Since the launch of the Education for All Fast Track Initiative in 2002, donor funding for primary education has been increasing steadily to help countries achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary school completion by 2015.

The improvement of education management plays an essential role in reaching this goal by ensuring that resources are used efficiently and equitably, especially in settings with considerable resource constraints.

The mobilization of much needed additional resources depends on demonstrating that these resources will be used effectively. Thus, building country capacity to manage for results is a high priority in international development assistance in the education sector.

What is AGEPA?

The World Bank, with the governments of France, Ireland and Norway, and with technical support from the Pôle de Dakar and Coopération Française/AFD, launched the Improving Education Management in African Countries initiative (IEMAC/AGEPA[1] ) as a pilot program in 2003.

The AGEPA initiative helps countries design, implement, and evaluate concrete plans to address management challenges in their primary education systems, and to condense lessons for broader replication. It focuses on two areas:

• More efficient allocation of resources to schools, particularly the distribution of teachers to schools
• Enhancing education quality through a better use of resources at the school or classroom level  

The Challenge of Education Management

The success of an education system does not consist of the number of students enrolled in school, but on what students learn.  In this regard, sound education management plays an essential role by ensuring that the necessary inputs in the form of teachers, learning materials, and financial resources are available at the school level, and that effective mechanisms are in place to enhance student learning. 

The AGEPA initiative is helping countries address these challenges by (i) strengthening in-country technical and organizational capacity for better management; (ii) creating knowledge assets; (iii) providing a regional forum for cross-country learning and experience exchanges; (iv) providing a network of resources; and (v) bringing education management issues to the fore in international policy fora.

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[1] IEMAC, also known by its French acronym, AGEPA, which stands for Amélioration de la Gestion de l'Education dans les Pays Africains.

Participating Countries

The initiative has grown from originally five participating countries[1] in 2003 to now eight countries associated with AGEPA, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger and Senegal. All of these countries have begun to think about innovative solutions to improve the management of their education system at various levels, either in the context of AGEPA or other national efforts.

Country Examples for Innovative Management Solutions

Benin	Results-based community outreach program
Burkina Faso	School grants School report cards
Guinea	School improvement projects
Madagascar	School & district report cards School improvement plans Teacher allocation tool
Mauritania	Teacher-management optimization tool for the school level Regional financial simulation model Regional improvement plans
Mozambique	School grants Management training for relevant stakeholders
Niger	School and district report cards Job descriptions (for inspectors, school directors, teachers)
Senegal	School improvement projects School principal association meetings focused on pedagogical approaches

Source: D'Orléans, 2006,Rapport du Troisième Atelier AGEPA Dakar, 16-18 mai 2006, Banque Mondiale.

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[1] At the inception of the AGEPA initiative, five countries were initially invited to participate in the pilot program: Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mozambique and Niger.

Since the launch of the AGEPA initiative in December 2003, a series of three workshops has taken place. The objective of these workshops was to launch the work in new AGEPA countries, take stock of the status of the country work, provide international expert feedback on the work content in more advanced countries, promote cross-country learning and create a network of national and international experts on education management issues.

Workshops

1^st AGEPA Workshop Antananarivo, Madagascar, December 2003 

2^nd AGEPA Workshop Nouakchott, Mauritania, November 2004 

3^rd AGEPA Workshop Dakar, Senegal, May 2006

4^th AGEPA Workshop, February 2009

How to address education management challenges - AGEPA's Approach

The challenges of effective, equitable and efficient resource distribution and improving the link between resources and quality are not new, but the AGEPA initiative attempts to approach them in an different way. The approach consists of a joint capacity building effort in the context of national education sector programs, and has the following characteristics

"FROM RESOURCES TO RESULTS" Policies defining general resource provisions Management Level 1 Distribution of resources (human, financial, and material) from national budget to schools Management Level 2 School and classroom operations: Transformation of resources available at local level into student results (retention, learning)

integrated into national strategic frameworks; based on country commitment demonstrated by the establishment of a counterpart AGEPA team lead by the Secretary General of the Ministry of Education; providing a conceptual framework as foundation for work on management improvements; based on an iterative, learning by doing work process through intensive, in-country technical assistance; fostering teamwork across different ministry departments and levels of the education system and with other donors; focused on results and learning through impact evaluations, cross-country experience exchanges during regional workshops and country-to-country missions; and through the creation of a network of national and international experts on education management issues; including sensitization and communication activities to raise awareness of education management issues in national and international fora

Main Steps of the AGEPA Work:

1. Establishment of an IEMAC/AGEPA team in the respective Ministries of Education under the leadership of the General Secretary of Education, accepted within the ministry, but also committed to changing managerial behavior at all levels of the system, form the school to the national ministry level;
   • Prioritization of management improvement agenda in primary education
   • Definition of institutional framework: clarification of actors' roles and responsibilities at all levels of the education system ; and development of explicit job descriptions of the managers of each level, such as director of planning and the central ministry, headmasters, teachers, inspectors, district directors, provincial directors (profile, responsibilities and competencies).
   • Definition of performance indicators and data required for planning and monitoring, with sufficient desegregation in the data to alert the relevant manager to problems in teacher allocation and/or student learning outcomes, and to facilitate evaluation of managerial performance, monitoring and supervision.
   • Creation of new tools and adaptation of existing tools for use by managers at each level: stock taking of existing instruments, identification of needs not satisfied by existing tools and development of additional instruments. These tools can include operational tools for each actor (e.g. lesson planning, budget tracking, student attendance).
   • Definition of the process and arrangements by which problems in teacher management and student learning will be identified and solved as they arise.
2. Development of a Country Action Plan consisting of the following five components:
3. Testing/validation of tools for teacher deployment and effective classroom processes in a small sample of schools (with subsequent adjustment of interventions if necessary).
4. Implementation of newly defined processes and tools on an experimental basis in a large sample of schools
5. Evaluation of the interventions designed: impact evaluation, analysis of the evaluation results; and adjustment of tools, processes, managerial training and communication for the extension of the interventions
6. Scaling up on the national level of the interventions, in parallel with information, sensitization and communication measures; and training of the relevant actors

Partners

Technical assistance and capacity enhancement requires a dedicated team. We therefore would like to thank our partners for making the launch of the AGEPA initiative possible in the first place and for their continued financial and technical support in this joint endeavor: 

• Agence Française de Développement (AfD)
• Irish Aid
• Ministère des Affaires Etrangères de la France
• Norwegian Education Trust Fund (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway)
• Pôle de Dakar (technical assistance)
• World Bank Institute (technical assistance)
• Education for All Fast Track Initiative (EPDF)