USAWA AGENDA
Established 2020
BACKGROUND
Usawa Agenda is a not-for-profit organisation duly registered in Kenya. We envision a world where every child benefit from quality education. Therefore, we promote systems’ change for education justice through research, innovation and stakeholder engagement. This vision was born out of 15 years of conducting foundational literacy and numeracy learning assessments (11 years as Uwezo program of Twaweza East Africa and four as Usawa Agenda), which reveal stubbornly low and inequitably distributed learning outcomes. A deeper analysis led to the conclusion that the low and inequitable learning outcomes are a derivative of unjust education systems that augment rather than eliminate the disadvantages children bring into school. Indeed, learning outcomes manifest the underlying substructure of the education system, which is fundamentally unjust.
OUR TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACH
Usawa Agenda envisions a world where every child benefit from quality education. We believe that informed and motivated citizens are the most powerful agents of sustainable change. We view citizen agency as both a goal in itself and an effective means to improve service delivery and public resource management. The organisational ‘Theory of Change’ informs and underpins everything we do at Usawa Agenda; centering citizen agency in building public pressure that will then trigger actions to improve equity and quality of learning and reaction from policymakers.
WHEN granular yet large, robust, and independent evidence on learning levels, their distribution and their drivers are regularly generated and applied by an inclusive, locally embedded but globally connected coalition of actors to inform policy, practice, programming, and investment decisions, through innovation, partnerships, and evidence-based advocacy, THEN we can enhance education justice for every child and achieve improved and just learning outcomes.
ADVANCING EQUITABLE EDUCATION ACCESS
With rigour, we generate robust evidence on learning outcomes by and with the citizen volunteers through oral one-on-one assessments conducted in households. Through partnership with the community and the county partners generate independent evidence on learning outcomes through citizen-led learning assessment in basic literacy and numeracy among children aged 6-15 years to stimulate evidence-based policies that would result in equitable learning for all children. We have regularly conducted assessments to evaluate learning outcomes among primary school children in Kenya, and the results reveal the actual status of literacy and numeracy competencies among the children. We use the findings to engage with policy actors and citizens to address the learning crisis. Usawa Agenda uses the citizen-led learning assessment approach and methodology pioneered by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in India, where trained citizen volunteers carry out learning assessments on children’s competencies in literacy and numeracy at the households.