Education Systems Strengthening_RFI_04.2021.docx.pdf

Date of Issue: April 15, 2021 Closing Date to Submit Comments: May 3, 2021, 1:00 pm EST Activity title: Education Systems Strengthening Activity RFI number: USAID-669-04.15.2021

Point of contacts: submit questions and comments to the following addresses:

Supervisory Contracting/Agreement Officer: Andrea M. Plucknett - aplucknett@usaid.gov Contracting Specialist: Edward Lamin - elamin@usaid.gov

SPECIAL NOTICES

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI)

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Mission in Liberia is in the process of designing a new Education Systems Strengthening Activity (the activity). This $20-25 million activity will partner with the Ministry of Education (MOE) to address system-wide constraints and increase the MOE’s capacity to provide decentralized and inclusive education, monitor progress, and sustain improved learning outcomes for all children and youth. The Office of Acquisition and Assistance (OAA) at USAID/Liberia has developed a draft concept, development hypothesis and accompanying Results Framework, and now aims to provide a community of stakeholders the opportunity to review, comment, and make suggestions to enhance the activity’s design.

The draft concept and Results Framework is anticipated to result in finalizing either a Statement of Work or a Program Description that may lead to a formal solicitation or Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). The place of performance is Liberia, specifically in Bong, Grand Bassa, Lofa, Nimba, Montserrado, Margibi counties. The draft concept is provided in the following pages. Your comments will be used to develop a design document that is clear, innovative, maximizes development learning, adaptation, and impact, and facilitates coordination and collaboration with existing and planned USAID and other programs.

DISCLAIMER

Please note: This is NOT a solicitation. This RFI is issued solely for information and planning purposes—it does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP) /NOFO or a promise to issue an RFP/NOFO in the future. USAID may release a full solicitation at a later date through the U.S.

Government portal at beta.sam.gov or www.grants.gov. The RFI is an attempt to reach out to stakeholders in an effort to receive feedback on our draft concept. Interest will be treated as information only. Responses to this RFI are not official proposals and in no way will be deemed to form any binding agreement with the U.S. Government and will not be construed as a commitment by the U.S. Government to issue a solicitation or pay for any information submitted as a result of this request. Organizations responding to this request are solely responsible for bearing all expenses associated with the preparation and submission of the responses to the RFI. It is the responsibility of the respondent to monitor beta.sam.gov or www.grants.gov for the release of any further information. Note that responding to this RFI will not give any advantage to any organization in any subsequent procurement. No telephone calls will be accepted and neither will responses to questions be provided with regard to this notice.

INSTRUCTIONS

Responses to this RFI must be in Microsoft Word or PDF format and submitted by May 03, 2021.

Comments on the concept, Development Hypothesis, and accompanying Results Framework should be submitted to USAID/Liberia via email to Andrea Plucknett at aplucknett@usaid.gov and Edward S.

Lamin at elamin@usaid.gov. To assist in the efficiency of this process, please ensure that your comments are concise and specific to the information included within the Concept, Development Hypothesis, and Results Framework. In addition, your responses to the following questions are welcome:

1. What other methods should USAID consider to ensure that this activity holds the MOE and its professionals accountable to deliver quality education and drive sustainable reform?

2. How can USAID best target the capacity development approach for sustainability and mitigate the risk that capacitated staff do not remain on the job?

3. What are the main barriers to resources reaching schools and how can USAID help the MOE address these barriers? How can USAID help the MOE to increase accountability to students and parents at the local level?

4. Should USAID support the MOE to expand initiatives related to mobile money, school grants, and/or school report cards within this activity? Are there other innovative components based on global best practices that USAID should consider?

Sincerely, Andrea M. Plucknett Supervisory Contracting/Agreement Officer

ANDREA MARIA

PLUCKNETT (affiliate)

Digitally signed by ANDREA MARIA PLUCKNETT (affiliate) Date: 2021.04.15 10:10:57 Z

Section 1. ACTIVITY TITLE

The name of the anticipated activity is the Education Systems Strengthening Activity (the activity).

Section 2. PROGRAM DURATION/TARGET BENEFICIARIES

The anticipated activity duration will be for four or five years.

With its support to the central MOE to improve education data, resource management and accountability, the activity will have a national reach. However, in its work to improve county-, district-, and school-level governance processes and systems, the activity will target the six central counties of Liberia that represent the majority of the population (Montserrado, Margibi, Lofa, Nimba, Bong, and Grand Bassa), in line with USAID/Liberia’s 2019-24 CDCS and to ensure synergy across USAID’s education portfolio. The targeting will allow USAID’s education portfolio to continue building county-, district-, and even school-level synergy that maximizes results. The activity will be able to share and extend best practices from interventions in the six counties which the MOE can then deploy in other geographic areas. The activity will target education officials and professionals at the central, county, district, and school level with its capacity development interventions with the end goal of improving education outcomes for children and youth in Liberian schools.

Section 3. CONTEXT

Deep-rooted education governance issues constrain the MOE’s capacity to sustainably finance and deliver education services that improve equitable access, learning outcomes, and skill acquisition for all children and youth. In particular, the MOE confronts serious inadequacies in data collection and analysis, resource management, and accountability. These issues are in part due to a stalled decentralization process that leaves county and district levels with low levels of capacity and even less authority and an annual budget that does not provide the resources necessary to measurably improve learning. Low capacity across government and society, including all levels of the MOE, represent the greatest barriers to sustained economic growth in Liberia. Moreover, the MOE does not receive sufficient resources to adequately fund its programs. The 2018-19 national budget allocated 14.9 percent of the national budget to education ($84 million out of $570 million), below the international guideline of 20 percent. The share of donor financing of the sector, at over 50 percent, is relatively high.

Liberia’s Education Reform Act of 2011 created and delegates authorities to county school systems and their county and district education offices and school boards; however, implementation stalled during the Ebola crisis and never regained momentum. Such a system, which is already envisioned by the GOL and active in the Monrovia Consolidated School District, would give counties, districts, and schools the discretion and incentives to meet the educational needs of their communities with policy oversight and technical leadership from the MOE. The envisioned Center for Education Management under the MOE’s Planning Department is pivotal to strengthening the county school systems and their district education offices; however, the center is yet to be established.

In the wake of tremendous disruptions to the education system by a once in a generation pandemic, helping the MOE to establish a strong foundation of good governance from which to build on its education emergency response plan is a strategic use of limited USAID funds. In particular, the activity will support the system strengthening component of the plan’s fourth policy priority: Recovery, school re-opening and system strengthening. Among other areas, this component calls for a focus on assessment, capacity development for county and district education offices and school leadership, school quality improvement and data strengthening, and monitoring and accountability. The MOE’s plan notes a funding gap of over $24 million, illustrating the stark challenge facing the MOE to monitor progress, generate data, and report towards global data milestones on the road to recovery. The fallout from COVID-19 is likely to have an overstated impact on students who are from already marginalized groups, such as out-of-school children and youth and overage students. With a focus on equity and inclusion a key component of the activity, these groups will merit special attention.

Section 4. KEY LEVERAGE POINTS

Through a human and institutional capacity development approach that catalyzes decentralization and improves efficiencies, the activity will partner with the MOE to drive sustainable reform in data collection and analysis, resource management, and accountability in the education sector. The MOE must be capacitated and supported through its departments and auxiliaries at the central and decentralized levels to drive sustainable reform. The activity will coordinate assistance with other education donors, especially those active in the Local Education Group and participating in the implementation of grants under the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). The activity will also ensure MOE commitment and leadership to propel reforms with sustainability at the core by closely collaborating with MOE officials throughout the design and implementation of the activity. The importance of sustainability cannot be overstated. The activity will seek to establish real commitments from the MOE with real consequences if they are not met.

With its capacity building focus, the activity will seek to engage and strengthen Liberian higher education institutions (HEIs) as partners. Such an approach could catalyze a university consortium to support improved educational management and leadership in Liberia. Recognizing the limitations of the education budget and the potential impact on reaching expected results, the activity will coach the MOE to advocate to the Ministry of Finance to fully fund the annual budget request, to leverage current financial resources more effectively, to secure additional public and private sector funding, and to pilot incentives for improved system performance through results-based financing (RBF). Building on sporadic achievements in decentralizing education, the activity will link stronger county school systems, such as Montserrado and Nimba, with other target counties to share successes and guidance on assuming delegated roles under the Education Reform Act of 2011. While the activity will target county and district education offices for capacity building to support the achievement of expected results, central-level technical personnel, as well as school-level parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and school management committees, are also critical groups to drive sustainable system-level reform.

Section 5. ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES

Development Hypothesis

IF the MOE has central-, county-, and district-level professionals with increased capacity to fulfill their roles; institutions that are more accountable to students and parents; data that is comprehensive and mechanisms in place to produce regular, timely, and reliable statistics; financial resources that align with their vision for quality education delivery, and a decentralization agenda that reflects the Education Reform Act of 2011, THEN the MOE will be a transparent driver of sustainable reforms that improve learning outcomes for students.

Results Framework

There are three anticipated outcomes under the activity:

1) Improved evidence-based decision making

2) Improved resource management

3) Improved accountability

Section 6. MAJOR ASSUMPTIONS:

An MOU with the MOE and close collaboration and partnership throughout activity design and implementation will encourage policy reform and the commitment of GOL resources to achieve the activity’s expected results. An annual review will examine the demonstration of GOL political will and its impact on activity progress. Some funding for the subsequent year may be dependent on demonstration of adequate political will. The MOE will commit to a negotiated list of requirements, to be confirmed later.

Section 7. INTERVENTIONS

Objective 1: Improve evidence-based decision making

Under Objective 1, the activity will partner with the MOE to improve evidence-based decision making.

Comprehensive and reliable data on the education system, regularly collected, is essential to understanding the bright spots to build on and the barriers to overcome in the drive to improve education outcomes among Liberia’s children and youth. Central to this work is an effective Education Management Information System (EMIS) and human resources at the central, county, and district levels that are capable of collecting, inputting, and analyzing the data. The MOE’s data collection needs include the following: school quality assessment (quarterly), school census (annually), and school grading (every 3-5 years). Under the GPE, UNICEF and the World Bank contributed resources recently for one-time support to data collection, including the school census. The MOE was able to collect less than half of the necessary data but has not been able to collect comprehensive data for five years. Coupled with onerous logistical and accessibility constraints, the MOE lacks a comprehensive plan and the resources necessary to implement the plan. Moreover, the EMIS team needs more capacity, especially at the county and district levels, as decentralized staff are expected to play a major role. The activity will build on the MOE’s decentralized education monitoring approach and group administered learner assessment (DEMA/GALA) supported by USAID in the same six counties targeted by this activity through Read Liberia.

The activity will also build on progress in planning and conducting learning assessment and educational research. Under a GPE grant, the MOE is developing a national learning assessment policy and framework through which it seeks to create mechanisms to measure learning outcomes beyond the public exams (i.e., the West African Examinations Council at grades 6, 9, and 12, and university entrance exams). USAID’s Read Liberia Activity helped establish the early grade reading assessment (EGRA) for grades 1 and 2 and a GPE grant will set an evaluation at grades 3 and 6. With regard to research, the MOE is working with the World Bank to explore why results at the secondary level are not as good as neighboring countries. There are no MOE-led research efforts at the primary level. The activity will build on this support to help the MOE craft and fund a comprehensive plan for data collection and analysis, monitoring and evaluation, and train the human resources necessary to implement the plan.

Illustrative Activities:

● Provide technical training for technical MOE staff (central, county, and district levels), potentially with support from collaborating Liberian HEIs and technical assistance (TA) from a U.S. HEI, on data collection and input, data analysis, analyzing and reporting on data, and using analytical reports for inclusive decision-making, planning and performance monitoring.

● Conduct a school population landscape assessment to have up to date information on student demographics given the number of children and youth out of school, the very high percentage of overage students, and the negative impact of COVID-19 on both.

● Plan and pilot technology, techniques, and strategies for better data collection (hardware and software) in challenging to reach areas to determine opportunities for system-wide scale up.

● Support the MOE to produce a quarterly school quality assessment, an annual school census, and one school grading exercise during the life of the activity.

● Pilot RBF initiatives to incentive improved data collection and analysis at decentralized levels.

Objective 2: Improve resource management

Under Objective 2, the activity will partner with the MOE to improve resource management. The MOE lacks the capacity to manage resources effectively in areas such as financial management, procurement management, asset management, and human resource management, especially at the county and district levels. In addition, the mechanisms, policies, and funding are inadequate to drive sustainable improvement. County and district education offices, with support from school-based authorities, should be able to manage their own schools and resources without relying on the central office, but they have not enjoyed the autonomy envisioned under the Education Reform Act of 2011 and they need more capacity to do so effectively. Poor infrastructure and lack of supplies limit the safety and suitability of school learning environments. Effective teacher management may be the most difficult challenge facing the MOE as human resources make up over 90 percent of the education budget. The activity will support the MOE’s vision to take advantage of technology to streamline resource management processes and reduce opportunities for corruption.

An inefficient payroll system includes ghost schools, ghost teachers, and double-dipping teachers, while poorly qualified teachers enter the profession without proper credentials and volunteer and supplementary teachers are not appropriately compensated. It may be that a number of ghost teachers are real teachers who have abandoned their posts in part due to the remoteness of some schools. Classrooms in remote counties are not attractive to younger teachers, so they often stay no longer than two years. A recently passed act to amend the Education Reform Law of 2011 and include a rural teacher incentive fund may provide a useful carrot. Building on support from Big Win Philanthropy and other past USAID and donor-supported efforts, the MOE is working to purge the payroll of ghost teachers (up to 2,000 have been cut from the payroll) and ensure there are qualified, appropriately compensated, and accountable teachers in the classroom. When the MOE removes ghost teachers, it can absorb the salaries of volunteer and supplementary teachers onto the payroll. The activity will support this process and boost the MOE’s Center for Educational Accreditation and Certification, a key actor to improving teacher performance management.

Illustrative Activities:

● Provide technical training for technical MOE staff (county and district levels), potentially with support from collaborating Liberian HEIs and TA from a U.S. HEI, on:

○ County budgeting and financial management policies and procedures.

○ Using appropriate basic financial accounting software and maintaining supporting documentation for disbursements.

○ GOL procurement policies and procedures, including oversight of county, district, and school procurement.

○ Resource allocation and costing to connect budgeting with data-driven decision making.

○ GOL asset and fleet management policies and procedures.

○ Controlling decentralized budget and financial management.

● Update studies on corruption and teacher absenteeism.

● Assess progress in teacher vetting and payroll status verification and support the MOE to complete processes in outstanding counties.

● Support the MOE, Civil Service Agency, and Ministry of Finance to remove ghost teachers from payroll, train technically proficient teachers who lack credentials, and integrate all teachers into a single payroll.

● Draft and rewrite job descriptions based on the MOE’s county organogram.

● Review and propose improvements in equity to funding formulas that distribute resources to schools, especially with regard to geography.

● Finalize county budgeting and financial management policies and procedures.

● Draft county procurement plans.

● Maintain county and school asset and fleet management records appropriately.

● Pilot RBF initiatives to incentive improved resource management at decentralized levels.

Objective 3: Improve accountability

Under Objective 3, the activity will partner with the MOE to improve accountability in the education sector. The MOE lacks capacity to lead and manage accountability systems effectively. At the central level there is weak technical oversight and support, including over the 52 percent of private and faith-based schools. A strong focus on integrity and ethics is insufficient at all levels. County and district school boards are important actors to ensure decentralization works, but they do not have the capacity or finances to do the work. At the school level, principals are not accountable to the education community, vice principals do not provide effective supervision and support for teachers, teachers do not spend enough time on task, and students do not spend enough time in school. PTAs should be provided more autonomy. Moreover, there is insufficient advocacy for education across all levels. Few county- or district-based citizen advocacy groups are focused on education. The lack of successful models illustrating the benefits of education lead to a lack of motivation for education.

The activity will strengthen the supply and demand side of accountability systems. On the supply side, the activity will target central-, county-, district-, and school-level entities with different interventions designed to improve their capacity to practice accountability in education service delivery. The activity will support the MOE to ensure that there are adequate policies in place, practical tools available, and effective reporting structures that improve accountability throughout the system. It will train and leverage county and district education officers to hold principals and teachers more accountable to fulfill their duties in the oversight and provision of quality education at the school level. The activity will pilot innovations in supervision and support for teachers, including school-based communities of practice, to improve teaching practice and increase their accountability to students and parents. On the demand side, the activity will target organizations and groups active in education advocacy and identify new opportunities to build coalitions that demand high quality education services. The activity will work with PTAs and school management committees, building on current and past USAID work to strengthen these strategic school-level leaders within the education community. This focus on accountability is linked with work under the first two objectives, as well: accountability to ensure data is collected and used and accountability around managing resources effectively.

Illustrative Activities:

● Provide technical training for technical MOE staff (central, county, and district levels), potentially with support from collaborating Liberian HEIs and TA from a U.S. HEI, on integrity/ethics, internal controls, decision-making and communications, and decentralization.

● Create an advanced degree program for aspiring county- and district-level education leaders, potentially with support from collaborating Liberian HEIs and TA from a U.S. HEI, on educational leadership and administration.

● Create a certificate course for school principals and vice principals, potentially with support from collaborating Liberian HEIs and TA from a U.S. HEI, on school management.

● Provide training for PTAs, in coordination with other USAID education activities, to deliver broader content and support for their many roles (school management, feeding, accountability, verification, etc.).

● Define roles and responsibilities across different levels of the education system (who is accountable for what and how those expectations are reinforced) and develop clear professional standards for county and district education officers.

● Develop and test tools for oversight of county and district education officers and boards by community stakeholders and for joint planning, accountability and decision-making, and train county- and district-based citizen groups to use them.

● Create and/or sustain county- and district-based education advocacy citizen groups and networks through grants to national or county NGOs.

● Assist MOE senior leadership to lead campaigns promoting integrity/ethics and respecting internal controls.

● Mentor MOE senior leadership on collaborating with other GOL agencies on decentralization.

● Document lessons learned and best practices in management of county and district education offices and school boards.

● Mentor school administration to create teacher clusters or school-based communities of practice.

● Conduct a study on the amount of time on task in school.

● Conduct a study on school fees.

● Pilot RBF initiatives to incentive improved accountability at decentralized levels.

Section 8. CONTRACTING OFFICE ADDRESS

United States Embassy 502 Benson Street United States Agency for International Development

Section 9. CAPABILITY STATEMENT

USAID requests all interested parties to include a capability statement with the response to this RFI.