Investing in Learning: the Case for Strengthening the Collection and Use of Learning Assessment Data in EiE Contexts [EN/AR] – World

Executive summary

Global displacement is at a record high, with children under 18 accounting for 40 percent of the 79.5
million people forcibly displaced. Children in these conflict and crisis contexts make up about 20 percent
of the world’s primary-school aged children, but represent about 50 percent of those not in school. While
improvements in education access have been made, one in three refugee children still have no access to
primary education, and two-thirds of these drop out before they make it to secondary education.

At the same time, the world faces a learning crisis, with far too many children not learning the basics in
school. There are numerous examples – from Ghana and Malawi, where more than 80 percent of students
at the end of grade 2 were unable to read a single familiar word such as ‘the’ or ‘cat’, to urban Pakistan
where 40 percent of grade 3 students could not solve a basic two-digit subtraction such as 54 – 25.
Such examples shine a spotlight on the need for more and better data on who is learning and who is not.
Yet children and youth in conflict and crisis contexts, who have experienced disruption to their education
and may suffer physically and emotionally from the effects of conflict and crisis, often remain invisible
within national education data management systems.

This may be because they are excluded, either deliberately or for practical reasons, from participating in
national assessments. Alternatively, national assessment data may not be disaggregated along important
dimensions, such as international protection and displacement status, socioeconomic status, gender,
location or disability status, which would reveal inequities and exclusions.