Africa Fellows in Education Program 2024/2025 for Sub-Saharan African Countries. Apply below.
1st April, 2024 (23:59 GMT).
Table of Contents
An indispensable element of successful long-term economic development is a skilled population. However, the major problem in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, is the low quality of education. For example, most children in these countries complete primary school without acquiring functional literacy and numeracy skills, reflecting educational systems struggling to prepare large numbers of students1.
Numerous factors contribute to this challenge, and a wide array of potential solutions have been proposed to tackle it. Transparent and analytically useful data from student assessments is perhaps the most critical initial step toward improving school performance. When properly constructed, this data identifies possible performance levels and encourages analyses that can improve low-performing school systems.
However, there is a lack of national testing and participation in regional or international assessments due to several factors, including costs, lack of capacity to conduct assessments, and aversion to possible embarrassment from the results. Notably, some of these issues are being addressed by the broad-based efforts of regional and international organizations to support the expansion of comparable student assessments.
Still, a closely related issue needs to be addressed: the need for more local capacity to use student outcome data effectively to improve policy and schools. While it might be initially possible to swap external people for trained local researchers, this is neither sustainable nor conducive to developing sound and well-informed decision-making in schools.
The Africa Fellows in Education Program (AFEP) aims to address this local capacity gap and improve education decision-making across Sub-Saharan Africa. AFEP will support a network of local policy fellows with enhanced skills in evaluating existing educational research, developing and using performance data to make better decisions, and introducing rigorous evidence into the decision-making process. Having a network of highly competent researchers across a region reinforces the value of using systematic evidence in decision-making and supports broad policy improvement. Local expert researchers will also form a constituency for expanding and improving the assessment structures in each country. The Fellows will be able to identify and produce high-quality research utilized in educational decision-making. They will also become active in outreach to policymakers and civil society actors and advocate for sound, analytically based local policies.
In sum, the objective of the AFEP is to build a group of Africa-based leaders capable of developing evidence and shaping educational policies relevant to their countries. They would be part of a global network of such people and could help build local networks of strong advocates for improving schools.
Fellowship
To be eligible for this call, applicants must:
Sub-Saharan African countries
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Funding includes a $35K research (cash) grant. Other expenses, with a value of up to $25K, for mentorship, study visits, conference travel, and in-country workshops to share research findings and training will be covered directly by the Program.
2 years
The Africa Fellows application process is managed by GEAI in collaboration with PEP. The applications will be assessed based on several factors, including prior preparation and the quality of an essay (see below). The expression of interest by the applicants should include:
Applications must be submitted via the PEP intranet system (see the detailed procedures below) before April 1, 2024 (23:59 GMT).
STEP 1: Register on the PEP website: click Register (see also the top right corner of the PEP website, next to “Login”) and fill out all required information.
STEP 2: Access your PEP account. Once your profile has been activated, you can access your PEP account by clicking the Login button (also in the top right corner above).
STEP 3: Complete your “profile”: click on your name (top right corner of your PEP account page).
STEP 4: Go to the menu under “My workspace” (top left corner) and click on “Submit a proposal”.
Visit Award Webpage for Details
This post was last modified on March 12, 2024 1:45 pm