Partnership to institutionalize evidence in education policies in Burkina Faso

The Ministry of National Education and Literacy of Burkina Faso and J-PAL Europe launched a partnership to integrate evidence into the country’s education policies.

The two organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that places a J-PAL staff person inside the Ministry of National Education and Literacy. With several education reforms in the pipeline, including new adult literacy programs, curricula, and teacher training programs, J-PAL will collaborate with Ministry staff to understand the education challenges that motivated these reforms and share policy lessons from existing evaluations that can help inform their design and effective implementation.

This partnership is the result of four years of effort by J-PAL Europe to expand its work with policymakers in Francophone Africa and to identify ways to increase the use of evidence in decision-making processes. As part of this work, J-PAL hosted or cohosted three events in the region: an Executive Education Course on conducting randomized evaluations of social programs in September 2012 (Ouagadougou), a conference on the access and quality of education in Francophone Africa in July 2014 (Ouagadougou), and a five-day policy and capacity-building workshop on impact evaluation research in June of 2015 (Abidjan).

Through this collaboration, the Ministry and J-PAL hope to identify policy issues where randomized evaluations would be especially informative for decision-makers, disseminate results from prior evaluations, and enhance Ministry officials’ capacity to commission and use evidence.