The Ministry of Education in Ethiopia developed its Education Sector Development Plan (ESDP) 2020/21-2024/25, outlining its vision of transforming society through harnessing the full potential of learners to become productive citizens. The ESDP includes several goals, including improving equitable access and participation in education for all children, improving the quality and relevance of education, ensuring good governance, and using education to establish national unity in diversity. As part of its plan, the MoE aims to improve its Education Management Information System (EMIS), including collecting more granular data, to inform decision-making and the equitable allocation of resources. By merging and analyzing existing administrative datasets in Ethiopia, the Data Must Speak (DMS) research helps to identify important associations between school inputs and school performance that can inform public policies and investments in the education sector. The DMS research leverages this administrative data to identify positive deviant schools – or those schools outperforming other schools operating in the same contexts and with equivalent resources. It then identifies the practices and behaviours that may be contributing to positive deviant schools’ success and explores how to scale these to more schools in the country.
