What Works Hub: “When USAID terminated its education programmes in early 2025, it also removed public access to a rich collection of data on global learning outcomes – putting at risk two decades of work and hundreds of datasets. These datasets, critical to researchers, implementers and most importantly, decision-makers in each country, were nearly lost. In June 2025, a data sharing agreement between USAID and the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), allowed these data to be publicly available through the DataLumos platform. 2,500 files from 109 education projects across 43 countries and 20 years were saved. These datasets and their associated files, including instruments, reports and codebooks, were publicly available on USAID’s Data Development Library (DDL) website until early March 2025 when the site went dark. Our endeavour benefited from insider knowledge of USAID’s processes and contracts, initiative from data champions within USAID (at the time) and the research data community, and the continued demand for answers across the sector. The key ingredient to saving the data? Persistence. From navigating internal processes at USAID (and State Department) at a time when reductions in force and changes in leadership were unpredictable, to finding a trusted, vetted home for federal data – persistence was key. Getting a data sharing agreement in place in July 2025 between USAID and the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) was just the first step to make the data publicly available again. With the agreement in place, copies of USAID education data were securely transferred to ICPSR. Next, we needed to sort the files and upload them into ICPSR’s platform for at-risk government data, DataLumos…”