By David Sengeh, Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, Sierra Leone
The Transforming Education pre-Summit which took place in Paris at the end of June was a unique opportunity for the international education community to get together and discuss our long-standing challenges, which only been exacerbated as a result of COVID-19. Over 150 ministers of education and nearly 2,000 stakeholders from civil society, development organizations, youth movements and private sector agreed on the need to take bold actions to transform education.
There is now a clear expectation and a demand for us to be concrete in the outcomes we shape coming out of the Transforming Education Summit (TES) this September. In the coming weeks, we will need to specify how our statements will turn into commitments and actions. The world’s children demand this of us.
We will also need to be clear about how to track these commitments and actions to hold ourselves to account. In my view, there are three building blocks.
We already have the first of those. Over the past year, countries voluntarily set their national targets for 2025 and 2030 on seven SDG 4 benchmark indicators, marking their individual contributions to our global education goal. This is a great foundation to build on.
The second is that we should learn from this national SDG 4 benchmarking approach to also monitor our TES commitments. Where there are existing effective systems within countries (in and out of government) to track progress, we should enhance those and utilize them as much as possible.
The third, therefore, is that we need to come up with a small number of indicators from the action tracks of the Transforming Education Summit whose achievement will help transform education.
In some action tracks, the benchmark indicators can serve as such headline indicators. We may not need new ones. In others, we may need indicators to rally around for monitoring our progress. For example, the percentage of schools connected to energy or the internet may be one such flagship indicator for Action Track 4 on digital learning and transformation – energy and connectivity access are essential for digital learning. Others, on school feeding, on climate change education, on aid to education may also complement the seven SDG 4 benchmark indicators we already have.
Note (1): Indicators in bold are the 7 benchmark indicators.
Note (2): Indicators in other colours are potential TES indicators per Action Track.
Countries will then need to set their own national targets for those indicators based on their commitments. How many schools do they plan to have connected to the internet, for instance, by 2025 and 2030? This will be the basis for a transformative compact in which international programmes will help support these ambitions.
I am very pleased that my team has worked hard on ensuring that Sierra Leone too could submit benchmark values for 2025 and 2030.
Because we should remember that, while the Education 2030 Framework for Action may have originally envisaged this as a mechanism ‘for addressing the accountability deficit associated with longer-term targets’, the way that the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Global Education Monitoring Report have designed it, the national SDG 4 benchmarking process is ultimately a formative tool – to help keep us all, whether in the Global North or the Global South, focused on key objectives.
The process in Sierra Leone, for example, has shown that we need to do better in the area of learning assessments. We have benefitted in the past from external support from our partners to carry out such assessments, but the country is not yet reporting on the SDG 4 indicator and has not yet developed a national assessment system although we have set up a national assessment unit to kickstart the process.
The report released last week on the occasion of the second review of SDG 4 at the High-level Political Forum in New York enables every country to review how its peers have approached their SDG 4 benchmarks setting process. There are also a dozen country case studies that show how countries linked their national targets to their policies.
Reviewing our national targets in Sierra Leone will inform our existing commitments and aspirations in comparison to other countries at our level of development in the past, now and for the future. For instance, we are now reflecting on our ambition in our secondary completion targets even as we accelerate towards SDG 4 2030 targets.
But we are also happy to report on our achievements – for instance that we are closing the gender gap on secondary education completion. This is a major achievement only possible thanks to our focus on inclusion in our Radical Inclusion Policy and the commitments made in the Freetown Manifesto.
Overall, I want to say that we are pleased that this process has been put in place. It offers a strong mechanism for accountability and learning. These are principles that I have espoused as a minister – and which I would like our global leaders to espouse at the Transforming Education Summit.
