous blog post speaks to the need to be deliberate in building a monitoring, evaluation and learning system that generates the data and analysis that help answer the question: are we improving education equity through our programming and policy? But how do we operationalize equity in education, in the context of education development programming? In Mainstreaming Equity in Education, a paper commissioned by the International Education Funders Group, our collaborative begins by recognizing that an equity-oriented monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) system around a program or set of interventions has an essential purpose not just to produce data on scope and coverage, but to allow for depth of understanding around who benefits and doesn’t, and offer actionable information on what to do about it. Here I outline five features that describe such a learning system.
