Good news from South Sudan

Charlie Goldsmith emails with updates on the Girl's Education South Sudan project:

"Our majority-South Sudanese team are proud that South Sudan, which has been so beset by trouble in the last year, has the chance to show positive ways in which it is a world-leader. 

Charlie Goldsmith Associates have been particularly involved on design, technology for, and delivery of: 

• The South Sudan Schools Attendance Management System, through which enrolment and attendance of individual pupils – almost 900,000 of them by now – from top to bottom of the education system is recorded, with schools asked to report daily to a freephone number through SMSs from teachers’ own phones.

• Cash Transfers to individual girls in P5-S4 and their families: more than 50,000 will be made in 2014, and around half a million, to 200,000 individual girls, by 2018. In 2015, we expect payment of the majority of these to be by M-Money. 

• School capitation grants to fund investments in quality: almost 3000 schools have been approved to receive these grants, having passed hurdles including opening a bank account, and making a school development plan and budget, and there have been outstanding examples of value delivered, notably in terms of economical construction. GRSS is now looking at rolling this model of funding direct to service delivery units across to the health sector. 

• A multi-year programme of investment in knowledge, evidence and research, much of it delivered by our specialist partners Forcier Consulting and, earlier on, Education for Change, including detailed school and household surveys, learning assessments, and a major subnational PFM performance survey.

The Government of the Republic of South Sudan (GRSS) budgets to spend 60m SSP of its own money a year (roughly £12m GBP) on school capitation grants, as part of the wider Local Services Support programme, supported by among others, the ODI Budget Strengthening Initiative. It's worth highlighting that this £12m a year spent by the government of South Sudan is slightly more than the DFID project itself (£60m over five and half years - a great example of leverage and sustainability where aid money can help to increase the effectiveness of potentially much larger government spending. 

You can find some examples of practical good news that has resulted – girls with the resources to be in school, teachers paid, classrooms and latrines quickly and cost-effectively constructed - and scans of how each school has budgeted to spend its capitation grant, including detail down to the cost of a latrine in a given school, and the accountability now being returned by schools.

In addition to the CGA work, other members of the consortium are delivering really exciting things too, particularly interesting are the BBC "Our School" programmes in local languages. Since they have one programme per State per topic, and have done about 14 topics this year, it is really quite a significant library of decent resources of people saying sensible things about education, including the practicalities, not just the slogans, in their own language. In due course, the project is going to do important things on in classroom education quality too. 

Using innovative technology elsewhere

We think some of these approaches and tools are broadly applicable:

• Monitoring enrolment and attendance at an individual level, in near-real time, on a public website (data on individuals can only be accessed by permissioned login), is a step of assurance and usefulness of data that goes beyond what some EMISs offer.

• Getting funds direct into the hands of individuals and down to bank accounts of service delivery units like schools and primary health care units, gives country governments and their partners assurance that funds have reached their destination, and sets good incentives for funds to be used correctly, and the leverage and information to follow up if there is a problem. Putting funds to individuals and schools and clinics at local level stimulates the local economy, and, in particular, financial inclusion – in South Sudan, Eden Commercial Bank are opening five new branches in County towns during 2014, driven partly by the additional transaction volume provided by capitation grants and cash transfers, and other banks have set up travelling account opening services. 

• The technology approach is designed for a low-connectivity/not-always-on environment, and for users using their own mobile phones/devices.

These approaches are operationally effective, and showing promising signs of effect on retention and enrolment, in South Sudan: how much more might they achieve in an environment where there were fewer barriers to accessing public services?"