| BACKGROUND
The School Improvement Grants (SIG) project aims at making operational a national school grants programme which will provide financially constrained schools with enough resources to address their most basic needs and meet a minimum set of school functionality criteria with the aim of improving the quality of teaching and learning at the school level and eliminating user fee costs for vulnerable students. The expectation is that this process will lead to a phased reduction in compulsory parental education costs, especially for the poor and vulnerable. In addition, by investing resources at the school level it is hoped that a ‘whole school approach’ will be strengthened encompassing issues related to teaching and learning and community involvement in the school. A ‘whole school approach’ entails that the community, school authorities and children will assess the key challenges and barriers to school effectiveness and develop a School Development Plan (SDP) to prioritise problem areas, set out solutions to the problems and strategies to realise those changes.
The grants are disbursed directly to dedicated school bank accounts from UNICEF account, and will be used to address issues of access, quality, governance and resourcing within the context of specific needs articulated in the SDP. This plan may include issues such as ensuring access to quality education to learners coming from the most marginalised households and to those with special education needs. The plan may also focus on the improvement of quality of teaching in classrooms, materials provision (core and non-core teaching and learning materials), improvement of school facilities and effective school resource management. Grants are disbursed to each selected school annually will fund different components of non-salary and non-personnel needs that will be in the School Development Plans (SDPs) and therefore potentially be covered by a school grants programme. These are broadly:
- Teaching and learning materials;
- Classroom furniture
- Special needs provision (improved access and security for children with disabilities)
- School running costs
- Water and Sanitation
- School infrastructure construction and rehabilitation
- Income generating activities to support school
Annually depending with the budget, at least 10 million US$ is spend on SIG to the disadvantaged schools. Since its inception 2013 to date, eighty-five (85) million US$ has been invested in the SIG programme.
Justification
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education aims at having an integrated robust School Improvement Grants (SIG) system, which facilitates payments of grants to financially constrained schools. The current SIG system is used to disburse grants directly to targeted schools with funds being availed from UNICEF in order to address issues of access, quality, governance and resourcing within the context of specific needs articulated in individual School Development Plants (SDP).
In order to process the funds into schools’ accounts, MoPSE Head office uses a system designed to capture and generate pay sheets. The system is used to capture the applications from the schools and the information is verified at different levels from the data manager, accountant and the Grants Management Coordinator makes the approval. Upon approval, MoPSE generates soft copy pay-sheet for direct input to Standard Chartered (UNICEF’s bank). This is encrypted for security and received at UNICEF Finance Section with the code to decrypt. A hard copy of the encrypted pay-sheet and a letter requesting payment with duly completed FACE form is signed by the MoPSE Director Finance and Admin and is sent to UNICEF programme section. UNICEF Finance decrypts the softcopy pay sheet and uploads the soft copy pay-sheet onto Straight to Bank platform of SCB. After the upload, the Education programme officer will access the S2B soft copy for verification purposes and process the payment. In addition to the capturing and generating pay sheets, the system is also designed to capture acknowledgements and acquittals from schools which are consolidated at district level. Also, the system is designed to generate various reports.
However, since 2013 when the system was developed by a private developer, there hasn’t been any system upgrade. To worsen the situation, the source code could not be established to enable MoPSE to take over any modification required. This has resulted in many challenges as the system performance keeps on deteriorating. This has led to significant delays in processing the SIG payments. Hence the need to have a relook at the system and have a new system developed in order to make the payments timely and address the current challenges being encountered with the existing system. Following are the challenges being experienced using the current system:
- The current system is not linked to Education Management Information System (EMIS), yet this is a critical database with all school information and is updated annually.
- When the criteria is revised, and new fields need to be added, at the moment it’s not possible for MoPSE personnel to make any changes as the source code is not available hence the need to have a new system which will be manned by MoPSE IT department for sustainability purpose.
- When the system was developed in 2013, some of the modules were not completed for instance reports, thus, the system is currently not able to generate reports.
- The searching function is not working properly and whenever a search is made, the school name doesn’t appear despite having been paid in the previous year. It has also been noted that some schools are disappearing on the pay sheet and it is difficult to find these schools.
- The system does not have a function to modify the active users. Hence, since 2013, all the users remain in the latest list, which is getting longer. Thus, the new system should have a function to sort out current users with access and previous users who no longer have access.
- The module for acquittal was disabled as it was rigid in that if one school does not acquit then the rest of the schools cannot be paid. Since then, the team has been processing manual acquittals which is time consuming. Hence the need to have a system which can link with the districts and acquittals are submitted in excel format and exported to the system thereby removing duplication of work.
- When reversing a pay sheet there is a missing stage.
- When encrypting the pay sheet, previously it would be done on a client machine, but now it can only be done on the server. This poses a big challenge as the Coordinator cannot do this stage when the I. T. Officer is not there.
- Schools not ticked by Data Manager on the pay sheet appear in the next stage, yet they should not be appearing.
- Some schools are provided with more than one school ID generated by the system. A single unique ID should be given, linked with EMIS school ID.
Additionally, emerging programmes such as GPE Complementary funding, SIG emergency and SIG School feeding have resorted to use the Regular SIG modality following its successes since 2013. The current system does not allow the IT personnel to change the fields to suit the different types of SIG as they have different allocations without calling for support of an IT Consultant. Thus, there is need to have a new system which can accommodate all types of SIG and can be easily managed by MoPSE IT personnel. |