Review of Zimbabwe’s application to the Global Partnership for Education and implementation of the second phase of the Education Transition Fund

Detailed description of project Back

Zimbabwe’s education system has deteriorated over the past 12 years.In the absence of sufficient central government financing, a complex system of fees, levies and ‘incentives’ has evolved that has significantly disadvantaged the poorest. 50 per cent of students no longer continue their school beyond grade seven.The decline in public expenditures on non-salary costs has had a significant impact on school and learning supervision, availability of information for planning and policy and the relations of school governance, which has in turn lead to a significant decline in the quality of school environments, the relevance of the education system and the placement of skilled teaching personnel.

In response to the crisis in the education sector, the Education Transition Fund (ETF) was launched in September 2009. In the ETF’s first phase, an expanded set of high impact activities – including the delivery of teaching and learning materials and school committee training to all primary and secondary schools – were completed, benefiting from major savings realized in effective, low cost, mass procurement; in its second phase the ETF (2012 – 2015) plans to provide major programmes of support in sector governance, school grants, learning materials and teacher training.At least US$100 million is expected to be earmarked by in-country development partners for ETF-II, but this is still inadequate to address the needs of the education sector to recover; therefore Zimbabwe requested additional support from the Global Partnership of Education (GPE) and is working towards the development, appraisal and endorsement of an application for an Implementation Grant from GPE.Zimbabwe expects to submit an application in late February 2013 for the indicative allocation of US$ 23.6 million.The backbone of the application will be a three-year Operational Plan (OP) to help deliver key elements of the EMTP.

The objective of the current consultancy is to review the proposed application for funding to the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and to review the progress on implementing the second phase of the ETF.

Type of services provided

PROMAN provides the services of the national Education Expert; HIFAB International provides the services of the Team Leader. The Team has a twofold task:

• GPE Proposal Review: review the draft three-year Operational Plan linked to the Government of Zimbabwe’s Education Medium-Term Plan 2011-2015 to help inform the Local Education Group’s decision whether or not to endorse the Government of Zimbabwe’s submission to the GPE Secretariat for funding.The review includes review of documents, stakeholder consultations, technical appraisal of the feasibility, assessment of capacity, governance and accountability, briefing /workshop of DPs;
• Review of implementation of ETF II: review and analyse progress made on implementation of the ETF II since January 2012, with a focus on achievement of expected results using as a benchmark key ETF II documents such as the Logframe and 2012 Annual Work Plan.