Education Data Use in Emergencies: Data Mapping and Stakeholder Consultation Report

The Middle East Education Research, Training, and Support (MEERS) initiative supports continuous data collection, research, training, and analysis related to learners, teachers, education systems, and education outcomes in the Middle East.

To better understand how MEERS could contribute to the global conversation around education in emergencies (EiE) data availability and quality with a focus in the Middle East region, a data mapping and stakeholder consultation process was created. This process took place in two stages:

1. An initial data mapping and stakeholder consultation process that informed MEERS’ Year 1 EiE data activities.
2. A second phase of stakeholder consultations that focused specifically on how different EiE actors use data, leading to validation of an EiE data usage framework.

This report provides a summary of the key findings. These findings pointed to six primary ways that EiE actors use data: planning, monitoring, coordinating, evaluating, policymaking, and advocating. Humanitarian and development actors discussed the use of data in similar ways, despite our initial expectation that there would be a substantial divide between how these two sectors thought about data use for informing their EIE work. These commonalities point to a shared starting point regarding data use and a shared set of challenges that can provide the foundation for increasing coherence between humanitarian and development actors. The more notable difference that emerged from the data was that respondents’ proximity to EiE implementation changed the way they thought about data in predictable ways. Finally, when examining how actors use data, we found that although frequency, timeliness, specificity, and aggregation mattered, what mattered most was context, use, politics, relationships, and organizational capacity. The findings indicate that improving data and evidence for EiE does not depend solely on ‘technical’ aspects of data, but also on institutional and relational factors that enhance data collection, data sharing, and data use.