Data, Assessment and Accountability
Achieving foundational learning at scale in Africa requires systems that consistently generate, interpret, and use data to drive action. Across the continent, countries have made notable progress in expanding data systems, strengthening learning assessments, and elevating learning outcomes within policy dialogue. Yet significant gaps persist – particularly in linking data to decision-making, ensuring coherence across system levels, and translating evidence into concrete improvements in teaching and learning.
As highlighted in the FLEX 2024 Declaration for Action, strengthening the production and use of high-quality data, evidence, and assessment, as well as accountability mechanisms, is central to ending learning poverty.
FLEX 2026, under the theme “From Commitments to Results,” places strong emphasis on moving beyond data generation to data use— ensuring that evidence informs system reform that harnesses emerging opportunities (e.g., EdTech and AI), resource allocation that promotes equity and gender equality, and instructional improvement to strengthen learning outcomes.
This sub-theme focuses on how African countries are building integrated, policy-relevant, and action-oriented data and assessment systems that reinforce accountability and accelerate learning outcomes at scale. This sub-theme is structured around two distinct but complementary areas:
1a. Data for action and accountability:
This component focuses on the broader education data system—beyond learning assessments alone—and how system level data are used to guide decision making, monitor implementation, and strengthen accountability. It focuses on improving data quality, integrating data across sources, and institutionalizing data use in planning, budgeting, and implementation. Key actions include integrated education management information systems (EMIS), early warning systems, policy trackers, school censuses, and quality assurance/school inspections, which underpin data-driven governance and accountability.
1b. Strengthening learning assessment systems:
This area focuses specifically on learning assessments – how countries have been designing and implementing robust, aligned assessment systems that measure foundational learning outcomes, and how assessment results have been used effectively to inform education policy and classroom practice. It emphasizes the development of coherent frameworks that connect large-scale, regional, national, and classroom-level assessments to foundational learning goals, ensuring that results are meaningful, comparable, and actionable. Strengthened assessment systems should not only track progress but also guide instruction, support teachers, and reinforce system accountability for learning outcomes.
Together, these areas aim to advance a shared objective: building systems in which data and assessment are not ends in themselves but core drivers of improved teaching, stronger accountability, and sustained gains in foundational learning across the continent.