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This article provides insights into a decade long process of evidence production and use in support of the Government of Ghana’s adoption of the Complementary Basic Education (CBE) programme for out-of-school children. A review of existing evidence on the programme and our semi- structured interviews with key stakeholders revealed the centrality of the government’s culture of evidence-informed policy making. Our findings also highlight the importance of both formal and informal relationships between key stakeholders and the often-neglected significance of civil society in evidence production and uptake, leading to a modification of Hinton et al’s policy impact framework.

African education research is often ‘overlooked and undervalued’ in global policy debates (Maclure 2006). This paper reports on a project to catalogue education research from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for the purpose of raising its visibility and strengthening the evidence base for national, regional and global policy and practice. The paper combines large-scale bibliometric analysis of education research outputs from 48 countries in SSA with a qualitative study of the priorities of African researchers. The study highlights the perspectives of African research and researchers with respect to informing the Education Sustainable Development Goal. Attention is given to areas of convergence and tension between global policy agendas and African researchers’ priorities for knowledge production. The quantitative analysis draws from structured searches of academic and grey literature databases, together with a process of expert consultation. The search sought to identify social science research outputs with implications for education policy and practice conducted by researchers in SSA over the period 2007-2017. Patterns and trends are identified regarding publication type, thematic foci, research methods, funding, and citations. The qualitative component derives from semi-structured interviews with African researchers and a range of non-academic stakeholders, including representatives of government agencies and NGOs. Thematic analysis was informed by previous studies of evidence use in education policy-making (Brown 2014). The paper considers lessons for the identification of research topics, research design and dissemination to enhance the visibility of African research in national and global policy debates. It further aims to support future research partnerships to inform the SDGs which are grounded in African knowledge and expertise.

This paper reports on a project to ‘map’ education research conducted by researchers and institutions based in sub-Saharan Africa as a basis for addressing the Sustainable Development Goals. A strong research base is required for governments, donors, NGOs, researchers and practitioners to engage in evidence-informed debate and decision-making on educational policy and practice. Despite signs that the volume of African education research has increased significantly over the past two decades, African scholarship is routinely ‘overlooked and undervalued’ (Maclure 2006), including studies with findings which are important for the achievement of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa, Agenda 2063, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Researchers based in the North are in a comparatively privileged position when it comes to disseminating their work. African research outputs are spread across a wide array of journals, working papers, monographs and other publications, which poses a challenge to policymakers, researchers and others seeking to access the evidence base. As a result, African research regularly fails to attract the necessary attention to effect changes in learning and conditions in schools and other educational settings. In the absence of an accessible indigenous research evidence base, local knowledge and expertise is frequently overlooked in favour of solutions developed elsewhere, often in markedly different socio-cultural and material contexts. This project seeks to address this issue and raise the visibility and impact of African education research through the development of an open access database and accompanying literature review of African education research. This study sought to identify social science research with implications for educational policy and practice conducted in the past decade by researchers and institutions based in sub-Saharan Africa. The research identification strategy involved two main strands. Firstly, structured searches were conducted using academic and ‘grey’ literature databases, including Scopus and BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). The latter draws on university repositories which have only recently become available online. The second strand involved a broad consultation of African researchers, institutions and organisations, including the Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), in addition to NGOs, researchers and others based in the North. Steps were taken to maximise the scope of the consultation in terms of regional and thematic coverage. The search was conducted in English initially, with plans to incorporate Portuguese and French at a later stage. Studies identified through this process were catalogued by author, institutional affiliation, country of focus, research methods, keywords, and number of citations. The keywords were developed through an iterative process of induction and deduction with reference to the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) thesaurus, and other indexing systems. The study reveals significant variation in the research productivity of different institutions and countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Positive outliers are identified, with implications for knowledge sharing and capacity development. Analysis of the keywords offers comparative insights on national and regional research foci. The exercise indicates a significant untapped source of policy- and practice-relevant research evidence in areas such as school-level language policy and planning, early childhood education, literacy development, teacher deployment and retention, and ICT in education. Key findings in these areas are discussed.

This article investigates the extent to which education publications authored by researchers based in sub‐Saharan Africa are published as open access (OA). We draw on bibliometric analysis of 1,858 peer‐reviewed articles over the period 2010‒18, together with interviews with 31 academics based in the region. Overall, we find a steady increase in OA publishing in the region over this period, although the proportion of OA publications remains low. The study finds that: (1) open access articles by researchers in sub‐Saharan Africa are concentrated in journals with a lower impact factor; and (2) authors in sub‐Saharan Africa tend to publish in higher quality journals behind a paywall, rather than in lower quality journals that either have no or lower cost for open access.

This article combines large-scale bibliometric analysis of publications on education by researchers based in sub-Saharan Africa with researchers’ accounts of their priorities and practice. Patterns in the thematic foci of the research from 48 countries in the region are considered from the perspective of international policy statements (the Education Sustainable Development Goal and the African Union’s Agenda 2063), alongside analysis of funding, co-authorship and citations. We find a large number of publications by these scholars in reputable journals which merit greater scholarly engagement. Furthermore, evidence presented in this paper challenges claims about the dominance of Northern research agendas in sub-Saharan Africa.

Most countries are far from achieving the new sustainable development target of equal access to higher education by 2030, with those in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa furthest behind. This raises questions about the allocation of public resources across the education system to promote equity. We use data from Demographic and Health Surveys and UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 31 countries in these regions to assess who benefits from public spending on education. Our results reveal an overall pattern of pro-rich education spending, increasing with education level. We find that this pattern can be traced to an allocation of resources to higher education that is disproportionate to the sub-sector’s size: even when higher education spending overall represents a small proportion of total educational expenditure, per-capita expenditure is extremely high. Given that the richest predominantly gain access to higher education, the current spending patterns are likely to reinforce wealth-driven education inequalities.