Supporting Holistic & Actionable Research in Education (SHARE)

SHARE Logo


What is SHARE?

Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education (SHARE) is a cooperative agreement by USAID’s new Bureau for Inclusive Growth, Partnerships, and Innovation/Center for Education (IPI/EDU) to the University of Notre Dame (UND) that advances global education learning priorities to improve learning outcomes. This Activity is funded through USAID’s Higher Education Leadership, Innovation, and Exchange (HELIX) Annual Program Statement (APS) under the USAID New Partnership Initiative (NPI). Within UND, this Activity is being led by the Pulte Institute for Global Development (Pulte) alongside UND’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC). UND implements SHARE in partnership with higher education and research institutions based in USAID geographic regions worldwide.

In the first three years of its implementation, SHARE operated in 19 countries, including twelve in Africa, four in Asia, and three in Latin America and the Caribbean. Many of the SHARE’s studies will help generate transferable evidence to inform education policy and implementation  in other countries facing similar issues. 

What is unique about SHARE is how it carries out its research. SHARE implements through country-level partners and deliberately engages local ecosystems throughout the research process. As such, SHARE applies innovative and rigorous research methods while strengthening the capacity of ecosystems to generate, translate and ultimately use evidence. This is manifest through an extensive process of involving key actors in research design and implementation, ensuring alignment on objectives, questions and tools. Through this work, SHARE increases chances of evidence uptake and that its studies will be more relevant for the local context, promoting a culture of evidence-based decision making. The SHARE team also uses its engagement with in-country partners as an opportunity to exchange learning and capacity across its network, in a way that is not always visible across activities. 

SHARE Multi-Country Studies, Global and Regional Education Products, Country Specific Studies:

Multi-Country Studies

Since 2021, SHARE has conducted 6 multi-country studies, across 12 countries, which sought to identify transferable educational policy recommendations. Read more about each multi-country study below: 

  1. Foundational Skills Learning Agenda 
  2. Education in Crisis and Conflict Learning Agenda
  3. Higher Education Learning Agena 

*Indicates a study funded by a USAID Mission or Bureau. 

In 2024, SHARE began a second round of studies, further advancing global education learning priorities from the newly revised Foundational Skills and Education in Crisis and Conflict Learning agendas, as well as the Higher Education and Youth Workforce Development Learning Agendas. 

Global and Regional Education Products

SHARE also produces Learning Products that both advance global and regional learning priorities and offer guidance to USAID and education researchers and implementers. Additionally, SHARE is advancing 5 distinct products:

Country-Specific Studies

SHARE provides highly specialized, technical assistance to USAID Bureaus and Missions to design and implement education research-based efforts that advances country or bureau-specific priorities, including evaluation and primary research studies, development of country or regional-specific learning agendas, learning assessments, technical assistance in evidence generation, translation, and/or use, and sector/system diagnostics. These country or region-specific research efforts also contribute to USAID’s global learning priorities in education. Below is a list of the results of these research efforts:

Basic Education
  • Basic Education Quality & Transition (BEQT) Impact Evaluation: 2021-2026 | Guatemala 
  • Transition-to-English Plus (T2E+) Impact Evaluation: 2021-2023 | Ghana
  • Read II Evaluation and Diagnostic of the Education Context: 2022-2023 | Ethiopia 
Basic Education in Non-state Schools
  • Non-State Schools Assessment (NSSA): 2022-2023 | Uganda
  • Low-Cost Private Schools Assessment (LCPS): 2020-2021 | Ghana
  • Advancing Partnerships for Improved Learning (APIL) Impact Evaluation: 2023-2028 | Ghana
Higher Education
  • Higher Education Portfolio Evaluation: 2022-2027 | Malawi
  • Local Scholarship Program (LSP) for Non-Public Universities Performance Evaluation: 2022-2023 | Egypt
Inclusion
  • Inclusive Education Diagnostic Study: 2022 | Uzbekistan

SHARE’s Implementing Partners

Pulte Institute for Global Development
The Pulte Institute for Global Development – an integral part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame – works to address global poverty and inequality through policy, practice, and partnership. The Institute is dedicated to conducting meaningful outreach which combines the world-class research of Notre Dame with global partners to design, implement, monitor, and evaluate projects that promote rights-based, growth outcomes for the world’s most vulnerable.

Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child
The Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child, based at the University of Notre Dame, collaborates with researchers and practitioners to ensure the wellbeing—physical, emotional, social, and cognitive—of children and adolescents in low-resource and conflict-affected settings. Using an innovative whole child development approach tailored to context-specific needs, we translate research into timely and thoughtful action, adapt research tools to improve the development of learning programs and policies, and activate systems (families, schools, communities) to lift children and adolescents out of adversity.

For more information, contact the SHARE team at share@nd.edu
USAID AOR Elena Walls at ewalls@usaid.gov
 

Learn More:

Systems Strengthening Global