Education Policy and Data Center (EPDC): A Global Education Asset

The Education Policy and Data Center (EPDC) was created in 2004 as a public-private partnership to contribute to improved data and policies for education through providing ready access to data, tools for better presentation, and analysis. It has fostered its public-private partnership by working in different ways with a range of different partners including: the EFA Monitoring Report; the Fast Track Initiative; the Governments of Kenya, Nigeria, and Zambia; the International Household Survey Network; the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS); the International Institute for Education Planning; and the World Bank. Funding for its work has come from several of these partners, in addition to core financial support from USAID and AED itself, where EPDC is housed.

In five years it has created unique capacity in four areas:

• DATA — global, on-line data base of education and related statistics from over 200 sources, with both national and sub-national and administrative and household data.
• VISUALIZATION — an on-line library of over 4000 maps, graphs, and charts that visualize the knowledge and information contain in data and the ability to transform reams of data into visualized forms.
• PROJECTION — models that project education trends 2-20 years into the future, allowing for more informed planning and analysis of education demand and supply.
• POLICY ANALYSIS — papers and reports that tease out the policy insights hidden in data.

Advisory Council

• Nancy Birdsall, Center for Global Development
• David Bloom, Harvard University
• Joel Cohen, Columbia and Rockefeller Universities
• Luis Crouch, Research Triangle International
• Charles Kolb, Committee for Economic Development
• Hendrik Van Der Pol, UNESCO Institute of Statistics
• Robert Prouty, World Bank