Over the past two years, Unlocking Data has endeavoured to support its community of practice to ‘unlock’ education data to increase its availability and us to improve education. Through a series of workshops run by Unlocking Data, the need to map the status of access and usage of education data in Africa was identified in order to determine where the major data gaps were. Around the same time, a series of initial data mapping initiatives sprung up in a handful of African countries, all with different purposes, stakeholders and methodological approaches. This guidance note draws lessons from education data mapping experiences in Kenya, Malawi, and Sierra Leone, building on the conceptual framework of education data mapping methodology by Lawson & Heady (2021), and key informant interviews (KIIs). In this note, we navigate the different questions and purposes, challenges and key considerations that were learnt from these mapping initiatives in order to make them successful and beneficial for other countries and stakeholders intending to pursue similar exercises.