Across the globe, education data often fall short of telling the full story. This pioneering collaboration seeks to change that by applying demographic methods to education statistics—producing more reliable, coherent, and policy-relevant data. By improving how we understand education participation, attainment, literacy, and inequality, this initiative will directly support SDG monitoring, inform national strategies, and guide future investments in human capital.
The EduCohorts Project is led by Anne Goujon, in close collaboration with long-term collaborator Bilal Barakat. The project is linked with the Yidan Prize-supported project at IIASA led by Wolfgang Lutz, which builds upon decades of scientific work highlighting education as a central variable in the analysis of climate change and sustainable development. This linkage reinforces the broader objective of understanding and projecting the educational composition of populations and its impacts on global challenges.
The project brings together the demographic modeling expertise of IIASA, the statistical mandate of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), and the education policy insights of the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report. It draws in particular on the long-standing work of IIASA’s Population and Just Societies Program and the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, which have pioneered methods to project populations by age, sex, and education. This foundation ensures that the project builds on internationally recognized approaches to producing consistent, comparable, and policy-relevant human capital data. It also builds on recent innovations in demographic modeling that have helped improve the reliability of health and fertility data and now seeks to apply these advances to education indicators.
The approach will generate demographically consistent time-series estimates for indicators such as school enrollment, completion, adult literacy, and education-related inequalities—filling current data gaps and aligning better with real-life educational trajectories. A key focus will be on improving indicators for pre-primary, tertiary, and adult education, as well as disaggregating data by demographic and household structures.
Over three years, the project will deliver a robust set of outputs: a methodological handbook, high-quality datasets, technical protocols, training for young African scholars, and policy-relevant scenario analysis for African countries. These outputs will be developed in close partnership with UIS and GEM to ensure uptake and alignment with existing global education monitoring frameworks. The project receives financial support from UNESCO and the Yidan Prize project funds. This support underlines the project’s alignment with global efforts to advance education research, strengthen data systems, and support evidence-based policymaking, particularly in regions where reliable education data remain limited.
Ultimately, this initiative aims to become a lasting reference point for the demography of education. It will help countries produce better data, adopt consistent protocols, and integrate education more firmly into long-term development planning—especially in light of growing challenges like climate vulnerability, where education plays a critical but under-recognized role.