Our team delivers services to strengthen education systems and scale up interventions. These activities lead to better transparency, accountability, decision-making, and investments.

We promote self-reliance for countries in providing quality education for all children. We have implemented education systems strengthening activities – including assessing, planning, training, monitoring, and evaluating – for countries such as the Congo (Kinshasa), Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Pakistan, Senegal, South Sudan, Thailand, and Zambia.

We develop and implement tools that assess capacity and track performance. For instance, we used our Capacity Scan (CAPScan) diagnostic tool in Iraq to assess the education sector capacity of the national government and local municipalities. In Egypt and Morocco, we developed a tracking tool with benchmarks for the skills development of assessment specialists in curriculum analysis, item banking, test construction, data management, and psychometrics.

We provide technical assistance for research into systems strengthening and sustainability. We led the Sustained Outcomes in Basic Education (SOBE) study, which resulted in recommendations for fostering the sustainability of education programming in developing countries. We supported the Education Systems Strengthening (ESS) study, which analyzed patterns of institutional strengthening in developing countries and provided recommendations for sustaining education systems.

In addition, as a leader in supporting the scale-up of successful interventions, we apply our research-based guidelines – the Scaling Up Management Framework and the Scaling Up Toolkit – in the education sector. We have used these guidelines with donor education officers in our global Scaling Up for Sustainability training and with government education specialists on the scale-up of a bilingual primary school curriculum in Senegal.

We also actively participate in the Global Community of Practice on Scaling Development Outcomes, which was launched in 2014 as a forum for development professionals to share experiences and learn lessons about ways to ensure that successful interventions reach the millions of people who can benefit from them. Visit the newly launched CoP website to join the community and engage with other scaling experts.