Establishment of
Independent Monitoring Unit (IMU)
The Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (GoKP), with technical and financial support from the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID), has initiated various reform initiatives to improve quality, access and governance in the education sector. These reform initiatives cover critical areas of interventions and require independent monitoring on a monthly basis to:
i.
track progress on key performance indicators
ii.
communicate findings to the Department
to inform decision making
Need
for Establishing an Independent Monitoring System
The public education system in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa suffers from low
levels of educational attainment, equity, and student achievement. Performance
is hampered mainly by three systemic impediments: (1) poor incentives and
capacity for systematic and strategic planning and effective implementation;
(2) minimal monitoring and accountability of service delivery agents for
implementation integrity and performance; and (3) system capture by insiders
and other special interest groups that prefer the status quo. Available data
suggests that the majority of the students especially girls gain far less from
school than they deserve. More than 50% of children dropout before completing
primary and without learning to read and write. To address these challenges,
policies must be made through an informed decision making process based on
reliable and current data.
At the school level, these challenges have contributed to high teacher absenteeism
and low student attendance, as well as other inefficiencies. Existing
accountability mechanisms have not been sufficient and successful in curtailing
these issues. An independent monitoring
system gathering data at the school level can address many of the above
obstacles and bring greater accountability to education service delivery in the
province. This system would provide information on a monthly basis throughout
the school year to capture data on key indicators.
The government has had difficulty in addressing these challenges partly
because it lacks reliable and easy to use data, and partly because it lacks the
ability to analyze data for effective decision making. The IMU aims to provide reliable and easy to
use data for the government to use to make informed decisions.
Objectives of the Independent
Monitoring System (IMU)
The
key objectives are as follows:
- Provide Elementary &
Secondary Education Department and its development partners with a viable
means of ensuring that education sector reforms are efficiently developed
and effectively implemented.
- Support the establishment of
performance monitoring mechanisms
- Deliver objective information on
a monthly, quarterly and annual basis to donors, civil society, parents
and other stakeholder for reviewing the performance of government and its
officials.
- Increase public awareness of the
status of school facilities and infrastructure and the level of education
service delivery in the province, district and the school level.
- Provide access to information on key indicators
to increase social accountability
- Increase social accountability
to improve governance, service
delivery outcomes, planning and resource allocations to the sector
Specific tasks relating to
IMU:
- The IMU is responsible for ensuring that data for all
key performance indicators are collected regularly on monthly basis and
uploaded using Smartphones.
- Once collected data will be analyzed for the purpose of performance
evaluation
- Next, the data is presented, in an agreed format, to all
relevant offices of the education department.
- The IMU will be responsible for ensuring accuracy and timely provision of data. It will also be required to randomly select a sample of schools to visit across various Districts in order to ensure accuracy of data. It will develop reports on remedial measures for data inconsistency, etc.
Specific tasks relating to
District Monitoring Unit are:
- District Monitoring Officer
at district level will be responsible to manage and supervise the entire
operation of data collection at the school level. The DMO will also liaise
with the provincial government and perform other necessary functions as
and when required by the department.
- 475 Monitors have been recruited
to collect school level data on a monthly basis. The numbers of Monitors
for each district depends upon the number of schools in a given district.
- The main responsibility of the
Monitors is to visit approximately three to four schools, during school
hours, unannounced and collect information. Information is fed to a
predesigned smartphone application documenting all the key variables of
the school and updated directly to the database. Once the information is
fed, both, the head teacher and the Monitor will sign to attest that the
information collected is correct.
- It will be ensured that each school in the district will be visited at least once during a month and by a different monitor the following month to ensure transparency in the data collection process.
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