12.1 Introduction

The chapters in this volume have introduced the ALiVE initiative, as both process and product. This social transformation program was designed to: generate evidence on life skills and values in the context of East Africa in order to develop and provide an open-source contextualised measurement tool; use the evidence to inform policy and drive public conversations; and use tool development as a process for learning and self-empowerment for local experts in East Africa. Four achievements stand out.

First, a ground-up ethnographic study was conducted in 15 districts across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. It was used as the basis for establishing local understandings of selected competences. Second, a contextualised tool was developed to assess collaboration, problem solving, respect and self-awareness; and a large-scale, household-based assessment was conducted across the three countries, involving a total of 45,442 adolescents, comprising 22,092 males and 23,264 females, and 86 not specified, aged between 13 and 17 years. Beyond the results, this assessment has contributed to both contextualisation and East Africa’s agency in contributing to global assessment in this emerging field. Third, four assessment reports and a summary regional report were launched (to include separate reporting for Zanzibar, Tanzania) with in-person participation of more than 500 national-level education actors, and media activation (including community radio) that reached millions of East Africans. This was followed by sub-country level launches in more than 50 districts, involving more than 3000 local level leaders and more than 10,000 head teachers. Fourth, 47 local experts were qualified via a learn-through-doing process that lasted 45 weeks between April 2021 and February 2022. Through this process, the ALiVE Academy has been established as the process that now sustains capacity development for assessment of twenty-first century skills in the region.

The preceding chapters in this book have articulated these achievements at length and shared the emergent knowledge from the ALiVE process. However, before one can draw the implications for policy and practice from the evidence, it is necessary to clarify the conditions necessary for that evidence to inform policy in context. Without this clarity, policy recommendations merely constitute a tick-the-box exercise with little impact.

Globally, there is general acceptance of and movement towards evidence-based policy making. Banks (2009) argues that policies that are not informed by evidence fall prey to the “law of unintended consequences” (p. 2), which often leads to costly mistakes. Head (2015) argues that the movement for evidence-use in policy developed momentum in the 1970s, driven by Weiss (1979), Aaron (1978), Bulmer (1982, 1987) and Rivlin (1971), and has yielded tremendous gains to public administration over the decades.

Evidence-use in policy has met with equal measures of optimism and pessimism. First, there is acknowledgement that while existing documentation confirms that evidence does inform and even influence policy, the path is not linear. The convergence of evidence and policy is not just dependent on science but is highly contingent on political persuasion and on a variety of other economic and organisational factors (Head, 2015; Elliot & Popay, 2000). Second, there is little clarity on what works best to achieve evidence-informed decision making, considering factors like the capacities of policy makers in using evidence and conditions that promote or inhibit evidence use (Head et al., 2014; Stewart, 2015).

Head (2015) submits that even when sound evidence is at hand, the decision-making process in public administration is extremely complicated, and generally unfavourable to science-driven perspectives. He argues that policy making is driven more by political interests, conflicts, trade-offs, and compromises than by scientific rigour; and that “the policy process is inescapably anchored in politicised context and that some kinds of evidence are inevitably seen as more relevant than others for underpinning policy positions” (p. 6). This perspective supports earlier arguments (e.g., Maynard, 2006; Weiss, 1979) that evidence uptake is not just dependent on the robustness and clarity on what works but is mostly subjected to personal and political persuasions. In addition, governments prefer using their own internal evidence over that generated by external parties (Head, 2015), and are averse to evidence that presents an issue that is either new or presents an ideological dispute (British Academy, 2008; Head, 2010).

Stewart (2015) adopts the proposal made by the Department for International Development (DFID, 2011) that offered a framework of four barriers to evidence use. First are the individual barriers faced by people in policy-making positions. These include lack of experience and capacity to assess evidence and build mutual trust, as well as negative attitudes towards change in general and evidence in particular. Second are organisational barriers in the responsible institutions, which include unsupportive culture, competing interests, censorship, and mistrust of external evidence, as well as other barriers like cultural and religious notions. Third are communication and relationship barriers, which include message and messenger choice, information overload, use of academic jargon and unactionable messages. Lastly are timing barriers, including the lack of time to understand and reason together, and lack of alignment between researchers’ and decision makers’ timeframes and priorities of the moment.

A further consideration is how researchers package and communicate evidence. Many researchers naively assume that rigorous evidence and good communication are the sole drivers of evidence-use in policy making (Cherney & Head, 2011), while others make recommendations that are both politically and economically untenable (Stewart, 2015). In confronting these barriers, Head (2015) suggests that any evidence-use case must provide a framework that balances the persuading of decision-makers to formulate a policy, the support needed to roll out policy implementation, and the provision of the necessary conditions for implementation. Further to this, Strydom et al. (2010) suggest that researchers must consider organisational factors (like structure and function), socio-economic contexts (affordability), communication factors (message attributes), notions of credibility of both the evidence and researcher, as well as the political priorities of the reigning government (Elliot & Popay, 2000).

Head (2015) proposes the concept of knowledge brokering. This concept calls for knowledge sharing and simplification of information to facilitate communication between evidence producers and users, and approaches that include face-face exchanges, formation of networks and communities of practice, and facilitated sessions.

These global perspectives bequeath to ALiVE a useful framework for viewing the implications of the ALiVE process and evidence for policy makers in East Africa. This framework includes first the aspect of alignment, how the evidence is packaged and communicated to speak to the economic contexts and political interests of the three countries. Second is the aspect of timeliness. The curricular revisions made by East African systems confirm that life skills and values are both a current point of focus and non-controversial for all four education jurisdictions (including Zanzibar as separate from Tanzania mainland). Third is the aspect of structured engagement. This points to the need to go beyond suggestions for evidence-uptake, and factor in support for implementation of those suggestions. This aspect includes the capacities and brokering needed to make policy making and implementation a reality, driven by trust and careful identification of messengers. Lastly is the dimension of institutionalisation. The recommendations must include a way to sustain the two-way relationship between the ALiVE community and decision-makers in government, in a form that is aligned to the needs, priorities and capacities of both groups.

12.1.1 Global Education Policy Pertaining to Life Skills and Values

In the initial chapters of this volume, Chaps. 1 and 3, Care (2024) and Giazomazzi (2024) conclude that global policy has embraced the inclusion of twenty-first century competences in education. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4.7; UNESCO, 2015) makes no explicit mention of these competences, but talks more broadly about the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development. Though the reporting on this target is most recently biased towards climate change, a few initiatives continue to drive SDG 4.7 as encompassing social emotional learning and related competences.

The SDG 4.7 was preceded by the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF), which led global consultations to explore the improvement of learning outcomes as well as the skills needed for twenty-first century learning, working, and living. The LMTF covered a total of 118 countries (11 in Africa) and concluded that besides the usual academic subjects, learning should include students’ physical, social, and emotional wellbeing, as well as approaches to learning how to learn (Anderson & Ditmore, 2016), described in some detail by Giazomazzi (2024; Chap. 3, this volume). However, more recent publications have expressed the perspective that progress is slow, and that universal integration of these competences may not be achieved by 2030, unless the pace is hastened (Jukes et al., 2018; Care et al., 2018).

Several mechanisms support the monitoring and implementation of SDG 4.7, and some focus on partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa. These include the Networking to Integrate SDG 4.7 and Social and Emotional Learning into Educational Materials (NISSEM), the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) and Harvard’s Ecological Approaches to Socio-emotional Learning (EASEL) Laboratory, the Karanga Global Alliance, the Global Learning Community coordinated at Utrecht University, and the Global Centre for the Development of the Whole Child at the University of Notre Dame (USA). The OECD has also focused on social-emotional learning, and has developed and conducted several assessments, including pilots with selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

12.1.2 Policy Landscape in East Africa

In East Africa, life skills and values are not new in education policy. There have been multiple curricular revisions over the past two decades. The inclusion of these constructs has been associated with the movement of the countries to competency-based curricula, commencing in 2005 in Tanzania, 2016 in Kenya, and 2019 in Uganda.

12.1.2.1 Kenya

The Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) commenced implementation in 2016 and reached Junior Secondary (Grade 7) in January 2023. The CBC prioritizes seven core competences for basic education, as well as eight values that education should develop (Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, 2017; Heto et al., 2020). The mode of delivery clarifies integration in academic subjects, with the curriculum clearly identifying the competences and values that the teacher should develop within each topic. Teacher training has included aspects of these competences, though little documentation exists on related classroom practice. Learning assessments have adopted a competency measurement approach, relying heavily on use of rubrics and portfolios in formative assessment. The learner assessments at Grades 3 and 6 have included some of these competences at classroom level, though these have not been released publicly with other learning areas. There is no shared evidence from summative assessment, and no evidence on these competences in policy and public debate.

Wafubwa and Csikos (2021) observe that despite the clear definition of these competences in the curriculum, the assessment framework is too sketchy to direct teachers how to observe and accurately capture competence in demonstrated behaviour. Originally, life skills had been adopted as a stand-alone learning area for junior secondary, but this was later axed by the Presidential Working Party in 2023, seeking to reduce learning areas for junior secondary.

12.1.2.2 Tanzania Mainland

While Tanzania is one country, it is important to be aware that basic education is a devolved function for Zanzibar.

Life skills education is not new in Tanzania. In the mid-1990s, life skills was a subject taught in all schools and covered social skills such as citizenship, emotional and behavioural competencies including acceptable behaviour and respect, as well as some cognitive competencies such as critical thinking, among others (Care, 2024; Chap. 1, this volume). In 2005, Tanzania initiated the movement to competency-based curriculum through a major reform, which also saw the removal of life skills from the list of examinable subjects. Giacomazzi (2024; Chap. 3, this volume) documents that while this was well-intended, it led to rapid de-prioritisation of life skills by the teachers, and the time allocated to life skills was often used to teach examinable subjects. In 2019, the government made a curriculum revision, and with support from UNICEF, revised the National Life Skills Education Framework, including the development of a detailed strategy and formative assessment tools for primary and secondary schools. There is documentation that despite these changes, the implementation of life skills and values remains problematic, and the teaching and learning processes may not be producing the targeted competencies (Nkya et al., 2021).

12.1.2.3 Zanzibar

A national life skills framework was developed in 2010. The framework was intended to promote quality provision of life skills education, with the focus “to attain positive behavioural changes among children and young people in Zanzibar for their own individual and societal benefits in relation to preventing HIV/AIDS infections, substance abuse, early pregnancies, gender based violence and lead more positive and productive lives” (Zanzibar Ministry of Social Welfare, Youth Women and Children Development, 2010, p. 8). In 2022, the President of Zanzibar appointed a taskforce to advise on reforming education. The taskforce report recommends, inter alia, proper definition and integration of life skills and related competences in the curriculum, teacher training and classroom practice and producing prioritized life skills and values through education. The changes are expected to be implemented from 2023. The government, recognizing the insufficient emphasis on life skills, has prioritized the refocus and review of the curriculum. Efforts are being made to integrate life skills into early childhood development and foster collaboration with ALiVE to incorporate these essential skills and values into the curricula. The district-level ALiVE launches have reinforced the government’s commitment, emphasizing the importance of political leaders incorporating assessment data into their planning of national plans and budgets (Issa, 2023). These actions reflect the government’s dedication to address policy shortcomings and ensure that decision-making processes are grounded in relevant data.

12.1.2.4 Uganda

In Uganda, life skills were embedded in the 2019 Sexuality Education Framework, which identified 20 explicit competencies, including conflict resolution, decision making, communication, negotiation, leadership, goal-setting, assertiveness, refusal skills, coping with emotions and stress, self-awareness, self-control, self-esteem, help- and health-seeking behaviours, time management, employability skills, analysing the media, and journaling. However, the focus on sexuality education received pushback from religious bodies, which operate about three quarters of the schools in Uganda. The Ministry’s response was a later revision that broadened the curriculum beyond sexuality education.

In 2019, the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) reformed the lower secondary education curriculum and prioritised a number of competencies. These were referred to as generic skills, and included critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, co-operation and self-directed learning, mathematical computation, and proficiency in ICT (NCDC, 2020). The curriculum also included life skills as a learning area under cross-cutting issues, which included decision-making, stress management and emotional regulation, and to “solve problems met in different situations” (p. 10). The assessment framework for the new curriculum was released in year 2022 and it requires the teachers to specify the level of students’ achievements in terms of subject-specific competencies and generic skills. Further to this, a new curriculum framework was drafted in 2023 for Upper Secondary which includes prioritized values.

12.2 Five Implications for Policy and Practice

The ALiVE results have woken us from slumber. We had nothing to show us where we were. Now, the call to action is loud (Dr Grace Baguma, Head of NCDC in Uganda, at the launch of the ALiVE report on December 13, 2022).

The ALiVE contextualisation study, assessment processes and results, have implications for policy formulation and implementation across the three countries. The evidence backing these implications draws from three main sources, two of which are covered extensively in chapters in this volume: ALiVE contextualisation studies (Shariff et al., 2024; Giacomazzi, 2024; Chaps. 2 and 3); and ALiVE assessment process and results (Nansubuga et al., 2024; Nakabugo et al., 2024; Mutweleli et al., 2024; Ariapa et al., 2024, Chaps. 7, 8, 9, and 10). The third source derives from policy conversations during the report launches in Zanzibar (November 17, 2022), Kenya (November 25, 2022), Uganda (December 13, 2022) and Mainland Tanzania (January 26, 2023). The admissibility of policy conversations as evidence draws confidence from the definition by Strydom et al. (2010), which views evidence as both research-derived and anecdotal, encompassing knowledge from experts as well as lay persons. The process and results of ALiVE yield the conclusion that while there has been consistent progress made in embedding life skills and values into policy, curriculum and classroom practice, the intended learning outcomes are not yet realized for a majority of the learners. At the same time, this is recognised by the systems in their efforts to more clearly embed the competencies in curriculum and assessment, as well as teacher training and support. Overall, five implications have emerged which speak to both policy and practice.

12.2.1 Implication 1: Boldening the Focus and Fully Contextualizing Holistic Learning

The importance of broadening the focus of foundational learning beyond literacy and numeracy, has been well articulated in this book. Care (2024; Chap. 1, this volume) refers to the World Bank’s conceptualisation of ‘learning poverty’ as referring solely to reading and numeracy. This minimalist approach to foundational learning is creating a push on low-income economies to sacrifice the holistic development of the child, and this abandoning of critical competencies in the nascent stage of the child’s development may have dire effect not only on their development and attainment of full potential, but also on the competitiveness of nations in producing skills for the changing world.

The results of the ALiVE assessments (Ariapa et al., 2024; Chap. 10, this volume) have demonstrated that while the three East African countries have been on a journey to include life skills and values in the curricula for now close to two decades, the interventions may not yet be delivering the intended outcomes. In brief, the ALiVE results have shown that most adolescents have commenced their journey to skill acquisition and are at varied points. For instance, in problem solving, most adolescents can identify the problem, but fewer are able to gather and present information needed to characterise the problem, and most of them identify only one solution to a problem, even when they are clearly prompted to identify several. Similarly, in terms of respect for others, most adolescents interpret bad behaviour as a lack of respect for others or self, with fewer taking conciliatory steps to resolve situations, and only a few being aware of links between respect for property and respect for persons.

12.2.1.1 Bold Focus

The dissonance between what happens at school (curriculum) and out in society (daily lives) (Care, 2024; Chap. 1, this volume) is an impediment to curriculum implementation. In other words, a focus on curriculum and school only, with no associated focus on the influence of society, may not work. A bold focus is needed, in which three things happen. First, the society recognises the need for change and embraces the direction of change. Second, curricula and schooling take up this society challenge. Third, consistency between society and school and curriculum is achieved through increased awareness of communities, adapted political leadership and appropriate investment to support the new direction of education.

This focus is needed to identify and articulate the competencies that each country prioritises, and clearly define and articulate these in the curriculum. The approach taken by ALiVE in carefully inter-weaving skill definitions and skill structures offers one option for curriculum experts in the region. Second is the pursuit of authentic assessments, which focus not on reporting scores, but ways of capturing the competencies and values as they are demonstrated in real life. Again, the ALiVE assessment has demonstrated that measurement of these competencies is possible and challenges the notion that life skills and values are impossible or difficult to measure. Third is equipping teachers with the pedagogical strategies needed for enhancing life skills, beyond the academic-only curriculum. Lastly is the engagement of society. Political leadership, together with community leaders, must champion this so that communities and parents not only change the way children are nurtured and educated, but are active in efforts to achieve coherence with the curriculum and address any dissonance.

12.2.1.2 Contextualisation

Contextualisation and authenticity are key components, not only for developing appropriate assessment strategies, but also providing the space for children to demonstrate these competences in real life (Care, 2024; Chap. 1, this volume). It is important that as countries embolden their focus on life skills and values, they also ensure that the prioritised competences are well aligned to the local context (Mutweleli et al., 2024; Chap. 9, this volume) and not just pick from other contexts where these may be well documented.

In a related publication from this work, Giacomazzi et al. (2022) make a strong case for contextualisation, not just for assessments, but also for pedagogical approaches. Giacomazzi (2024; Chap. 3, this volume) has presented the results of the ALiVE contextualisation study conducted in 15 districts across East Africa. These results guided and framed the development of assessments of problem solving, self-awareness and respect, and collaboration (Care & Giacomazzi, 2024; Chap. 4, this volume; Ngina et al., 2024; Chap. 5, this volume; Scoular & Otieno, 2024; Chaps. 6, this volume), demonstrating the potential of contextualisation to inform curriculum and assessment. The ALiVE contextualisation unearthed unique skill dimensions not captured in global literature. The differences established highlight the importance of not striving for harmonisation across contexts but rather, focusing on common components as well as understanding the competencies in their contexts.

12.2.2 Implication 2: A Paradigm Shift to Assess Life Skills and Values

The way of assessing academic subjects in East Africa’s education system is fundamentally different to what is needed for measuring generic competencies. The sometimes non-visible nature of life skills and values, and their high dependency on context, necessitates a different paradigm (Nansubuga et al., 2024; Chap. 7, this volume; Mutweleli et al., 2024; Chap. 9, this volume; Nakabugo et al., 2024; Chap. 8, this volume; and Ariapa et al., 2024; Chaps. 10, this volume). Three implications emerge from these chapters, and from the knowledge accumulated through the ALiVE assessment.

12.2.2.1 Clear Shift of Assessment Frameworks

Life skills and values are dynamic in nature and are less known and understood in the context of formal education. Accordingly, it is particularly important for the assessment of these competencies that measurement procedures commence with proper definition of the constructs, clarification of the constructs, development of tasks and items, collection and scoring of responses, through to the production of measures (Ariapa et al., 2024; Chap. 10, this volume).

To integrate these assessments in the system, investment is necessary. Frameworks must be developed for each competency or value in order to ensure a standardised approach, and to ensure that the outcome will be true to context. The indulgence of the national assessment institutes to contextualise the varied approaches, together with a research component to establish their validity and reliability, is critical. From ALiVE’s experience, the development of such frameworks includes a systematic way of establishing the assessable and non-assessable components of a skill, exploring a variety of options to arrive at the most suitable methods for both capturing the responses and behaviours, scoring and analysis, as well as achieving the highest possible psychometric qualities for the assessment tasks. In all this, a framework must deliver a simple approach for teachers to use for formative purposes, as well as schools and the system to use for the summative purpose of monitoring learning outcomes.

12.2.2.2 Leveraging Technology

Two chapters in this volume, Chaps. 7 and 8, Nansubuga et al. (2024) and Nakabugo et al. (2024), have justified the need to consider use of technology in assessment, and used the ALiVE approach to illustrate use of digital assessment. The fact that the assessment of life skills and values is a new thing in East Africa offers the opportunity to introduce it in a new way that does not require change management. The ALiVE assessment, which used smartphones (rather than tablets or other devices that might be more difficult to avail) and Kobo Toolbox (an open-sourced software, rather than software or applications that need purchase or subscription), offers useful reflection on how the adoption of technology could revolutionise assessment and lower its cost. In a school setting, options might include the development and sharing of level-based item banks that teachers could draw from, the development of a classroom-based digital platform for recording observed behaviours and responses, and the leveraging of technology to automate developing and sharing reports.

12.2.2.3 Inducing Use of Assessment Evidence

Being a new area of education focus, the assessment of life skills and values offers the opportunity for advocacy, to ensure that stakeholders in the system will understand, embrace, and support successful mainstreaming. Thus, the suggestion by Nakabugo et al. (2024; Chap. 8, this volume) is worth consideration, that we treat the data generation process just as importantly as the data itself. This process needs to be open and inclusive (co-creation), facilitating the participation of as many stakeholders as possible, including policy makers and other key actors in the system like local officers and even parents. A second suggestion that emerges from ALiVE and articulated by Head (2015), is that the communication of assessment results needs to speak to the political process, and take advantage of critical political moments. One such moment is the summative assessment for the new lower secondary curriculum in Uganda planned for 2024, the education reform underway in Zanzibar, and the pronouncement of priorities of the current government in Kenya through the report of the Presidential Working Party on education reform.

12.2.3 Implication 3: Teachers’ Assessment Capacities

Care (2024; Chap. 1, this volume) argues that a shift in curriculum without a matched shift in teacher attitudes and capacities, and learning resources, may not lead us to where we want to go. The preference of the integrated approach by East African education systems has ushered in the need for teachers to not only pay attention to the achievement of lesson objectives for academic subjects, but also objectives linked to additional competencies. This is not easy to achieve, even for the best teachers.

The conversation among policy actors at the ALiVE launch in Uganda arrived at the conclusion that while a mindset shift was needed, the acquisition of these competences (in both teachers and learners) necessitated a shift in the way of life, not merely a pedagogical one. This, it was seen, implied wide scale mobilisation of teachers to understand why these competencies are needed as a matter of priority, before we can talk about their capacities to teach or develop them. As one participant indicated: A national approach is necessary, where we walk together as a nation. All teachers must be mobilised to understand, own and nurture life skills. Related to this, a further perspective was noted, that while development of academic knowledge and skills is dependent on the content knowledge and pedagogical competence of the teachers, life skills and values require demonstration, implying that teachers would need to possess these.

Teachers’ lack of assessment capacities has been documented (e.g., Giacomazzi et al., 2022). However, before we reach teachers, the upstream functions of national assessment and quality assurance systems need to accumulate expertise and pass this on to the trainers of teachers. As noted in various chapters in this volume, assessing these competencies requires specific growth in expertise. The ALiVE academy, which now builds expertise not through boardroom training, but through the measurement development process, offers a useful model for education systems in the region. Through this model, it would be possible not only to build a critical mass of experts over time, but also to harness cross-country collaborative energy for the region. This could produce shared item banks and repositories that could benefit everyone. Once expertise starts accumulating at this level, it will be possible to onboard teacher trainers in a systematic way and unlock the available resources for teacher training at pre- and in-service levels. This can go hand-in-hand with integration of assessments at classroom and system levels, adopting an iterative improvement approach.

12.2.4 Implication 4: Assessment as a Shared Space Between Teachers and Parents

Recalled at the ALiVE launch event in Dar es salaam, the oft-repeated statement ‘it takes a village to bring up a child’, remains as true as ever. The conversation in Tanzania noted that the school was unnecessarily burdened by problems that families and communities should solve: ‘many children show up at school when they are already broken, and it becomes the impossible task of teachers to mend them’.

A tough inference can be drawn from these conversations. Intervening in these life skills and values competencies needs communities to engage, where adults and parents are held accountable for demonstrating the skills and values to children. Second is the need for consistency between the home and school value systems, through dialogical relationships between parents and teachers in promoting ways of living that promote the nurturing of life skills and values. Third, the wider community and society, including the media and other communication platforms such as community and political meetings must be seen to be adopting the prioritised values.

ALiVE has two processes that connected closely with communities and parents, and lessons could be drawn for this. First, the contextualisation exercise that was conducted over the COVID period was situated in communities, involving local leaders, teachers, parents, social and health workers, religious teachers (catechists, maalims), and other people who worked with adolescents. Besides producing useful insights for the understanding of the constructs in context, this process enabled community members to contribute to the assessment development process. This contributes to the suggestions made severally in this volume (Care & Giacomazzi, 2024; Mutweleli et al., 2024; Ariapa et al., 2024, Chaps. 4, 9, and 10), that the assessment of these competences must mirror the daily lives of children in the community.

Second, the ALiVE assessment was conducted in the household, offering opportunity for parents to observe and ask questions on the assessment. The opportunities and challenges of household-based assessments are well covered in the chapter by Nakabugo et al. (2024). Most highlighted is the awareness raising that occurs through these assessments, and the immediacy of feedback obtained through this. However, one challenge that arises is how to balance the exclusion of teachers, when theirs is the accountability burden to nurture the competences. There are suggestions to flip this, where school-based assessments could consider open space for parents and other key actors to participate, as a shared exercise. For instance, the teacher could open space for parent representatives to participate, bringing their experience to it, but also drawing useful parenting lessons from it.

12.2.5 Implication 5: A Resilient, Comprehensive Approach for Change

Heated debate ensued at the Uganda ALiVE launch. One side of the conversation argued that it did not make sense to measure something where no structured intervention exists in the education system, and the other side argued that evidence is needed to drive the shift. The participants recalled a three-decade history of life skills education, from early 1990s, and how focus oscillated across epochs where these skills were and were not examined. Even while the construct of life skills has evolved over this time (Care, 2024; Chap. 1, in this volume), the point was clearly made. Without evidence, such as that provided by ALiVE at this launch, it may have been impossible to achieve such depth and intensity of conversation.

This focus on three decades of intermittent life skills education is a clear indication that change happens slowly, steadily. ALiVE’s participatory process of learning how to develop the assessment tool across more than 40 weeks, with 47 East Africans, is one clear manifestation of the resilience of the change. A reflection on the journey forward takes us back to the opening section of this chapter, to five factors.

12.2.5.1 Achieving Alignment

First there must be alignment between the call to integrate assessments of life skills and values on the one hand, and political priorities and economic realities on the other (Stewart, 2015). Proper packaging and communication of the evidence ensuing from assessments is necessary to achieve political persuasion (Elliot & Popay, 2000) and the needed convergence with political interests of each country. One lesson that ALiVE offers is the opening up of assessments as negotiated space with policy makers, rather than producing results, taking evidence to policy makers, and exposing this to the risk of doubt and rejection (Nakabugo et al., 2024; Chap. 8, this volume). Given that political interests and economic realities keep shifting, the assessment process must constantly be re-aligned to emerging curricula and pedagogies.

12.2.5.2 Exploiting Timeliness

Giacomazzi (2024; Chap. 3, this volume) and Shariff et al. (2024; Chap. 2, this volume) concur that the moment is right for the three countries to pay attention to the development of this field. Now, life skills and values are perceived as a non-controversial and timely debate. Within just 3 years, the ALiVE process has attracted immense attention, and now presents a significant opportunity to heighten awareness of the implementation consequences of recent policy. The strengthened bond between state and non-state actors provides a convincing example of how collaborative practice can shift discussion and stimulate action.

12.2.5.3 Sustaining Engagement

Keeping abreast with the political and economic shifts necessitates sustained engagement, beyond suggestion and through to oversight and implementation. The ALiVE process has led to structured partnerships with government agencies across the three countries, as the only pathway to realizing change at the classroom and child level. Three ingredients may be needed to sustain these engagements. First is cultivating trust and collaboration among government institutions (curriculum and assessment centres), so that they break the expert-silos that currently exist. Second is to promote partnership and community building among experts in and out of government. Third is the formalization of relationships and inventing cross-institutional collaboration, so that the sharing of available resources can be smoothed. To achieve this, the programme has rebranded to ‘Action for Life Skills and Values in East Africa’, recognising that assessment alone is cannot achieve the needed change, and expanding focus to support developments in curriculum, classroom-based assessment and pre-service teacher training.

12.2.5.4 Institutionalising What We Produce

Chapters in this volume have described some barriers to assessments of life skills and values. Beyond the technical difficulties faced in producing evidence, there are difficulties that concern evidence use. As mentioned, Stewart (2015) describes four key barriers to evidence use. Beyond the individual, communication and relationships, and timing, lies the organizational or institutional. The anchoring of assessment processes and tools in existing institutions is key to change. System mapping approaches offer useful strategies for the embedding of capacities, processes, and tools. The myriad spaces for institutionalisation include the political processes of legislation, the technical processes of education strategy and policy development, the teacher training ecosystem, the quality assurance and school-based teacher support systems, as well as the many supportive networks that include teacher and parent associations and civil society networks. These are the institutional spaces in which sustained engagement must focus.

12.3 Conclusion

Since conclusion of the first phase of ALiVE, in what might in retrospect be seen as a deep learning about life skills and values and their assessment, the products of that phase and the discussions with the four education systems across the three countries have generated and contributed to continuing reform and development initiatives across Tanzania mainland, Zanzibar and Uganda. First, these initiatives are taking the form of increasing focus on prioritization, definitions and structures of skills – making these explicit in the curriculum. The second dimension is embedding these in assessments, testing the different approaches to assessment and building system capacities in this area. The third dimension of the initiatives is on teacher training, embedding the competencies in teacher training curricula and working with the teacher training institutions to develop training methods best suited for these skills. If this momentum is sustained, the collaborative work of experts in and out of government is expected to accelerate the movement towards realisation of the learning outcomes across education levels. More valuable still, will be the contribution of East Africa to global knowledge, on what works and what does not in achieving system shift outcomes for learners’ life skills and values.