The emergence of global development frameworks such as Education for All, Millennium Development Goals, and Sustainable Development Goals have expanded opportunities for Universal Basic Education (UBE) in Ghana and Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA). In the three decades of their implementation, these frameworks have also stimulated a culture of research based on measuring development and educational outcomes through established indicator‐based approaches. Subsequently, research on UBE in Ghana and SSA remains largely dominated by quantitative indicators which concentrate on enrolment and completion numbers in measuring a country’s progress. Yet, emerging literature shows that the expansion in enrolment is accompanied by high rates of drop‐outs, non completion, and low learning outcomes even for those able to complete basic education. Using structured and unstructured procedures to identify both academic and grey literature, this review explores the state of educational expansion and research on UBE in Ghana and SSA. We argue that the current reliance on dominant quantitative, indicator‐based approaches to assessing UBE reveals little about the differential experiences of children, particularly those in rural and marginalised communities, who receive poor quality education. The lack of information about children’s experiences of access reinforces inequalities in education, employment, and upward mobility in later life. Future research should seek to unpack micro‐level experiences which characterise access, as well as the pathways through which factors such as poverty and location create unequal experiences in schooling access, to inform context‐specific policies for UBE.

中文翻译：

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重新审视加纳和撒哈拉以南非洲的全球发展框架和普及基础教育研究：对证据和未来研究的空白进行回顾

诸如全民教育，千年发展目标和可持续发展目标等全球发展框架的出现，为加纳和撒哈拉以南非洲（SSA）的普及基础教育（UBE）提供了更多机会。在实施的三十年中，这些框架还激发了一种研究文化，该文化基于通过建立的基于指标的方法来衡量发展和教育成果。随后，对加纳的UBE和SSA的研究仍主要由定量指标主导，这些指标着重于注册人数和完成人数，用以衡量一个国家的进展。然而，新兴文学表明，入学人数的增加伴随着辍学​​率高，辍学率高和学习成果差，即使那些能够完成基础教育的人也是如此。本文使用结构化和非结构化程序来识别学术文献和灰色文献，探讨了加纳和SSA的UBE的教育扩展和研究状况。我们认为，当前依靠主导的基于指标的量化方法来评估UBE并不能充分反映儿童（尤其是农村和边缘化社区儿童）的不同经历，他们的教育质量较差。缺乏有关儿童获得生活经历的信息，加剧了教育，就业和以后生活中的向上流动的不平等现象。未来的研究应寻求剖析表征获取机会的微观经验，以及贫困和地理位置等因素在学校获取机会方面造成不平等体验的途径，以为针对UBE的特定环境政策提供信息。