Opportunity

Finance is a critical input to a country’s education system, yet partner country education systems are strained under the pressure of limited financial resources, demographic changes, and growing enrollments. The USAID/Africa Bureau has identified a significant knowledge gap within its education officers, as well as with DC-based education staff, whose role is to support mission education staff in the area of education programming.

To address this gap, the USAID/Africa Bureau requested support from Integra under the USAID Learning, Evaluation and Analysis Project (LEAP III) to tailor existing and develop new training sessions and materials for USAID’s education staff. Our team developed and delivered two courses and a workshop with the primary goal of strengthening the knowledge of public and private financing of education systems and interventions among USAID’s education staff.

• Public Institutions & Education Finance Training
• Navigating Private Finance in Education Training
• Institutional Perspectives on the Education Finance Landscape Workshop

Methodology

The trainings and workshop were designed and developed and then piloted, resulting in recommendations for future offerings of this course. Feedback was collected through end-of-course evaluation forms and informal interviews of USAID trainees by Integra throughout the week. The robust feedback is expected to guide modifications to the content before being rolled out to field staff.

Tested knowledge – A pre-test and post-test were administered. The post-test contained the same questions as the pre-test (as well as a few supplemental questions) for comparison. The assessment questions were chosen to reflect general knowledge of education finance and public financial management and were not directly shared with those leading the lectures or chosen with the detailed content of the lectures in mind.

Self-reported knowledge – At the beginning of the course, participants filled out a ‘self-reported knowledge’ scale, ranking their knowledge of 7 topics from 0 (“completely uninformed”) to 10 (“confident expert”).

Impact

The pilot of the Funding the Future Series was a success in many respects. Subject matter experts came together, participants were provided with a deep overview of a range of topics in education finance, and Integra the opportunity to engage with participants to better align future trainings to their needs and preferences.

• Post-test scores increased by 16.53 percentage points from 47.88 percent to 64.41 percent. Only two participants performed worse on the post-test, while all others increased their scores with 40 percent increasing their scores by over 20 percentage points.

• Self-reported knowledge increased significantly for all topics except one. This is unsurprising as knowledge of this one topic was high to begin with, relative to other topics. The greatest improvement was on self-reported knowledge of USAID’s Financing Self-Reliance (FSR) framework.

Key highlights from the end-of-course evaluations are presented below: