Launch of the online African Education Research Database

The African Education Research Database, an online curated collection of research conducted by researchers based in sub-Saharan Africa, was launched in Paris on 15 June. To help users quickly identify relevant research, the 2000+ studies in the database are searchable by country, keywords and research methods.

The database results from a partnership between the REAL Centre and Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA) which started in June 2017. It aims to raise the visibility and impact of education research from sub-Saharan Africa, and identify priorities and partners for future research. African-based research tends to be ‘overlooked and undervalued’. Yet progress towards global and regional priorities, including improving equitable access and learning in the region, requires policy actors to use local evidence as a basis for making informed decisions about policy and practice. .

At the launch of the database, at the offices of the Agence Française de Développement in Paris, Suzanne Grant Lewis, Director of UNESCO IIEP, stated:

“This is a very important contribution which IIEP wants to take full advantage of. It will inform IIEP’s technical support to countries, our policy advising, our training materials, as well of the design of our research. And of course, it will help to identify institutional partners. In our applied research, we want to build on existing work in Africa.”

It is hoped that others working in education in sub-Saharan Africa will also find value in this resource.