Getting to Scale: How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People

11. Scaling Up in Education: School-Base Management in Niger

277 11 Scaling Up in Education: School-Based Management in Niger shunichiro honda and hiroshi kato The implementation of a school-based management (SBM) policy in Niger offers ample lessons pertinent to the debate on scaling up development impact. The case involves the adaptation of an institutional model of primary school management to the specific and difficult environment of Niger; a goal of reaching national scale; supportive donor engagement and broad participation of national and local stakeholders; an effective learning process, in which alternative institutional models were tested and evaluated; and implementation of the preferred approach consistently over a decade and beyond. The government of Niger officially adopted an SBM policy in 2002 as the core of its national education sector reform program. SBM is a popular policy worldwide, intended to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of school management, especially in low-income countries. At the core of the policy is the establishment of school councils (Comités de Gestion des Établissements Scolaires, or COGES) and the delegation of various responsibilities and decisionmaking to these councils.1 COGES were established in practically all primary schools throughout the country and continue to function reasonably well, having survived Niger’s 1. In 2012 COGES was renamed CGDES (Comités de Gestion Décentralisée des Etablissements Scolaires), with a ministerial decree on February 2012 (EPT 2012). However, here we use COGES, as this is the name used throughout the period covered by this chapter. 278 Shunichiro Honda and Hiroshi Kato political turmoil since the coup in 2010. Although it is too early to fully evaluate Niger’s SBM, its achievements so far in Niger’s extremely difficult environment must be judged as remarkable, and Niger’s policy and institution-building process should be of general interest to the international development field. Our analysis provides insights on such issues as how a policy of foreign origin was adapted and later scaled up regionally and nationally; how institutional and capacity constraints were overcome; and how various actors including the government, communities, NGOs, and external donors interacted with one another for mutual learning and knowledge creation. While none of the individual components of the SBM initiative in Niger presents an innovation per se, the overall process of introducing, systematically adapting, and rapidly scaling up a policy and institutional approach that had previously not been pursued in this fragile state represents a significant and innovative achievement. The case in Niger is also an interesting study for education professionals. While many developing countries have tried to replicate SBM policy, with El Salvador’s EDUCO seemingly the most successful model, experiences are mixed in terms of both implementation and educational impact.2 The achievement in Niger could provide us with useful insights for improving the feasibility of the model in difficult conditions. We base our analysis on an analytical framework for the scaling up of development policies and interventions developed and applied by Arntraud Hartmann and Johannes Linn.3 Accordingly, we define the concept of scaling up as the process of “expanding, adapting, and sustaining successful policies, programs , or projects in different places and over time to reach a greater number of people.” Critical in this framework is the notion of scaling-up pathways, which are defined as “the sequence of steps that need to be taken in the innovation– learning–scaling up cycle to assure that a successful pilot or practice is taken from its experimental stage through subsequent stages to the scale ultimately judged to be appropriate for the intervention pursued.”4 Along with these pathways , the process of scaling up should be looked at to see if factors such as the following are appropriately addressed: —Defining the desired scale —Focusing on key drivers (the forces that push the scaling-up process forward ) and spaces (the opportunities that can be created, or potential obstacles that need to be removed to open up the space for interventions to grow) —Defining intermediate results —Selecting operational modalities for scaling up 2. Caldwell (2005); Bruns, Filmer, and Patrinos (2011). 3. Hartmann and Linn (2008). 4. Quotations from Linn (2012, p. 4). School-Based Management in Niger 279 —Putting monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in place for effective learning —Avoiding the risks of paying inadequate attention to scaling up. In applying this framework to the case of SBM in Niger we emphasize certain factors, such as dimensions, learning, key drivers and spaces, incentives and accountability, and institutional capacity, for which the Nigerien...