Notre Dame’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child awarded $2.24 million to strengthen Haitian education data systems
The University of Notre Dame’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child Haiti has been awarded $2.24 million from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to enhance school data collection systems in Haiti and equip schools with data-backed processes to improve student learning and development outcomes.
The two-year project will engage schools that are a part of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Model School Network in the Central Plateau of Haiti, a region with a difficult topography, high rates of poverty and limited scalable and effective academic interventions. Given these realities, the network seeks to improve outcomes of students in the Central Plateau through sustainable, multilayered, data-driven, and effective governmental and civil society partnerships.
This latest award will be leveraged to enhance Haitian schools’ capacities to collect and use relevant data to drive informed decision-making. The project brings together the GC-DWC Haiti, Notre Dame’s Children’s Environmental Health Initiative, and the Université Quisqueya in Haiti to equip local schools with the skills and tools necessary to increase capacity for multilevel data collection, annual benchmarking, evaluation, and visualization.
“In the context of a low-income country such as Haiti, with a chronic lack of investment in education, the role of scalable, cost-effective and culturally appropriate interventions that embrace data-informed approaches cannot be overlooked,” said Neil Boothby, the founding director of the GC-DWC and principal investigator on the project. “There is an urgent opportunity to provide capacity-building resources to Haitian education networks at the school level and to equip them with the tools to leverage data effectively in order to improve student outcomes.”
The GC-DWC and its partners will develop a school-based information system tailored to the needs of the Model School Network, build schools’ capacity for the implementation of data collection, and provide ongoing support and professional development to schools. These processes will ensure that data are used to address gaps in students’ educational experiences and to strengthen current curriculum and school practices. In particular, CEHI will leverage its data expertise to build a functional and robust data platform at both the school and national levels.
“In the Haitian education system, robust data and data systems can provide an energizing source of power, change and innovation,” shared Marie Lynn Miranda, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost of the University of Notre Dame and director of CEHI. “We are excited to partner with Haitian educators and administrators to collect and leverage data to create sustainable and impactful opportunities for students.”
