United States Fund for UNICEF

With this grant, UNICEF proposes to explore the pathways connecting women’s empowerment to early childhood care and development. UNICEF would investigate how women’s empowerment and early child care interact and affect the life outcomes of two generations. With the International Labour Organization and UN Women, UNICEF would convene an inter-agency advisory group to strengthen collaboration, coordinated research, and program and policy efforts to invest in better outcomes for two generations.

This grant will support UNICEF’s Data Must Speak program that will improve global knowledge about what works and where (or not) in the development and use of data-driven school profiles by local education officials, school personnel, and parents to make performance gaps more visible and identify specific local actions for better learning. UNICEF will support data improvement, development of user-friendly school monitoring tools and related training modules for school personnel and community members, and evaluation of the effectiveness of these social accountability tools in expanding parent participation and accountability in education service delivery in up to 10 countries.

Data Must Speak is a multicountry program for testing new approaches to school-level performance monitoring, equity, and citizen engagement. This grant provides support to UNICEF to evaluate Data Must Speak, focusing on whether and how the process of co-designing school report cards has led to more community engagement and joint problem-solving to improve the quality of education and learning in five countries.