This background paper was prepared for the Mastercard Foundation report, Secondary Education in Africa: Preparing Youth for the Future of Work. This paper is intended as a forward-looking and policy-orientated paper, which will assist in implementing high quality secondary STEM and ICT education in sub-Saharan Africa, targeting disadvantaged learners in difficult delivery contexts. The specific objectives are: a) To better understand the characteristics of successful national policy frameworks for increasing access for disadvantaged groups of learners, including girls, learners from poor socio-economic backgrounds and speakers of minority languages, to good quality STEM and ICT in secondary education; b) To identify successful strategies used to address the data gap of student performance, teacher ability and school level resources available for STEM and ICT education; c) To develop a diagnostic framework enabling policy makers to analyse their particular context and identify pressure points in the system, where targeted intervention could be particularly impactful.