Report of the 2014 AU EMIS Restricted Technical Committee meeting

The report of the 2014 AU EMIS Restricted Technical Committee (RTC) meeting, which took place in April in Accra, Ghana is now available. The Committee, established in 2008 under the auspices of the AU’s Human Resources, Science and Technology Division (HRST) is created to coordinate the monitoring of the implementation of the Plan of Action for the Second Decade of Education in Africa. It brings together high level experts drawn from ministries of education, representatives of regional economic communities, development partners and agencies engaged in promoting education statistics and information systems.

The Committee provides technical advice and review of the implementation of the EMIS priority area of the Plan of Action by coordinating the roll out of the continental strategy with regional and national initiatives. ADEA’s Working Group on Education Management and Policy Support (WGEMPS) acts as the Committee’s secretariat and lead agency in the implementation of the AU EMIS strategy. To date, WGEMPS has organised, facilitated and coordinated five AU EMIS RTC meetings.

The overall key objectives of the last meeting, co-funded by the AU and Germany's Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)  were to review the process and outcomes of EMIS development initiatives on the continent with a specific focus on reporting to the Committee for Ministers of Education of Africa biannual meeting (COMEDAF);  regional EMIS Peer Reviews, the hosting of an online continental database of education statistics for Africa, the coordination of international learner assessment methodologies and the role of EMIS in the post-2015 agenda in terms of a proposed “data revolution”.

The meeting was attended by Cameroon, Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa, the Economic Community of Central Africa States (ECCAS), and partners which included the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) and the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ), ADEA, UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), UNICEF ESARO, the International Center for Girls’ and Women’s Education in Africa (CIEFFA), and the AU’s Education, Statistics and Youth Divisions.

A communiqué was developed and approved by all the participants. The communiqué, among other things acknowledges the importance of addressing the role of education statistics in the post-2015-agenda, the need to initiate dialogue among national, regional and international learning assessment processes to reach a common position on the most appropriate methods and measures in Africa; to undertake further piloting of challenging continental indicators and the necessity of fast tracking the uploading of AU Outlook on Education Database with national statistics online.

For more information, please contact Angela Arnott, Interim Coordinator, WGEMPS, a.arnott@afdb.org