The SACMEQ at a glance series is part of an ongoing research project on data from the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). The aim of these documents is to provide a two page snapshot of some important elements of the primary school system in each of the participating countries, allowing for comparisons both within and between countries. Statistics are reported for ten African countries for SACMEQ II (2000) and SACMEQ III (2007). The ten countries are: Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The results are also presented for three sub-groups: school location (urban and rural), gender (boys and girls), and student wealth (poorest 25% of students and wealthiest 25% of students) for each country. Some of the reported statistics include the prevalence of functional illiteracy and innumeracy, textbook access (reading and mathematics), pupil-teacher ratio, teacher content knowledge, proportion of students receiving a free school meal, as well as the proportion of schools with electricity and water, among many other statistics. These documents should be a helpful resource to researchers and policy-makers alike, providing accessible information in a comparable format. For any queries please email Nicholas Spaull.
