EQUIP2 Final Report.pdf - Education Policy Data Center

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EQUIP2 Leader Award Final Report
methodology did not capture what was, in fact, a very complex reality. The
contentious report received a great deal of attention at conferences, and its
mixed reception delayed its publication by a year. Members of the education
policy expert team agreed that the evaluation, though controversial, was
influential at USAID. As one implementer commented, “The report had the
intended result of getting people’s attention, and it drove a better awareness
of USAID’s strengths and weaknesses. The agency moved towards better
design, with a focus on quality, and better monitoring and evaluation
overall.”
Education System Reform
In the 1990s, a member of the donor effectiveness research team, Luis
Crouch, had been the lead author on a series of reports under USAID’s
Advancing Basic Education and Literacy (ABEL) Project entitled, Education
Reform Support. The work was beneficial to USAID education officers,
particularly in terms of thinking about the bigger, longer-term picture
of education reform in an environment typically dominated by five-year
projects. As one USAID representative commented,
The idea was that you pull yourself out of your project specifics. Especially
as we were getting more into an environment of basket funding, and
country-owned plans, it was a useful construct to help people think, what
are you doing as a USAID education officer? We tend to get locked in the
weeds – the little picture is too engrossing.
In 2006, the EQUIP2 team decided to provide an update to the report
series, including a new literature review and an extensive survey of
professionals who had implemented some of the recommendations from
the original reports into their own projects. The result, Education Reform
Support Today, included several examples of field projects that were meant
to be practical and instructive. According to members of the education
policy expert team, this work helped development practitioners, particularly
at USAID, to integrate long-term and contextualized approaches into their
education projects.
The success of the publication resulted in an invitation for members of the
Education Policy Expert Team to go to Egypt in March 2007, where the
USAID mission and the Egyptian government were interested in applying
the system reform framework to the EQUIP2 Education Reform Project
(ERP). The meeting led to a continuing series of consultancies, ultimately
influencing the trajectory of Egypt’s decentralization efforts. Soon afterwards,
the same framework was used in El Salvador, influencing the policy dialogue
during an election year. As the momentum around education system reform