In the latest episode of the RISE Podcast, the Director of UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, Manos Antoninis, talks to RISE Research Fellow Jason Silberstein about the first report in the Spotlight Series. The Spotlight is a new initiative by the GEM Report and its partners to shine a spotlight on primary completion and the state of foundational learning in Africa. They discuss the report’s original research and clear recommendations for how to improve learning, with a focus on what the Spotlight has to say about politics, measurement, supporting teachers, and balancing investment in student-level inputs with systems-level reform.

Links

• Spotlight on Basic Education Completion and Foundational Learning in Africapublished by UNESCO, under the direction of Manos Antoninis and prepared by the Global Education Monitoring Report team with the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, and African Union.
• Global Education Monitoring Report
• Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA)
• UNESCO Institute for Statistics
• National SDG 4 Benchmarks
• The Long-Run Decline of Education Quality in the Developing World by Alexis Le Nestour, Laura Moscoviz, and Justin Sandefur at the Center for Global Development
• Focus to Flourish: A Messaging Campaign on Five Actions to Accelerate Progress in Learning by the RISE Programme
• Five Actions to Accelerate Progress in Learning by Lant Pritchett, Kirsty Newman and Jason Silberstein

Guest biography

Manos Antoninis

Manos Antoninis is the Director of the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report since 2017. He was previously responsible for the monitoring section of the report. He coordinated the financing gap estimates for the 2030 education targets, the projections on the achievement of universal primary and secondary education completion, and the World Inequality Database on Education. He has been representing the report team in the Technical Cooperation Group on SDG 4 indicators, which he is currently co-chairing.  

Prior to joining the team he worked for 10 years on public finance, monitoring and evaluation projects in education including: a public expenditure tracking and service delivery survey of secondary education provision in Bangladesh; the evaluation of a basic education project in the western provinces of China; the mid-term evaluation of the Education For All Fast Track Initiative; the annual reporting of progress in the implementation of the Second Primary Education Development Project in Bangladesh; a basic education capacity building programme in six states in Nigeria; the evaluation of an in-service, cluster-based teacher training programme in Pakistan; and the...