Community level
District level
Large NGOs, usually internationally based but including some national organisations based in-country are increasingly being used as intermediaries between Government and donor, and local beneficiaries. There is much ongoing debate concerning what their role could and should be. Because 'NGO' can cover such a broad range of organisations, it is important to establish the type of NGO being considered in these debates. Farrington and Bebbington warn that "for all their talk about participation and capacity building, NGOs perform better at delivering services (inputs, seed, health, education, etc.) or implementing projects such as road and canal-building. Several analyses of NGOs have come to the conclusion that they do not reach the poorest of the poor."25 During an ODA/NGO seminar in 1992, many participants claimed that: "The most appropriate role for a local NGO would not necessarily be in the delivery of services or aid but in organising the consultation, feasibility and planning process with the local community, or assisting communities to access government services and pressure government to deliver them effectively."26 Commenting on some key factors which make community-based institutions effective, Francis et al (1996) argue that the qualities and skill of leadership, especially to be able to mediate between village and government office, are crucial to community advancement.27
25 J Farrington and A Bebbington, 1993, Reluctant Partners? Non-Governmental Organisations, the State and Sustainable Agricultural Development, Routledge, p.15.26 ODA, 1992, 'Report on the ODA/NGO Seminar on Popular Participation', p.21.
27 P Francis et al, 1996, State. Community and Local Development in Nigeria, World Bank Technical Paper No. 336, Africa Region Series.
It has been argued above that the facilitating NGO cannot do everything to bring about community participation, and that community participation alone is only part of the solution to improving the quality of teaching and learning. In other words, we cannot offload so many difficulties and problems on NGOs and communities. What then is and should be the role of other institutions and education authorities in mainstreaming approaches and principles of community involvement and governance?
At the time of its design, the SIF project concentrated on working out a vertical structure, from the highest level of the Steering Group down to the School Management Committee, with the Ministry of Education's Project Management Unit and the facilitating NGO falling between these levels. However, it played less attention to horizontal structures, that is, the relationship of different actors at the district and local community level. The financing mechanism for the SIF adopted a straight top to bottom structure: funds passed directly from the Project Management Unit (PMU) of the MoE to the SMCs on the basis of their approved SIF plans. The PMU also directly financed CEDEP for its role in running and facilitating the pilot. No funding passed through the Ministry of Education and the central, regional or district offices of the Ghana Education Service.
When the SIF pilot began, there would have been justifiably little confidence in the capacity at district level for district authorities to play a greater role. With recent developments in the decentralising of budgeting and financial management from the centre to the districts, it now becomes more feasible and necessary to respond to the challenge of working out in greater detail the necessary horizontal relationships, bringing together expertise at district level covering communication skills to improve access and community participation as well as greater management for efficiency (especially on the whole area of sanctions and incentives for teachers) and teacher development (including a focus on improving teaching and learning methods).
It is generally agreed that the institutional and social context have a critical role to play in providing the conditions for sustainable economic development. As a rule of thumb, "it is easier to build on existing institutions than to create new ones."28, and Putnam29 demonstrates, in his study of civic traditions in modem Italy, that the civic community has deep historical roots, so we might be ill-advised to rush into creating new institutions. But how a project should work with local, grassroots institutions, to what extent it should seek to change or modify them (for instance, in terms of encouraging greater female participation and working to change what might be an elite identity and lack of representation of the wider community), and how it should encourage the forging or consolidation of links between these organisations and local government authorities are all outstanding issues which need to be tackled sensitively. Francis et al provide a useful checklist of the kind of explanations given for not getting the institutional and social questions right. These are: poor technical design of implementing institutions; absence of suitable institutions at the local level; disconnect between an indigenous order and an externally imposed institutional framework; failure to incorporate an emerging 'civil society'; difficulty of establishing credible, enforceable contracts; and lack of 'generalised trust'.30
28 Colletta and Perkins, op. Cit.29 R Putnam, 1993, Making democracy work: civic traditions in modem Italy. Princeton University Press
30 P Francis et al, op. cit., p.3.
We need, therefore, to analyse to what extent key institutions were involved at community and district level in the SIF pilot, and how their role and interaction might be strengthened in future with the aim of mainstreaming approaches and principles of community involvement and governance.
The two important institutions at the school and community level are the Parent Teachers' Associations (PTAs) and School Management Committees (SMCs). PTAs have existed throughout Ghana for many years. As the name implies, membership is restricted to teachers and the parents of pupils who attend a given school. In 1994, the Government of Ghana inaugurated the institution of the SMC, a body which is supposed to solicit membership from a broader section of the community than just teachers and parents. Baku and Agyeman's survey of teachers and headteachers found that only 43 per cent of the respondents claimed to have a SMC. Commitment and regular attendance, they claimed, was only 'high' or 'very high' for SMC meetings in 10 per cent of communities, compared with 18 per cent attendance at PTA meetings.31 However, they also found that the Town Development Committees and SMCs, where they existed, were reliable vehicles for promoting community participation.32
31 Baku and Agyeman, op. Cit. p. 53.32 Ibid., p.96.
During the process of SIF plan preparation, the SMC was the body which played a central role; in most cases, the PTAs played rather a minor, supportive role later, during the implementation period. The main problem with the SMC involvement was that its composition rarely met the national requirements. There were often no women representatives from the community, and about half the members turned out to be teachers or ex-teachers, in addition to holding another position in the community (e.g. the Assemblyman, the Unit Committee Chairman and members of local associations). So effectively it was sometimes doubtful whether the SMC did encompass a broader representation of community interests than the PTA. In many cases, just one member of the SMC, a teacher usually in the role of secretary, played a major role in drafting the SIF, which was then taken back to the rest of the SMC and to broader community meetings for their comments and approval. In these situations, conflict between the teachers and communities was sometimes less evident, but despite the greater involvement of the teachers on the SMC, there were no more likely to be imaginatively worked out plans to improve the quality of teaching and learning. In a few of the SIF communities, the teachers writing the draft SIF plan included the provision of bicycles for themselves, but at a broader community meeting, this item was struck off, which again added to the sense of grievance felt by the teachers.
It is difficult to arrive at a clear distinction between the roles and functions of the PTAs and SMCs, which may simply be an indication that their roles are still in the process of evolving. In one village visited, it was said that before the SIF, the PTA's main role had been to address pupil absenteeism and organise work to carry out minor school repairs, but this work had handed this over to the SMC more recently. In one of the three districts, the district director of education pointed out that the SMCs were starting to carry out the function of following up problems concerning absent teachers, but the SMCs in the SIF communities were more operational in this respect than those in the non-SIF communities. One SMC member said that the SMC and the PTA were the "same thing", except for the fact that PTAs focused on checking that both teachers and pupils arrived punctually at school. The officers of the district education office in one of the three pilot districts remarked that their main problem, from the point of view of the institutional setup of the SIF, was conflict between the PTAs and SMCs. The chiefs and elders in another community claimed that the PTAs and SMCs worked in close partnership.
Whatever their respective roles and strengths, it is clear that the capacity of both PTAs and SMCs needs to be strengthened. In future, the intermediary NGO role could be re-focused to address broader issues to do with helping these community organisations become more representative of their communities, more effective in communicating with district education offices and district assemblies, and more capable of dealing with community-teacher relations. It is interesting to note that the community-focused schooling improvement fund project in Chad moved away from its original design to straightforward capacity building of PTAs, for which it has started to achieve results. But the task of strengthening institutions in poorer communities is not straightforward because these communities also tend to be less well endowed with effective institutions (although the relationship is not simple: poverty may reinforce reciprocal social bonds as well as leading to a depletion of social capital.)33
33 P Francis et al, op. Cit.
The main committee at district level responsible for dealing with questions of education is the District Education Oversight Committee (DEOC). However, the DEOCs have only been in existence since 1995, and a number of visits to districts throughout Ghana suggest that many of them had not yet met by mid-1997, the stage at which the SIF pilot was already being implemented. The project had encouraged the setting up of a new committee in the pilot district capitals, called the District Approval Committee (DAC) which was composed of district representatives of MoE and GES, the District Coordinating Officer, the Chair of the Social Services Sub-committee of the District Assembly and a representative of a local NGO where applicable.
In some districts there may have been too little involvement on the part of the Assembly and District Education office (DEO) in the SIF. The DAC members in one district who were interviewed during the mid-term review said that they had relied on CEDEP to read all the SIF plans and then give recommendations to the DAC. The reason for meeting very rarely was given as the lack of 'T&T' (transport and food) allowances. Again, it was apparently the lack of any separate transport allowance which meant that they were only able to visit to pilot SIF communities when CEDEP gave them money for fuel. Summing up, they said that: "the project should remunerate the DAC for their work if the District Assembly won't." The NGO district field supervisors pointed out that there were delays in implementing the pilot at various stages as DAC and DEO did not fulfil their role or delayed playing their part, and there was an insufficient degree of ownership, with the DEO being a long way from understanding the whole process and objectives.
It has been proposed that the next phase of the SIF pilot continues to work through the DAC mechanism, but although many of the DEOCs are relatively new, it might be better for the purposes of mainstreaming the district's involvement in the project if the DEOC (which are a permanent district structure) were to take over the DAC's role in the SIF, possibly through setting up a sub-committee to carry out the liaising activities with the NGO. Because the DACs did not, on the whole, become very actively involved in the first phase of the SIF, it cannot be argued that their experience would be lost through working with a different structure.
In another of the pilot districts, the problem was inappropriate involvement on the part of the district education office. The DEO gave out guidelines on SIP formulation to head teachers in advance of CEDEP's arrival, and did not inform communities of their obligation to contribute twenty per cent of the total costs, nor that their plans may not be accepted, wholly or partly, by the MoE. The consequences were quite serious as CEDEP had to hold lots of discussions with communities, backtracking to explain how the project was actually different to what they were originally told, and to try to soothe over dissatisfaction, and false hopes and expectations.
Ultimately district level education structures must be more fully involved, as befits their skills and authority, and in line with their new role in the decentralisation of education services under the performance and reform management programme. We should be working towards a situation in which the district education office contract out to NGOs for their skills and to other individuals and organisations where appropriate. Of course, they are likely to be resistant to such a way of working because once they have the financial resources in their own control, they will prefer to keep these resources within their own institution rather than to contract out to other institutions to provide a particular service. Two good reasons for this preference would be the opportunity to control resources and patronage and, in most cases, the chances of getting a service at less expense than through contracting a NGO34. This was illustrated by the Sefwi Wiawso district. The district director of education was for a long time resistant to the idea that CEDEP's services were needed at all for the SIF. This was a case of one of the more committed directors of education feeling that the extra resources from the SIF for managing and facilitating would have been better spent by the district office of education. It was only after some months of the pilot that he began to understand the sort of facilitating skills which the CEDEP field supervisors employed and came to realise that his office would not have been able to undertake these activities unaided. So the right balance between the facilitating role of the NGO and the enhanced service delivery and teacher advisory role of the GES needs to be achieved, and again, this might only be done through a collaborative approach of social development, management and teacher educational input, from both Government and donor side.
34 see Carmen Malena, "Working with NGOs" for a discussion on how frequently NGO involvement in a project proves to be more rather than less costly.
