This article was originally posted on the FHI 360 Research for Evidence website.

As we work to realize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to education, it is the responsibility of every funding, implementing and research organization internationally to be asking questions about our own contributions to building equity in education. While a great amount of data gets produced in the course of education projects, only a fraction provides the detail that is needed to assess intervention impact on different equity dimensions. At the technical and implementation level, organizations need to capture and use the necessary evidence to understand and respond to inequity in education provision and outcomes.

To do that, we need to be deliberate in building monitoring, evaluation and learning systems that generate the data and analysis that help answer the question: are we improving education equity through our programming and policy? Disaggregated data are the first step to understanding who is left behind in obtaining a quality education for successful and productive adulthood. My recent paper, Mainstreaming Equity in Education, outlines key issues and challenges that need to be addressed around equity in education, and provides a way forward for mainstreaming equity-oriented programming and data analysis. In this blog post, I show how disaggregated data can make a difference to understanding impacts. I then provide evidence that, unfortunately, such disaggregated data are rarely collected.

Read the full article here>>