When you ask Eric Siyolo Mayekiso — a teacher in the Eastern Cape of South Africa — why he became a teacher, his answer is simple: He wanted to help people. He chose this work in the hopes of making a difference in the lives of as many children as possible.

But the traditional structure of South Africa’s education system offers limited options for South African educators to provide the quality instruction that can make a difference for students. And despite significant government spending and charitable investments to reform South Africa’s public schools, student performance has remained low.

At the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, we’ve seen how educational data, when used correctly, can dramatically improve learner outcomes. With this in mind, we partnered with South Africa’s Department of Basic Education (DBE) in 2012 to help improve the outcomes of the basic education system through available, quality, and timely education data to support South African educators.

Our 2012 Success by Numbers report was the first output from this partnership. The report included seven practical steps for South African educators, particularly school leaders, to become effective drivers of data with the goal of improving public schooling. These seven steps were the catalysts for the 2013 launch of the Data Driven Districts (DDD) program.

The DDD program was designed to not only increase the quality of education data, but to empower education officials to use data to positively impact learners. The program itself combines two strategic elements: a data management tool and a data visualization tool.

School-level data is collected from the South African School Administration and Management System (SA-SAMS) and other sources. It’s then added to the DDD dashboard, a highly intuitive online tool that provides learner performance metrics and corresponding reports in a visual and analytical manner. The dashboard allows education officials around the country to access innovative, visual representations of real-time learner data spanning individuals, schools, districts, and provinces.

Read the full article about education data in South Africa at Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.