SACMEQ at a glance for 10 African countries…

Towards the end of last year I got really frustrated that no one had used the SACMEQ data to create an “Education at a Glance” type of document which contained the essential statistics we can get from SACMEQ. (For those of you who don’t know, SACMEQ is a survey that is conducted in 14 African countries and tests Grade 6 students in mathematics and language and also has a bunch of other information on things like teacher content knowledge, student background, school facilities etc.) So I holed myself up in my office for a few days and did the number crunching and created “SACMEQ at a Glance (10 countries combined PDF)” for ten of the SACMEQ countries. For some reason I didn’t blog about it when I did it, so here it is 🙂

It’s been available on the RESEP website for some time now and I’ll include the decriptive blurb from there below:

“The SACMEQ at a glance series is part of an ongoing research project on data from the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). The aim of these documents is to provide a two page snapshot of some important elements of the primary school system in each of the participating countries, allowing for comparisons both within and between countries. Statistics are reported for ten African countries for SACMEQ II (2000) and SACMEQ III (2007). The ten countries are: Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The results are also presented for three sub-groups: school location (urban and rural), gender (boys and girls), and student wealth (poorest 25% of students and wealthiest 25% of students) for each country. Some of the reported statistics include the prevalence of functional illiteracy and innumeracy, textbook access (reading and mathematics), pupil-teacher ratio, teacher content knowledge, proportion of students receiving a free school meal, as well as the proportion of schools with electricity and water, among many other statistics. These documents should be a helpful resource to researchers and policy-makers alike, providing accessible information in a comparable format.”