Harnessing the wind : Reflections and lessons from CIES 2026 

eBASE Africa took part in two panels at CIES 2026, held in San Francisco from 29 March to 2 April 2026: "Unlocking Foundational Learning Data in Africa: Bridging Data Silos for Equity and Peace" and "Global Evidence Architecture: Consolidating a Fragmented Landscape." This blog shares what was discussed in both sessions and how the two conversations connect.

Author: Rigobert Pambe

In the 2019 multiple award-winning movie The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, a young William Kamkwamba learns to create a wind turbine from scrap materials using a book he finds in his school library. This invention helps save his village from famine. The wind was always present, and the knowledge was there, but what was needed was someone willing to look at what was available, understand the situation deeply, and build something useful for the community. This act of ingenuity, refusing to wait for outside help while the village faced starvation, is one of the most inspiring examples of African problem-solving ever shown on screen. 

It is also, we believe, a precise metaphor for where educational evidence in Africa stands today. 

Across our continent, we sit on vast untapped resources: data collected but never connected, studies conducted but not always found, knowledge generated but not necessarily translated into the decisions that shape children's learning. What has been missing is not the evidence itself, but the ingenuity, creativity, proactive mindset, and deep contextual understanding necessary to harness it. It's about examining what exists and asking ourselves how we can make this work for us, here and now. 

At CIES 2026 in San Francisco, eBASE Africa participated in two panels where we shared our experience of mapping Cameroon's fragmented education data ecosystem and rescuing otherwise unseen evidence. We also presented our work contextualising the global evidence base for teachers and policymakers in the Lake Chad Basin, making evidence accessible and actionable for decision-making. Both discussions focused on showing a facet of eBASE Africa, harnessing data for improved education outcomes. 

The elephant in the room 

Data exists in ongoing studies, government reports, and international assessments. Yet this information is often hard to access for those who need it most, such as classroom teachers, resource allocators, and policymakers. It remains siloed within academia and disconnected systems that do not connect evidence creators with users. The issue isn't a data shortage but rather limited access, trust, and infrastructure to support its use. 

The global education community increasingly recognises this issue. The Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC), led by the Wellcome Trust and supported by over 35 organisations, including the Jacobs Foundation and eBASE Africa, has pledged USD 126 million to create a global evidence architecture. Central to this is a synthesis-ready evidence repository, designed to make evidence easy to find, combine, and use for decision-makers worldwide. This is a vital and welcome development. 

However, its success relies on the quality and diversity of the evidence it receives. Without intentional pipelines from Francophone Africa, fragile and conflict-affected regions, and research outside the peer-reviewed journals, this infrastructure risks perpetuating the same blind spots it aims to address. A global evidence system without local pipelines will be comprehensive everywhere but where it is most needed. 

This challenge was the focus of eBASE Africa's presentation at CIES 2026. As a Cameroonian evidence intermediary committed to promoting the use of the best available evidence in education and health across the Lake Chad Basin and beyond, we have spent over a decade working to rescue, contextualise, and connect evidence. The two panels we presented at CIES, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, tell different chapters of this ongoing story. 

Panel One: Unlocking Data, improving access and use of data 

On April 1st, we attended the panel "Unlocking Foundational Learning Data in Africa: Bridging Data Silos for Equity and Peace". eBASE Africa showcased Cameroon as a case study, a situation both unique and familiar to many working across the continent. Cameroon's education data system involves multiple ministries, each gathering, analysing, and sharing data only for their sectors, using different methods and without effective coordination. Besides government agencies, universities, international organisations, NGOs, and civil society also generate education data, all driven by the desire to improve outcomes but operating in silos that limit their collective influence. This results in a country rich in data but poor in insights.  

Through the Unlocking Data Initiative, eBASE is mapping this ecosystem not just to identify existing data but to understand who produces and uses it, who is excluded, and why connections between actors break down. We created an evidence gap map covering 55 studies over four decades on foundational learning in Cameroon. The map revealed that evidence mainly focused on policy reforms and early childhood interventions. Key gaps remained in numeracy, teacher development, and tech-enabled instruction. Male researchers outnumbered females, and English outputs dominated in a mainly Francophone system.

The map showed not just what we know but also who has produced knowledge and in what language. Using a Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) approach, we are reconnecting data producers and users, bringing ministry officials, researchers, and civil society together to work on shared questions, build trust, and exchange data. Early results are promising. However, our core message at CIES is that Unlocking Data is more than a national effort; it’s foundational to any credible global evidence system. Data not addressed at this level never reaches repositories and simply vanishes or sits lifeless on shelves or hard drives. 

Panel Two: Contextualising global evidence and the architecture being built to scale it 

The afternoon session, titled "Global Evidence Architecture: Consolidating a Fragmented Landscape", examined the gap between global education evidence and the information that actually guides decisions at the country level. We began by sharing our experience adapting the Education Endowment Foundation's Teaching and Learning Toolkit for teachers and policymakers across Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger, starting in 2019. We evaluated thirty pedagogical strategies through stakeholder input and contextual analysis, excluding those not closely aligned with local realities. These exclusions underscore deep-seated assumptions about typical schools, teachers, and classrooms globally. Local stakeholders identified three critical topics absent from the global toolkit: menstrual hygiene management, cash transfers, and corporal punishment. Each topic was reviewed against global evidence. Cash transfers showed a modest but positive effect on learning and were included. Menstrual hygiene management was deemed too specific to exclude despite limited rigorous studies, reflecting areas where global research funding has concentrated. No rigorous evidence was found on corporal punishment, exposing a significant knowledge gap. All findings are accessible through an online portal in bilingual English and French to promote equity. The session also highlighted the creation of a synthesis-ready evidence repository by the Jacobs Foundation, a global platform that hosts organised, synthesis-ready educational data using a shared taxonomy. This early prototype includes data, taxonomy, and tools for testing in real settings, aiming to incorporate local evidence in multiple languages to inform policy and practice. This initiative is essential because a repository like this could improve evidence accessibility and lower costs for organisations working in low-resource contexts, such as eBASE. However, a key challenge is ensuring the repository actively includes regional contexts like Cameroon; otherwise, it risks reinforcing bias, over-reliance on English language and high-income country evidence and neglecting critical Africa-specific data. It emphasises that African evidence must be intentionally collected, mapped, validated, and linked, requiring dedicated resources, intentional design, and genuine partnerships with local organisations already active on the ground. 

Where the two panels meet 

These are not two separate conversations that happened to share a date on a conference program. They are two sides of the same argument. 

The Unlocking Data Initiative is doing the upstream work, going into the field, into the ministries, and into the silos and rescuing data that would otherwise never be found, never be compared, and never be used. It makes the invisible visible. Without this work, that data disappears. The Synthesis-Ready Evidence Repository and the broader ESIC architecture represent the downstream ambition of a global system that consolidates, standardises, and makes evidence usable for anyone, anywhere. 

The link between them is the link William understood instinctively: you cannot build a system that works for a community without understanding what that community already has, what it needs, and what it will take to connect the two. One salvages. The other scales.

eBASE Africa sits at the exact intersection of both. We do the upstream work of mapping, rescuing, and connecting local evidence. We do the downstream work of stress-testing global evidence in our own contexts and feeding back what is missing. This dual position is not accidental. It is what an evidence intermediary operating in a context like ours has to be. 

Harnessing the evidence 

CIES 2026 brought both conversations into the same building on the same day. That proximity was instructive. The morning panel rescued local data. The afternoon panel asked how to build a global system for it. The corridor between those two rooms is the distance the global evidence community must learn to close, not occasionally at conferences, but structurally, by design, in how the repository is built, governed, and fed. 

William Kamkwamba did not wait for someone to bring him a wind turbine. He found existing knowledge, understood what his village needed, and built the connection himself. The wind was always there. What changed was the decision to harness it. 

In Africa, the evidence has always been there. Fragmented, under-resourced, under-valued, but present. What the global evidence community is now building, and what eBASE Africa is committed to contributing to, is the infrastructure that finally puts it to work. Not for the archive. Not for the citation count. For the child in a classroom in Cameroon who deserves a teacher equipped with the best available knowledge about how she learns. 

The shelves of the global repository are waiting. The question is who will fill them and whether the architecture will be humble and deliberate enough to make space for the evidence that has always been there but never seen.