Rescuing USAID Education Data

Since the announcement of USAID’s closure, AFLEARN has been working with partners to preserve vital education data and teaching and learning resources.

Together, we have rescued over 2,500 files from 109 education projects across 43 countries—representing more than 20 years of evidence.

On 7 August 2025, DataFirst co-hosted a major data rescue event with RDAP and ICPSR. More than 100 volunteers joined the hackathon, working collectively to prepare files for public release.

The first rescued datasets are now available on DataLumos, a crowdsourced repository at the ICPSR for at-risk U.S. federal government data.

Explore the interactive map to see which African datasets are already available (with direct links to DataLumos) and which will be released soon.

 

While USAID’s closure has had devastating consequences, the collaborative response has created an unexpected opportunity: not only will the datasets once available on USAID’s Development Data Library be made public again, but hundreds of additional datasets that had been awaiting release will also become accessible.

 

 

A huge thank you to the data rescue volunteers whose efforts have ensured that this invaluable evidence for education will not be lost.

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