How to open a policy window: Helpful advice from the EAC Regional Education Conference

How can you impact the lives of hundreds or thousands or even millions of learners with one set of activities? Find a policy window.

Education policies can affect what students are learning, how that learning is taking place, and the resources available to motivate learning. Even small changes to policies can make a big difference to teachers and learners, so influencing policies is one way education practitioners, researchers and advocates can win big if they are strategic and timely with their evidence and action.

Often, policies are unfortunately like a closed window — locked shut with no space for movement. But openings occur, and when they do, education stakeholders need to be ready to act.

This was the topic of a recent session we facilitated with members, partners and fellow travelers of the School Action Learning Exchange (SALEX) as part of the East African Community Regional Education Conference in August 2024 in Arusha, Tanzania. As education-focused organizations working across the East Africa region, we shared some lessons about successfully leveraging policy windows to improve education outcomes, and we heard from participants about some of their learnings from working in this space.

Here we share five crowdsourced pieces of advice and lingering questions about opening policy windows:

1. There are lots of open windows when you take the time to look.

During the EAC conference, we created space for small groups of education practitioners, researchers, advocates and policymakers to sit with colleagues from their country and see whether any policy windows emerged. And in most countries they did.

For instance, the Ugandan group identified a new government entity working on teacher continuous professional development that was primed for evidence uptake. At the same time, colleagues working in Tanzania identified issues such as curriculum review and development of learning materials on which to collaborate.

2. Policy is in the eye of the beholder.

When you think of policy change, what comes to mind? For a lot of people, policy means a national law or regulation. But policy can be much more local, from district-level change all the way down to school-level policies.

EAC participants identified that some of the most interesting and exciting opportunities for policy change involve the people closest to learner outcomes: school leaders and teachers. These school-level changes can sometimes be overlooked when education stakeholders are looking to influence changes at a large scale, but participants shared examples of school-level policy changes that practitioners were able to test and scale through their networks, achieving big changes that started with a few teachers.

3. Having policymakers at the table is key.

Not all groups in the EAC conference had a policymaker sitting with them, but everyone agreed that government has to be involved as a collaborator — and not just as an audience — for evidence uptake.

Colleagues expressed that working with government officials helped them to identify policy windows that are open or in the process of opening. They also provided invaluable input on what evidence-based solutions are feasible and which ones are never going to work in a policy framework. Working with policymakers from the beginning helps to build trust and give them a sense of ownership in the process and the ultimate policy change.

4. Everybody has a role, but what role?

One thing that requires more clarity for many policy windows is what role(s) all stakeholders should play. EAC participants shared that academics can provide support for leveraging evidence for policy, but it is less clear where their role ends.

Are they just producing the research, or are they involved in its translation? Many education-focused INGOs also struggle with the question of what is their role in translating evidence to policy: should they be an advocate with existing evidence or work on evidence generation, too?

Even policymakers — those who arguably have the clearest role in, well, policy making — face pressure to be engaged in research and dissemination. Clarifying these roles is a messy but critical step for leveraging policy windows in education.

5. Sometimes policy isn’t the problem.

While small group discussions surfaced a lot of policy windows, a few groups came to agreement that, in their countries, the policies were looking pretty good. The problem? Poor implementation and enforcement. But evidence generation and uptake isn’t just there to inform policymaking — it can also provide important insights for policy implementation and oversight.

In our next blog post on this topic, Brenda Akite Otika of STiR Education shares how her organization has leveraged these lessons to achieve big change in education in Uganda.

The authors of this blog would like to thank SALEX member colleagues who participated in the EAC conference for their contributions to this piece: Titus Kizungu, Sylvie Kinabo, Annika Rigole, Louiza Kaluna, Emily Tusiime, Animesh Priya, Everlyn Majuma, Ursula Hankinson and Robyn Whittaker.