Modupe Adefeso-Olateju

Seventy-seven percent of the evidence in education from the global south was produced by scholars in the global north. The notion of equity, balance, diversity is so important. Do we as scholars have a sense in which there is a superiority in ourselves? If so, it needs to be corrected. The highest office in the land is the one of the citizen, and it’s the only office that doesn’t have an office. There is a lot of deconstructing that needs to be done when we think about the production of knowledge, evidence, and data which can be done by following the principles of equity and continuing to ask the important questions.

Previously, Modupe Adefeso-Olateju shared the following comment as part of the report launch.

It’s critical that we capitalize on this once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the evidence-support system for educational decision-makers, including government policymakers, school-board officials, school principals, teachers and parents. I wholeheartedly embrace the idea in section 6.2 about this evidence-support system needing to be grounded in an understanding of local context (including time constraints), demand-driven, and focused on contextualizing the evidence for a given decision in an equity-sensitive way. Through the Global Evidence Commission, I’ve learned a lot about how we can complement our local educational evidence from Nigeria, including the citizen-led assessments we implement, with other forms of evidence specific to Nigeria, as well as with the best evidence regionally and globally. I see the UK’s Education Endowment Foundation evidence resources and the US Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse, and can immediately see the value in similar services being initiated in Nigeria and other low- and middle-income countries. Repositories like the ESSA African Education Research Database need to be strengthened and supported to become even more useful. We need to work at this.