Interactive dashboards for adaptive management: Enabling differentiated school support in 100 school districts in Ghana – successes and challenges

• In Event: Data use for improved programming and sustainable outcomes: case studies in applying the collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) approach

Proposal

The USAID Partnership for Education Learning Activity (Learning) implemented by FHI 360 in Ghana aims to improve the reading skills of 1.1 million children in the early grades of primary school. The project has trained more than 30,000 teachers, head teachers and curriculum leads in the use of teaching and learning materials and in the implementation of a continuous professional development support system developed by Learning across more than 7,000 schools in 100 school districts in all 10 regions of Ghana. Given the scale of the project, how can Learning work hand-in-hand with the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) to monitor the results of the project and provide support to schools and teachers who need it most in order to maximize impact on student reading skills?
To do this, Learning developed a comprehensive monitoring system whereby more than 800 MOE Circuit Supervisors were trained to conduct tablet-based data collection in all 7000+ schools each school term. To make this data actionable, Learning designed an interactive dashboard using the Microsoft Power BI platform and trained MOE staff from all 100 District Education Offices (DEOs) in the use and interpretation of the dashboard. In turn, DEOs presented the results of their own review of the dashboard at district-level meetings, highlighting areas of weaknesses in the implementation of the Learning program to support the development of an action plan to address these weaknesses.
In this presentation, we will talk about the process taken to create the dashboard and train the districts, and how learnings from the first year of dashboard implementation informed revisions in the second year. This will include a presentation of statistics usage rate and process review. We will also discuss the various uses of dashboard for adaptive management and development of a differentiated school support plan, from use by national Learning staff, regional Learning staff to DEOs and USAID.

Author

• Jennifer Sargeant, FHI 360