One hand cannot clap: How can African countries use national assessment results for global reporting?

By Hon. Conrad Sackey, Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, Sierra Leone; Josephine Kiyenje, Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM Report); and Yanhong Zhang, UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)

Among the eight sessions on learning assessments in Africa at the 2026 Foundational Learning Exchange (FLEX) meeting organized in Lilongwe in mid-July, one focused on a deceptively simple question: how do countries move from national learning assessments to input into global reporting on learning outcomes?

At first glance, this looks like a technical question about methodologies, standards or statistical procedures. What emerged from the discussion was something broader.

Standards establish what good practice looks like. Leadership and institutional coordination make it happen.

The session opened with a familiar West African proverb: Wan han no de klap — one hand cannot clap, No matter how strong or capable a hand may be, it cannot create a sound on its own.

The proverb became the thread connecting the entire conversation. Governments provide leadership. Assessment institutions build technical capacity. Regional and international organizations contribute frameworks, expertise and quality assurance. Development partners support innovation, system strengthening and sustainability. Teachers, curriculum specialists and researchers help translate evidence into practice. Each contributes something important; together, they create the conditions under which learning assessment systems can flourish.

Across Africa, countries have made significant progress expanding access to education, yet governments need credible evidence about what children know and can do if they are to improve learning outcomes and direct resources effectively.

Standards create the conditions; leadership delivers the results

Consider the example of aviation. Participants travelled to Malawi through different airports, with different airlines and on different aircraft, confident that these systems would work together. This confidence rests on shared international standards that enable different systems to operate safely and reliably.

Similarly, frameworks such as the African Union’s Continental Assessment Framework (CAF-Africa) give countries a common foundation for strengthening their national assessment systems. Alignment with the Global Proficiency Framework, the Minimum Proficiency Levels established through UIS-led global processes, and agreed SDG indicator 4.1.1 reporting criteria together with the Data Readiness Review and Support Mechanism create a shared architecture through which nationally produced results can become internationally comparable.

But aligned assessments do not automatically become trusted learning data. Moving from assessment readiness to reporting readiness requires institutions that can coordinate actors, assemble evidence, document procedures, sustain assessment cycles, respond to technical review and ensure results are used. These are fundamentally leadership and governance challenges — and that was the central message illustrated by the country experiences.

Three countries, one shared challenge

From the GEM Report’s Spotlight Series, the context for assessment in Africa was presented, highlighting  the need for countries to set realistic national benchmark targets based on their own context, thereby creating stronger ownership and accountability. Building on this foundation, the most instructive part of the session was the discussion of implementation. Ghana, Sierra Leone and Madagascar each presented a different pathway toward stronger, more credible learning data. Their contexts, systems and priorities differ, yet all three illustrated the same underlying reality: trusted learning data emerge not only from technical standards, but from sustained leadership and institutional coordination.

Ghana has tried to translate a mature national assessment programme into evidence that supports both domestic decision-making and international reporting. The National Standardised Test was already generating high-quality learning data, but moving toward SDG 4.1.1 reporting required extensive coordination across the Ministry of Education, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment and the Ghana Education Service, as well as assembling a comprehensive documentation portfolio and undergoing independent review. Ghana’s experience shows that confidence in learning data depends not only on assessment quality but on institutional capacity to document, validate and communicate the evidence behind it.

Sierra Leone has been building a nationally led assessment system, while strengthening technical quality and positioning the country to participate in international reporting. Building on its earlier P4 National Learning Assessment (Primary Grade 4), the country used its recent P0 and P2 assessments — early-grade rounds designed to capture foundational reading and numeracy skills — to strengthen the National Assessment Services Unit, institutionalize assessment processes, align nationally developed tools with the GPF, and establish a linkage to the global MPL. Its experience shows that international reporting does not require abandoning nationally owned systems; it requires leadership capable of building institutions that sustain both quality and comparability over time.

Madagascar has been moving from measurement to use. Through ENA, its national assessment programme, the country has increasingly focused on using learning data to guide policy dialogue, prioritize teacher support and remediation, and inform resource allocation. Recent work to strengthen benchmarking and improve how results are communicated reflects a broader ambition: turning assessment from a reporting exercise into a management tool. Madagascar’s experience shows that producing data is only the beginning — leadership is required to ensure data  influence decisions.

The pathways differed. But all three countries confronted variations of the same question: how do we build systems that are nationally meaningful while generating evidence others can trust?

Seeing the ecosystem in action

The discussion of pathways from assessment to reporting emphasized documentation, coordination, leadership and continuous improvement. And the country experiences showed what implementation looks like under real institutional conditions.

The session challenged a common misconception: that the goal is reporting itself. Reporting matters. Comparability matters. Standards matter. But none of these are ends in themselves; they exist to build confidence in the evidence that governments, educators and partners use to improve learning outcomes.

The country experiences made the deeper point unmistakable: the countries that treated reporting readiness as a leadership function — building institutions, assigning ownership, sustaining coordination across ministries and agencies — got further than they would have by treating it as a technical checklist. Shared standards provide Sierra Leone, Ghana and Madagascar with a common basis for producing credible and comparable evidence, while national leadership ensures that these standards are embedded in sustainable assessment systems and translated into better-informed policies.

Progress requires many hands working together: no government, institution or partner can strengthen a learning assessment system alone. Common standards create the conditions for trust, but standards alone cannot achieve trust without people, institutions and decisions.

Frameworks can establish standards. Partnerships can provide support. But only national leadership can transform assessment readiness into reporting readiness, and reporting readiness into better decisions for learners. That may be the most important lesson from this FLEX session.

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