GPE’s CEO ‘powerfully impressed’ by Sierra Leone’s education plan
By Kemo Cham
Despite the troubles its education system has gone through, Sierra Leone is on track to achieving the global goals on education, says Alice Albright, Chief Executive Officer of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).
Albright said she was very impressed by the plans of both the government and the Ministry of Education which, combined, could make a difference in the sector which has been blighted by recurrence of disasters and maladministration.
Albright, who visited the country last month, said all the authorities needed to do was to ensure staying on course with the plan.
It was her first visit to Sierra Leone, where she held discussions with key government officials, including President Julius Maada Bio and Education Minister Alpha Timbo. She also visited projects implemented with GPE funding.
“We know from reading from the background of the history of Sierra Leone that the country has some difficulties…not just the civil war but also the Ebola crisis. And both of them together really had a very negative impact on the schooling system,” she told Politico.
“I have come away just being powerfully impressed by the determination and the will they have built,” she added, referring to the government’s free education policy and the Education Ministry’s Education Sector Plan.
GPE is a global fund for education which is managed through a multi-stakeholder partnership, with the aim of strengthening education systems in developing countries by increasing the number of children who are in school and learning.
Albright’s visit coincided with the inauguration of 14 district offices of the newly established Teaching Service Commission (TSC) under the Education Ministry. The TSC is a major milestone in an ongoing reform within the sector, a large part of which is being bankrolled by the global fund.
President Bio, in office for 11 months, has made education his government’s central focus, in line with his priority of human capital development.
Under his new administration, Sierra Leone is pursuing an ambitious free education policy, which was launched last September. The Free and Quality Education (FQE) seeks to provide free tuition and books for children in primary and secondary school. Over 1.5 million children have been targeted by the scheme, which has been estimated to cost Le 191billion (US$20million). But this amount is to take care of issues around tuition and learning materials.
The goal of this policy is to offset a huge deficit in school enrolment in the country which has a literacy rate of 48 per cent, one of the lowest in the world.
There has been overall progress in access and quality of education in Sierra Leone in the last decade. But statistics show that while an increasing number of children have been enrolling at every level, many children do not start primary schooling at the official age of 6 years and too many of official primary school age are out of school.
According to the Education Sector Plan (2018-2020), Gross Enrolment Rate (GER) stood at an impressive 130% in 2016, a number said to have been fueled by the large number of children over the official age. The ESP contains the government’s goal of attaining Universal Primary Education.
In addition, while access to education has improved in the previous five years, as indicated by a relatively high gross enrolment rates at the primary level, significant repetition and drop-out rates at the upper primary levels, secondary and above, especially among girls and students from poor backgrounds, remained a major concern.
Other critical challenges include significant overcrowding in existing education facilities, no secondary school facilities in some districts and even chiefdoms, and lack of basic water and sanitation facilities in many schools.
Alongside the ESP, the FQE policy has been designed to address all these barriers.
Scaling up
As the only global organization focused exclusively on improving education, GPE brings together developing country and donor country governments, multilateral development and humanitarian agencies, and organizations from the private sector, philanthropy, civil society and the teaching profession. Since its establishment in 2002, it has worked with 67 developing countries.
Sierra Leone became a member in 2007 and since then it has received three grants totaling US$46.8 million, all spent on programs designed to support children’s education. Part of that money went into the development of an Early Childhood Education (ECE) curriculum, policy, and teaching and learning materials, as well as the design and distribution of early grade reading materials to primary schools, and a nationwide media campaign to increase awareness of early grade reading.
GPE, alongside the World Bank, has funded 50 pre-primary classrooms across the country.
The TSC, which is tasked with training and empowerment of teachers, was also set up with GPE funds.
During the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic which ravaged Sierra Leone, learning institutions were shut down for nearly a year. Under the Ministry’s Ebola Strategic Response Plan, GPE provided US$950,000 which was used to fund 600 hours of educational radio programming. In addition, 5, 970 schools were provided with hand-washing stations and supplies, and a house-to-house assessment was mounted to encourage reenrollment.
GPE funding often targets the hardest to reach children, so the beneficiaries of the previous grants to Sierra Leone were purposefully targeted at districts with some of the most deprived populations - Kenema, Kambia, Tonkolili, and Pujehun – where more than 1, 200 schools received performance-based school grants.
The latest grant of US$17.2 million, according to Albright, is to scale up these interventions to more regions of the country.
What makes this grant notable is that it is supported by the government’s strong strategic commitment and statement around improving the availability of free quality education program, she said.
A strong education plan is among a number of elements that qualifies a country to benefit from GPE grant, she said, adding that countries also have to indicate readiness to put a significant amount of domestic resources into the sector. The GPE benchmark is 20percent.
The Sierra Leone Government’s 2019 budget made history by allocating the highest ever budget to the education sector in the country’s history - 21 percent.
Sierra Leone used to be fondly referred to as the 'Athens of West Africa' for the pivotal role it played in providing education, through its iconic Forah Bay College, when western style college education was not available elsewhere in the sub-region. Several factors have been identified for the fall in educational standard and most experts’ explanation point to a flawed elementary education system.
In 2009, the concerns climaxed with a presidential decision ordering an inquiry, in response to the worst performance in external examinations the previous year. Among the issues those findings revealed were lack of infrastructure, including classroom inadequacies and the consequent high teacher-pupil ratio.
Getting it right
The new GPE funded program, designed around the theme: ‘Getting it right – Building a strong foundation for learning,’ has the objectives of increasing access to early learning for 3-5-year olds; improving learning outcomes in reading, writing, and math for early grade 1-3 students; and improving systems for decentralized school monitoring, data collection and management.
To achieve this, the program has been designed to focus on increasing pre-school classes in primary schools and expanding community-based early childhood education. Over 120 pre-primary and primary classrooms will be constructed, according to the program detail. It will also train 1-3 grade teachers in conjunction with the TSC.
Ms Albright says this is in line with their goal of addressing the challenges of education at the root, noting that the decisions being take now will have a positive knock on effect on the learning outcomes later in life.
The GPE CEO however called for restraint in expectations, noting that from a budgetary perspective it might take some steps along the way for a country to get free education at all levels of the system. She said this is why as a partnership they saw the need to together and help the government work on the efficiency.
“The goal of free education is very clear in the sustainable development agenda. So many countries have that as their goal. Some are able to get there faster than others. But I think that this country’s intent on it is very impressive,” she said.
(c) 2019 Politico Online
