Education Reform Support Volume Five: Strategy Development and Project Design

Volume Five within the series of Education Reform Support (ERS) provides a systematic approach that can be adopted during the development of strategy for the education reform. The researchers believe that volatility inherent within projects prevents the donor agencies to accomplish their educational objectives and therefore a careful design and redesign of the framework can allow the policy implementation process to become relatively easy. The paper highlights the ten steps that are involved in the design process starting with the need to assess the political economy and identifying the key substantive reform issues and key process barriers to successful implementation. An understanding of the major stakeholders and the tools and techniques involved must be developed which shall be followed by building relationships between substantive issues and process issues.

The next steps entail the need to understand the relationship that exists between actors and issues followed by the need to associate tools and techniques with the actors involved. The first eight steps will allow the agencies to develop an initial implementation plan that defines the concrete action steps and the monitoring strategy involved within educational reform. The paper emphasizes that the ten design steps must be followed thoroughly and non-mechanically whereas policy makers must get in the spirit of achieving the objectives.