Uwezo, a Swahili word which means ‘capability’, has been a programme of Twaweza East Africa since 2009. Twaweza’s mission over the last ten years has been to enable children to learn, citizens to exercise agency and governments to be responsive to citizens’ demands in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Uwezo’s main function has been to generate and curate evidence on learning outcomes and use it to engage with policy actors and citizens to address the learning crisis. Uwezo has used the approach and methodology pioneered by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in India, in which trained citizen volunteers carry out assessments and obtain other relevant data, in the household setting, from large, nation-wide samples of children. To mobilise volunteers, Uwezo has collaborated with hundreds of local organisations that broadly represent civil society.
The Uwezo assessments have been carried out annually or biannually and reported systematically at regional, national and district/county levels, in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Over the last 10 years we have gone to all districts of the three countries, reached hundreds of thousands of households and assessed millions of children. To demonstrate that information collection is not an extractive process, we have embedded instant feedback to the households and communities that were selected for inclusion. The citizen volunteers have been encouraged to participate in measuring learning outcomes and become advocates for the improvement of basic education in their communities.
The Uwezo professionals have sought to communicate the findings to educational officials and other stakeholders at local, national, regional and global levels and to focus attention on the educational quality issues that have been raised, especially the fact that millions of children are leaving school without mastery of the very foundational skills needed to fulfil the promise of education. According to the theory of change adopted by Uwezo, the quality of a service is more likely to improve if demands are articulated simultaneously by civil society and by professional opinion and if these are directed at various levels of the chain of delivery – in this case policy-makers, educational administrators and teachers.
The skills regularly assessed by Uwezo are basic elements of reading and arithmetic that are supposed to have been mastered by the end of Primary Grade 2 and are a necessary foundation for subsequent learning. Children aged 6-16 years have been assessed, but special attention has been given, in analysis, to the performance of those attending Primary Grade 3 and above, as this provides evidence about the effectiveness of schools in achieving curricular goals. In the national and district reports, performance at easily understood levels of literacy and numeracy is reported. Variations in performance according to many different characteristics of individuals, households, schooling and geographical location are also considered. We recognise that equity has many dimensions that can only be explained if we expose these variations.
We also recognise that schools remain the formal pathway through which basic literacy and numeracy skills would be acquired and hence the need to examine the school contexts of learning. For this reason we have conducted some school surveys alongside our household-based assessments. It is for this same reason that in 2016 we sought to inquire on how children emerge from the foundational skills into deepened learning when the breadth and depth of learning demands become evident. We therefore conducted the Uwezo Beyond Basics Assessment in school settings, targeting more advanced literacy and numeracy skills that form part of the Primary Grade 4 curriculum and using samples of children attending Primary Grades 5 and 6. The ‘Beyond Basics’ assessments showed similar delays in the mastery of skills intended for Primary Grade 4, further highlighting the learning crisis.
We have recognised that the equity agenda includes interrogating learning levels for children in difficulties or in isolated localities. As a regular part of our work, we have utilised assessment evidence to engage communities and school systems to create awareness and trigger local actions for improved learning (Nakabugo and Savage 2018). In 2017 Uwezo also carried out a pilot study, applying its assessment of basic skills to children in Uganda’s refugee settlements and comparing their learning outcomes and learning conditions with those of children in host communities in the same districts (Uwezo 2018b). Through this work, we demonstrated the adaptability of Uwezo citizen-led learning assessment methodology and tools to crisis contexts. The work was referenced in the 2018 Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR) on Migration, Displacement and Education (UNESCO 2018: 60).