Are our children learning? Annual learning assessment report Tanzania 2011

Uwezo traces its genesis to 2008, when a group of educators from East Africa visited Pratham, an independent civil society organization in India, which has developed an innovative and citizen-driven methodology that produces the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER, see www.asercentre.org). The East Africa team was struck with the potential of the approach to galvanise action from all quarters to affect positive change in education. At its core is the insistence on using evidence as the springboard for informed positions on the status of basic education. From a reliance on quasi measures to inform us if citizens are literate, Uwezo now offers evidence from actual assessments. The Uwezo national assessment is conducted at a local and national level but uses a methodological design developed and perfected at a regional and international level. Uwezo data is collected from the household at the village level, in sampled enumeration areas. The unit of analysis is the district. It is designed to be large scale in order to offer indications on the working of the national system of education. Uwezo is found in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, and it benchmarks itself on the ASER methodological design found in India and Pakistan.