RECOUP: Consortium Partners
RECOUP was one of three Education Research Programme Consortia (RPCs) established by the Department for International Development (DFID) and commissioned by the Human Development Team of the Central Research Department (CRD) of DFID. It was a five-year research programme during which more children than ever before - particularly those from poor households - will be moving through schooling and training to become working youths and adults. Their fortunes will be affected not only by their educational experiences, but also by the broader context of welfare and opportunity. The multi-sectoral objectives of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) acknowledge this inter-dependence. Yet its nature and strength are not fully understood, and judgments about priorities for policy change, or about their sequencing, are not always firmly based.
RECOUP focuses upon educational outcomes. The other two RPCs are concerned with issues of access to education (CREATE, coordinated by University of Sussex) and of educational quality (EdQual, coordinated by University of Bristol), respectively.
Research Partnership
RECOUP continues to be a partnership of seven institutions from UK and four developing countries - Kenya, Ghana, India and Pakistan - coordinated by the University of Cambridge. The research focused on the circumstances of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - the two regions where the challenge of achieving the MDG objective of halving world poverty by 2015 was greatest, and where the policy benefits were most urgently required.
Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are regions with low school efficiency, low levels of cognitive achievement amongst many school leavers, high inequalities in educational outcomes and in the social and economic consequences of schooling. They include countries with different demonstrated commitment to education provision and rights, providing opportunity for comparative policy analysis and educational strategies. Most of the detailed work of RECOUP takes place in our partner countries - Ghana, Kenya, India and Pakistan. However, Consortia members have research links with a wider range of countries in Africa, Asia and other regions.
The RECOUP research team
The RECOUP research team comprised three UK institutions and four from Africa and South Asia. They are:
- The Centre for Education and International Development (CEID), University of Cambridge - lead partner;
- School of Social and Political Studies (SSPS), University of Edinburgh;
- Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE), University of Oxford;
- Associates for Change (AFC), Ghana;
- Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD), India;
- Kenyatta University, Kenya;
- Mahbub Ul Haq Human Development Centre (MUHHDC), Pakistan.