AFLEARN Data Hub

Our mission

Our mission is to enhance quality and capacity across the full data life cycle from collection to impact. We do this through a range of activities in four inter-connected areas:

About the hub

Over the past 15 years, Africa has seen an increase in evaluations of foundational learning programs, greater participation in regional assessments, and the inclusion of foundational learning assessments in household surveys. However, these data are not easily discoverable or accessible and there are often issues around methodological consistency, coverage, assessment design, data quality and comparability. This hampers efforts to move from evidence generation to aggregation in support of policy-guidance. The recent downgrading of the SDG 4.1.1a indicator for reading and mathematics in grades 2/3 underscores the significance of addressing these challenges to prioritize foundational learning in Africa.

Historical inequities in funding and resources have limited the capacity of African organizations to drive sustainable change. Northern hemisphere institutions have frequently led key initiatives addressing learning poverty and assessment quality. This imbalance creates a legitimacy issue and undermines the development of a locally driven ecosystem for improving foundational learning outcomes. Strengthening the organizational capacities, infrastructure, and sustainability of African institutions and the broader research ecosystem is therefore essential to achieving long-term success in addressing these foundational learning challenges.

The newly established African Foundational Learning Data Hub (AFLEARN) illustrates how international donor investment in local infrastructure, knowledge transfer, and capacity-building initiatives can leverage existing expertise within Africa. Housed at DataFirst, Africa’s only internationally accredited open research data repository, AFLEARN builds on SALDRU and DataFirst’s long history of data scholarship and capacity building across the continent. These endeavours have historically focused on labour, poverty, inequality, and development. With support from the Gates Foundation, the hub now seeks to focus these capacities on foundational learning data, strengthening quality and capacity across the full data life cycle – from collection to impact.

AFLEARN aims to:

• create an African hub of foundational learning data and expertise in methods, measurement, data quality and comparability;
• empower African organizations and ministries to utilize such data for evidence-based advocacy and policymaking;
• support an African research agenda by expanding and capacitating the group of researchers working on foundational learning.