Senior Research Fellow Maruyama Takao Was Invited to Make a Presentation at the University of Oxford on Evidence Use in the JICA-Supported “School for All” Project

Maruyama Takao , Senior Research Fellow of the JICA Ogata Research Institute, was invited to make a presentation at the University of Oxford on evidence use in the JICA-supported “School for All” project in Madagascar. The presentation was to the annual conference of “What Works Hub for Global Education” (WWHGE), organized on Sept. 25 and 26, 2024. WWHGE is a program of the British Government implemented by the University of Oxford.

While evidence on educational development has been accumulating along with an increase in impact evaluations, the evidence uptake in policymaking and evidence-based practice is still limited. The British government collaborated with other partners, including the Gates Foundation, to launch WWHGE, which aims to promote evidence generation and its use in educational development in low- and middle-income countries. Practitioners and researchers with various backgrounds from different regions gathered at the conference to share their knowledge and experience facilitated by the Academic Director of the program, Noam Angrist of the University of Oxford.

In the conference, Maruyama joined the session called “Testing Scalable Models” and presented a case study of a series of impact evaluations and scaling-up of intervention packages for developing collaboration between schools and their local communities in Madagascar. The model was disseminated to different regions in that country based on evidence under the leadership of the Ministry of Education and with support from JICA. The case was highly evaluated by the participants of the conference as a pioneering example of evidence generation and its use in educational development.

As WWHGE promotes evidence generation and its use in educational development, involving different stakeholders, the presentation by Maruyama became a contribution of JICA to the international partnership. The videos of the conference are available at the following links:

The case of evidence generation and use in the JICA-supported “School for All” is also introduced in his blog post and a YouTube video at the following links: