Data Must Speak: Ethiopia
Positive deviance reports and project briefs
Highlights
The Ministry of Education in Ethiopia developed its Education Sector Development Plan (ESDP) 2020/21-2024/25, outlining its vision of transforming society through harnessing the full potential of learners to become productive citizens. The ESDP includes several goals, including improving equitable access and participation in education for all children, improving the quality and relevance of education, ensuring good governance, and using education to establish national unity in diversity. As part of its plan, the MoE aims to improve its Education Management Information System (EMIS), including collecting more granular data, to inform decision-making and the equitable allocation of resources.
By merging and analyzing existing administrative datasets in Ethiopia, the Data Must Speak (DMS) research helps to identify important associations between school inputs and school performance that can inform public policies and investments in the education sector. The DMS research leverages this administrative data to identify positive deviant schools – or those schools outperforming other schools operating in the same contexts and with equivalent resources. It then identifies the practices and behaviours that may be contributing to positive deviant schools’ success and explores how to scale these to more schools in the country.
Data Must Speak (DMS) is a global initiative launched in 2014 to address evidence gaps and mitigate the learning crisis using existing data. The DMS Positive Deviance research is co-created and co-implemented with Ministries of Education and key partners. It employs mixed methods and innovative approaches, including positive deviance, behavioral sciences, implementation research, and scaling science, to generate knowledge and practical lessons. The research focuses on understanding 'what works,' 'why,' and 'how' to scale grassroots solutions for national policymakers and the international education community.
On this webpage, you will find all the DMS Positive Deviance research outputs related to Ethiopia:
DMS Stage 1: Understanding what resources and contextual factors are associated with good school performance
- Stage 1 report: Unpacking Factors Influencing Primary and Middle School Performance in Ethiopia
DMS Stage 3: Discovering locally-led behaviours and practices to improve quality education
- Stage 3 report: Schools Inspiring Change: Research on the practices and behaviours of positive deviant schools in Ethiopia
- Executive summary of the DMS stage 3 research in Ethiopia
