SHARE (Supporting Holistic & Actionable Research in Education)

Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education (SHARE) is a cooperative agreement by USAID’s new Bureau for Inclusive Growth, Partnerships, and Innovation/Center for Education (IPI/EDU) to the University of Notre Dame (UND) that advances global education learning priorities to improve learning outcomes. This Activity is funded through USAID’s Higher Education Leadership, Innovation, and Exchange (HELIX) Annual Program Statement (APS) under the USAID New Partnership Initiative (NPI). Within UND, this Activity is being led by the Pulte Institute for Global Development (Pulte) alongside UND’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC). UND implements SHARE in partnership with higher education and research institutions based in USAID geographic regions worldwide.

In the first three years (2020 - 2023) of its implementation, SHARE operated in 19 countries, including twelve in Africa, four in Asia, and three in Latin America and the Caribbean. Many of the SHARE’s studies will help generate transferable evidence to inform education policy and implementation  in other countries facing similar issues. 

What is unique about SHARE is how it carries out its research. SHARE implements through country-level partners and deliberately engages local ecosystems throughout the research process. As such, SHARE applies innovative and rigorous research methods while strengthening the capacity of ecosystems to generate, translate and ultimately use evidence. This is manifest through an extensive process of involving key actors in research design and implementation, ensuring alignment on objectives, questions and tools. Through this work, SHARE increases chances of evidence uptake and that its studies will be more relevant for the local context, promoting a culture of evidence-based decision making. The SHARE team also uses its engagement with in-country partners as an opportunity to exchange learning and capacity across its network, in a way that is not always visible across activities.