BE² Blog series – Knowledge brokers in international education have a unique skillset (and role in your team)

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The intersection of policy and evidence has been a challenge for every sector since the late 1970s, primarily originating in the health sector. In the education sector, we have used a variety of terms to refer to this space – evidence use, evidence for decision making, evidence translation or most recently – and arguably most appropriately – knowledge brokership[1].

Numerous organizations and initiatives, including the OECD’s Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), the Africa Evidence Network, highlight the importance and difficulty of translating evidence into action. Even in the US, the idea that translating evidence into action is an important yet difficult task was the impetus behind the Strategic Data Project (SDP), initiated by funding from the Gates Foundation and implemented by Harvard University. SDP equips data strategists with the skills to bridge the gap between evidence and policy. These skills encompass analytical ability, policy knowledge, and effective data storytelling. SDP is now recruiting for its 17th cohort of data strategists to work with US state- and local-level schools and system leaders to utilize the vast data available to them.  Underlying all these organizations and initiatives, both in the US and globally, is this: that usingevidence requires a special skill set that combines analytical chops, policy knowledge, and the ability to tell a visual and non-technical story.

For international education, this feels like a turning point – let’s stop hoping that we can get data people to speak just enough policy or get policy people to speak just enough data.  By defining knowledge brokers by their unique role and skillset we recognize that this is a unique job as well.  We can now turn to empowering the next generation of knowledge brokers by training for these skills and recruiting accordingly.

At CIES 2025 I had the privilege of presenting my experiences and thinking around knowledge brokers based on years of being one in SDP, FCDO, USAID and a few NGOs. My co-presenters shared on-the-ground examples of knowledge brokers in practice at UNICEF and at Jacobs Foundation’s EdLab, underscoring the unique skills that knowledge brokers bring to make evidence usable and useful to decision makers.

Some takeaways from our CIES presentation:

  1. Formal Recognition of Knowledge Brokership: It’s time to acknowledge and define knowledge brokership as a distinct profession, including the creation of a role description.
  2. Knowledge brokers are researchers, communicators, visual story tellers and realists: they go beyond statistical significance (aka, p-values) and operate in a gray space of practical significance, make inferences from incomplete evidence to narrate a compelling data story to an audience often short on time and resources
  3. Relational Expertise: Even with abundant evidence to draw from, knowledge brokers are primarily sought after for their ability to navigate the relational aspects of knowledge translation, including capacity strengthening and building partnerships.
  4. Knowledge brokers are part of the evidence ecosystem: We still need evidence generators, evidence users, communication and knowledge management experts: evidence brokers are a missing piece of the team. They are different from communications and knowledge management experts who can support aspects of evidence use such as dissemination, communication, storage and facilitating access through knowledge management.

So what?

Knowledge brokership is not a new idea. However, our current approaches to evidence uptake have assumed the role of broker can be ‘double hatted’ by a researcher and/or a policy expert.  Instead we need to recognize that it is a unique role – one that can be included in a research or policy team – and that it requires a unique set of skills – skills that can be nurtured and trained for.

An example of a knowledge broker in practice

One example of a knowledge broker role is the GEEDLab in Ghana, an evidence policy lab, led by Kwame Akyeampong, a member of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP). After the launch of the 2023 Smart Buys’ report by the GEEAP, Kwame worked with the researchers at the GEEDlab to contextualize the report for Ghana. This involved additional desk research, analysis of local evidence, and then creating a report that leveraged the global evidence, supplemented by local evidence and synthesized it for local policymakers. Kwame’s role went beyond generating/synthesizing to the relational aspect we highlight above: he combined statistical knowledge with the policy and political context knowledge to surface key insights in collaboration with policy makers.

Sources:

Author and contact information: Hetal Thukral is an accidental knowledge broker. She started her career in international education developing and implementing Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) programs in India, Pakistan, Guyana and South Africa with the Education Development Center. Following her dissertation, she served as a knowledge broker to the Superintendent of schools in Howard County Maryland before she went on to build a team of researchers and knowledge brokers at School-to-School, International. Since then she has worked with FCDO’s Girls’ Education Challenge and at the Center for Education at USAID. You can reach her at hthukral@gmail.com

About this blog series

This blog is part of a blog series: “How can we improve the use of evidence for policy, planning and implementation in education”? The Blog Series is hosted by Building Evidence in Education (BE2) and Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel Secretariat. 

This blog series will cover identified trends and practices that increase evidence use in education. Where available, blogs will also discuss the impact that increased evidence use has.

The content of this blog represents the opinions of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BE2 or GEEAP.

[1] The function of knowledge management has been recognized for decades, e.g., Peter Drucker, in his publication: 1999 Drucker, P. F. (1999). Knowledge worker productivity – the biggest challenge. California Management Review , 41 (2), pp. 79-94. However, the role of the knowledge broker is a more recent phenomenon.