Evidence Synthesis

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Education.org was established to advance the use of evidence synthesis in global education. We are on a ten-year journey to build an Education Knowledge Bridge, and a critical part of that Bridge is developing a portfolio of evidence syntheses that contributes to the knowledge base and directly support education leaders in their decision-making.

In the last decade, the number of people displaced due to conflict, violence, climate disasters, and public health emergencies has been climbing steadily. As a direct result, an estimated 222 million children and adolescents need urgent education support. Around one-third, or nearly 80 million of these learners, are out of school. This growing crisis in educational provision for the world’s children and young people was gravely exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic, with experts estimating that a three-month school closure potentially caused a year or more of learning loss.

Accelerated Education Programmes (AEPs) have emerged as an important alternative route to access education and improve learning recovery for out-of-school children and youth (OOSCY) who have not been reached effectively by their country’s formal systems. Government AEP policy actions can improve access and learning for OOSCY, both in emergencies and more broadly, but policymakers are struggling to make critical choices regarding AEPs because of a limited evidence base on which to ground their decision making. This critical issue therefore became the focus of Education.org’s first high-quality synthesis of the available evidence, with the accompanying High-Level Policy Guidance providing contextually relevant and actionable recommendations supported by concrete examples and case studies for those shaping policies and guidelines for AEPs.

Education.org’s portfolio of documents and evidence related to Accelerated Education Programmes comprise:

• Key Notes for Ministries: An easy access, four-page summary of the five key recommendations in the High-Level Policy Guidance. 
• High-Level Policy Guidance: Steering Through Storms: Five Recommendations for Education Leaders to Close the Learning Gap in Times of Crisis serves as a decision-making tool for policy leaders and their technical leadership teams. It was updated in December 2023 to include the latest evidence on AEPs. 
• Accelerated Education Programmes: An Evidence Synthesis for Policy Leaders provides the in-depth synthesis of AEP evidence and was produced through a ground-breaking process including a global literature review, the crowdsourcing of difficult to find evidence, analyses of national AEP policies and case studies of successful country AEP programmes.  
• Country Case Studies on the successes and challenges of AEPs in Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Kenya tackling critical issues such as building programmes at scale, promoting teacher development, providing accelerated education for refugee children and those in conflict- and post-conflict zones.
• Supplementary Material: Including a Bibliography of Synthesis Sources and a list of Organisations providing AEP evidence for the synthesis.
• Press Releases on the publication of the AEP Synthesis and High-Level Policy Guidance.