My presentation for the Making It Matter in Education event in London on Friday May 16th 2014 for Open Knowledge.

2. What is 'open development'?
Open Development sits at the intersection of
the 'open' movement, and international
development.
This could take the form of looking at how open
data can affect decisions made within
international development; open access to
research materials; or opening up the ways we
work, for example by being more inclusive.

3. Aims
To see development data used and useful. Although there
is currently more open data than ever before, data
availability is not the same as data accessibility.
We want to empower people to really use and make
sense of data that is relevant to poverty reduction.
To do this we need to focus upon the needs of citizens
and journalists in aid-receiving countries, as they are well
positioned to transfer the knowledge they gain to the
wider public.

5. Education and Development
Multilateral (UN) Organizations
- UNESCO
- UNICEF
International Organizations:
- World Bank
- Asian Development Bank
Bilateral Donors:
- DFID
- USAID
New / Emerging Aid Donors:
- China
- Russia
- Brazil
- India
NGO’s:
- Save The Children
- World Vision
- Oxfam
Actors and Aid Architecture

6. World Conference on EFA
1990, Jomtien, Thailand
EFA 2000 Assessment
World Education Forum
2000, Dakar, Senegal;
Millennium Declaration (MDGs)
EFA 2015
MDGs 2015
Stock taking
Target re-set
National Action Plans prepared
New global architecture/
review mechanism for EFA
Annual EFA Global Monitoring Report; UNESCO
Institute for Statistics monitoring, End of Decade
Notes on EFA Progress (2012)
Start of global EFA
movement
EFA Goals and targets set
Lead agency: UNESCO
6
Global EFA Movement:
Jomtien to Dakar to 2015
Mid-Decade
Assessment (1996)
Asia-Pacific Mid-Decade
Assessment (2006-8)

7. 1. Expand Early Childhood Care
and Education
2. Achieve Universal Primary/Basic
Education (UPE)
3. Provide Life Skills and Lifelong
Learning
4. Improve Literacy Rates
5. Achieve Gender Parity and
Equality in Education
6. Provide Quality Education
7
The Education MDGs and the
Six EFA Goals
MDG 2:
All children, complete a full
course of primary education
by 2015
MDG 3:
Eliminate gender disparity
in primary and secondary
education, preferably by
2005, and in all levels of
education on later than
2015
Education is key to achieving all the MDGs

8. Strengths of the MDG goals
• Brevity of goals and targets.
• Imparted a focus about poverty and deprivation
• Galvanized support for poverty as a priority
• Stipulated time horizon
• More aid
• Harmonised and coordinated action
• Improve national level accountability system -
improved data collection.

9. A UN idea that
‘changed’ the
world: galvanized
political
commitment
Concrete, time
bound targets
anchored in human
development
Provided a robust
basis for
international
development
assistance
Crafted in a top down
technocratic manner
Were not well
contextualized and
missed out on
important
development
challenges
Not integrated with
any resource
framework
‘Minimum’
Development Goals?
MDG 8 lacked will and
ownership?
Positives
Negatives

10. MDG beyond 2015 need to be informed and crafted through a
broad based, inclusive, bottom up consultative process with a
sub-national, national, regional and global canvas iteratively and
interactively
The global goals should be amenable to being tailored to
national and local contexts
Expand the Agenda to new goals and targets
• Stiff choices and tough trade offs for global consensus
• The Rio+20 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) must build
from MDGs and not seek to overburden the MDGs
Extrapolate MDG beyond 2015 and complete the unfinished
agenda
Need to account for the changed development landscape and
emerging global realities (growing inequities, economic crises,
climate change in particular)

11. The technical question is also political
• HLP call for a 'data revolution' and strong emphasis on
transparency, accountability, and governance.
• Demand for increased country ownership and
participation in goal setting processes and more
politically smart thinking about aid and development.
• SDG highlight need for decentralised data to leverage
'common but differentiated responsibilities and
collective capabilities'.
Challenges for education:
• Data is crucial for planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation purposes in education.
• Shifting focus from access to quality and the relationships between them.
• Debate around measuring quality: 'Learning Metrics task force'.

12. The technical question is also political
• Triangular and South - South cooperation will require
more open and better managed knowledge flows.
• Need to focus on equity and the 'middle ground' in
developed and developing countries.
• Expiring MDG toolkit of indicators and goals brings to
light new sources and focuses for data, new drivers of
change and changes in the future shape of
development in education.
Challenges for education:
• Data is crucial for planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation purposes in education.
• Shifting focus from access to quality and the relationships between them.
• Debate around measuring quality: 'Learning Metrics task force'.

13. Gaps in education progress
Slow progress in many goals - most of the EFA goals are
unlikely to be met by 2015 – ‘unfinished business ‘.
• Poor ECCE progress
• Failure to link education, learning and employability
• Lack of attention to Adult Literacy
• Gender parity at the expense of equality
• Lack of focus on learning and quality teachers and
teaching
• One size does not fit all
• Equity and equality ignored
• Failure to link educational goals with other MDGs
• Aid decline

14. Education quality is a key concern
A focus on education quality emerges as a key thematic priority for the post
2015 agenda.
• Learning environment: An expanded vision of good quality education
includes attention to all aspects of the learning environment.
• Learning: the focus on education quality placed emphasis on learning
which has emerged as a key goal in almost all discussions on post 2015
education goals.
• Teachers emerge as crucial to education quality and learning (conditions
of service, professional development, participation in policy formulation)
• Debate about what counts as learning and how it should be measured
• Different agencies and organisations propose different suggestions and
goals of learning for the post 2015 framework.

15. Relevance of Education
Relevance implies responding to changing global, regional and
national contexts and needs, including preparing learners to become
active citizens, equipping learners to lead informed and economically
productive lives, raising awareness and appreciation of their rights.
Relevance is about improved linkages between education, life and
employment, and ensuring that learning is more responsive to
changing. aspect of relevance include:
• Skills for employability
• Education for Sustainable Development
• Global Citizenship
• Sexual and Reproductive Health Education
• Information and Communications Technologies

16. Central Asia
East Asia and
Pacific
South and West
Asia
49.4 million
21.2 million
647,000
Out-of-school breakdown by sub-region
Total number of out-of-school
children and adolescents
• World: 141 million
• Asia-Pacific: About 72 million
Over half of the world’s out-of-school
population live in Asia-Pacific
Source: 2011 Global Monitoring Report

17. “As we accelerate our work towards [EFA and] the MDGs, we must
always remember that our effort is not simply a statistical exercise. It is
a moral imperative. And it is up to us to put a human face – the face of a
forgotten child – on [EFA] and the MDGs.”
- Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director

18. Education and Development as a
Human Right
• Educational attainment is linked with
– Better overall-being (health, nutrition)
– Higher income (GDP)
– Social mobility and social norms
– Reduced risk of recurrent poverty
– Enhances human security
• Education equality and income equality are
closely linked

19. Inequality in Education by Location
Urban/rural gaps in school participation rates, 2000s

20. • Poverty alleviation should start with early
learning interventions
• The need to fulfill the right to education is
greatest in humanitarian crises
• Learning outcomes and quality require increased
attention
• Increased attention to better understanding of
bottlenecks and barriers
Actions for Acceleration

21. Actions for Acceleration
Key lessons for sharpening focus and scaling-up good practices
1. Galvanize political commitment, appropriate policies,
coordinated provision of technical and financial resources
make a difference
2. Adopt a holistic approach to education
3. In developing strategies, “One size does not fit all”
4. Social protection and safety net programs provide strong
incentives for enrolling and remaining in school
5. Build robust education systems resilient to external pressures

22. - Improve data on marginalized groups and
further disaggregate and decentralize data
- - Explicit data on equity and equality issues:
eg. WIDE UNESCO http://bit.ly/1dgXWt9-
- Combine national government data / PISA
data with flows from other data sources
- Mining 'big data' to bridge complex gaps in
service delivery
Widening data for education and development

23. Open Data Opportunities
- Overcoming information asymmetry.
- Blurring of data boundaries / categories and
generating new hybrid data sets.
- Building tools to access and analyse data and
capacity at local level to share, analyse and access
data.
- Using low cost mobile devices to collect, generate
data in different contexts.
- Data localization in multiple languages.

24. Ideas and applications for education
- Using data to increase the effectiveness of
existing voucher schemes in education.
- Collating data together on ECCE from health
records and education, to identify stunting and
disability earlier on to tackle it better.
- Using metadata via peer to peer networks with
'open badges' to recognise skills and overcome
barriers to formal and higher education.
- School report cards detailing school performance.

25. Open Data Initiatives in Developing
Countries
National Initiatives:
- Moldova : http://bit.ly/19Vwn6N
- Nigeria: http://nigeria.opendataforafrica.org/
- Rwanda: http://africaopendata.org/group/rwanda
- Kenya: https://opendata.go.ke/
- Uganda: http://www.opendev.ug
- Ghana : http://data.gov.gh/
Sub-national initiatives:
- Edo state Nigeria http://data.edostate.gov.ng/
Sub-sector education
- CHET South Africa Higher Education Open Data project
http://chet.org.za/data/sahe-open-data

26. • http://opendevtoolkit.net/

27. Globalization and Higher Education
Snapshot: The Changing face of Higher Education:
- Corporate search for talent
- Rise of openness and open forms of education
- Demand for analytics and data
- Demand for agile approaches
- Rising global demand for complex skills
- Increased investment in Higher Education in
emerging countries

28. Demand for new solutions focusing on:
• Analytics and data
• Agile approaches
• Learning design in education

29. McKinsey Human Capital Report
Tomorrow’s workplace will look different from today’s:
there are big opportunities to rethink organizational
design and workplace flexibility
Securing a pipeline of skilled future workers: the war for
talent is being pushed forwards by emerging markets and
mismatches between skills and jobs
Engagement: younger employees seek connection,
autonomy and purpose.
Need for business to ensure that HC becomes more agile:
organizational agility is an essential response to volatility
in today’s environment

30. DEMAND FOR
INNOVATION
DEMAND FOR
DATA

31. • Market forces and Massification of Higher Ed
• New Technologies
• Lack of Government Investment
• Widespread Skills Mismatch
• Rise of Openness
• Rise of Learning Analytics
External Pressures on Higher Education
• Increasingly diverse student profiles
• Fewer full-time students.
• Wider range of learning needs
Internal Pressures on Higher Education

32. Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012 10:124
Annual volumes of articles in full immediate open access journals

33. • Blended and distance-learning
• MOOCS
• Interest-based communities
• Commercial and corporate universities
New Kinds of Academic Programs

34. The Traditional University

44. • Students
• Mentor groups
• Alumni
• Associations
• Academic boards
• Unions
But what is missing in this picture?
Social and political organization of education

45. Open Development Mail list:
https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-development/
Sources and Further Reading: http://bit.ly/1jJxyxt