Boosting OxTrack Outcomes with EdoBEST Success Factors

Former Governor Godwin Obaseki’s frequent engagement with some of the world’s most renowned institutions on education transformation does not only underscore the global success of the EdoBEST initiative, but also provides a useful toolkit for framing other initiatives like OxTrack to improve their quality on scale for resounding impact Crusoe Osagie writes
 

Again, His Excellency, former governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki was at University of Oxford’s historic Rhodes House in the United Kingdom, exchanging ideas with some of the world’s most respected thinkers on education reform.

This time, the focus was OxTrack, a social impact spin-out initiative emerging from the University of Oxford’s education research ecosystem, designed to improve teacher effectiveness and strengthen learning outcomes across developing countries.

The OxTrack Initiative

OxTrack is the product of more than two decades of rigorous research by scholars at Oxford into teacher knowledge and classroom practice across Africa and South Asia. The research involved assessments of approximately 100,000 teachers across multiple countries and helped develop psychometrically robust indices of teacher professional knowledge, measuring how well teachers understand how children learn, how they apply knowledge, how they manage diverse classrooms, and how they evaluate learners. 

The initiative emerged after researchers discovered that many teachers tasked with preparing students for primary mathematics and reading comprehension tests were themselves unsure of the correct answers. This revelation triggered large-scale studies across several African countries that confirmed deep systemic gaps in teacher preparation and pedagogical knowledge. 

To address this, OxTrack was designed as a mobile-based professional development and assessment platform that allows teachers to test their knowledge across a wide range of teaching competencies. Through periodic assessments and personalised feedback—including AI-enabled tutoring tools—teachers can track their professional growth, benchmark themselves against peers, and identify areas for improvement. 

Importantly, the system also provides a private professional profile for teachers, enabling them to demonstrate verified competencies for career advancement, improved remuneration, and greater professional recognition. By 2025, pilot programmes had already been deployed among tens of thousands of teachers in Nigeria and Kenya. 

For policymakers and education leaders, OxTrack offers a powerful new data infrastructure capable of generating real-time insights into teacher quality and classroom practice at scale.

Obaseki’s Experience 

Obaseki’s participation in these high-level discussions was hardly coincidental. As former governor of Edo State, Nigeria, he led the design and implementation of EdoBEST—the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation Programme—which has emerged as one of Africa’s most widely studied and celebrated education reform initiatives.

Launched in 2018, EdoBEST fundamentally re-engineered the Edo state’s public primary school system by combining teacher retraining, digital lesson delivery, real-time classroom monitoring, and strong governance reforms. Teachers were equipped with tablets loaded with structured lesson guides, while supervisors monitored classroom activities and learning outcomes using digital dashboards.

The programme was built on a simple but powerful premise: improving teacher effectiveness is the fastest and most sustainable path to improving learning outcomes.

Under the reform, thousands of teachers were retrained and supported with structured pedagogy, while data from classrooms allowed the government to monitor attendance, lesson completion, and student progress in near real time.

The results were significant. Independent evaluations and international development partners reported measurable improvements in literacy, numeracy, teacher attendance, and classroom engagement.

Global Recognition 

The impact of EdoBEST quickly attracted global attention. Development institutions including the World Bankhighlighted the programme as a leading example of how technology, data, and strong political leadership can transform education systems in developing countries on.
World Bank analyses of foundational learning in Africa have cited EdoBEST as an innovative model for large-scale teacher professional development and accountability systems, noting that the programme demonstrated how structured pedagogy combined with digital monitoring can significantly improve classroom practice.

The programme has also been featured in global policy discussions on education reform and has been studied by education researchers, multilateral agencies, and governments looking for scalable solutions to the continent’s learning crisis.

EdoBEST as a Model for Africa

Beyond Edo State, the reform’s influence has steadily spread across the continent.

Several national and subnational governments across Africa have studied and adopted elements of the EdoBEST framework as part of their own education transformation efforts. Countries and states exploring similar structured pedagogy reforms have drawn lessons from EdoBEST’s integrated approach—combining teacher capacity development, digital learning tools, robust data systems, and strong leadership.

The initiative has also become a reference case in international education policy circles, where it is frequently cited alongside other successful education reforms for demonstrating how systemic change can be achieved within a relatively short period when leadership, technology, and accountability mechanisms align.

Lessons for OxTrack

It was therefore fitting that Oxford invited Obaseki—who is also a fellow of the Oxford Next Horizon programme—to contribute to discussions on how OxTrack could achieve large-scale impact.

In his intervention, Obaseki emphasised that for OxTrack to truly transform education systems, it must avoid a tokenistic or pilot-only approach.
Africa, he noted, is rapidly becoming the world’s largest reservoir of human capital, and the continent’s future prosperity depends on the quality of its education systems. To address this challenge, education reforms must be able to scale quickly and reach millions of learners and teachers within a short period of time.

Drawing from the EdoBEST experience, Obaseki stressed the importance of making teachers—not policymakers or administrators—the primary drivers of transformation.

In his view, reforms gain momentum when teachers themselves are empowered with tools, data, and professional incentives that allow them to improve continuously.

The Bottom-Up Advantage

According to Obaseki, successful reforms must combine strong policy direction with bottom-up ownership from teachers and school leaders.
When teachers can see their progress, benchmark themselves against peers, and access targeted support, they are more likely to embrace change and improve classroom practice.

This insight aligns closely with the philosophy behind OxTrack, which seeks to provide teachers with individualised data about their professional knowledge and performance.

If implemented at scale, OxTrack could become a powerful complement to broader education reforms—providing governments with the tools to understand teacher performance while empowering teachers to develop professionally.

Bridging Research and Practice

The Oxford discussions therefore represented an important convergence between cutting-edge academic research and real-world policy experience.
While OxTrack offers sophisticated measurement tools rooted in decades of research, EdoBEST demonstrates how such tools can be integrated into a functioning education system and scaled across thousands of teachers and schools.

For global education reformers, the lesson is clear: data and technology are most powerful when combined with leadership, teacher engagement, and systemic policy change.

As universities like Oxford continue to innovate in education research and policymakers like Obaseki bring practical implementation experience to the table, the possibility emerges of building education systems that are not only better measured—but also fundamentally transformed.