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Afghan children read: Moving to a sustainable and scalable system for textbook delivery

Thu, April 18, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Atrium (Level 2), Waterfront D

Proposal

Delays in accessing teaching and learning materials (TLMs) due to the absence of textbook distribution monitoring systems significantly decrease the quality of learning in schools around Afghanistan. Issues around poor textbook tracking and inventory practices, which make access to TLMs difficult in countries around the world, are compounded by instability in conflict-affected countries like Afghanistan. USAID’s Afghan Children Read (ACR) project developed an Online Textbook Inventory Management System (OTIMS) as part of discussions around scaling up Track and Trace (TnT) technology capable of following TLMs from issuance to delivery. While the TnT pilot in Afghanistan was successful, both ACR and the Afghan Ministry of Education (MoE) had concerns about using it for distribution at the national level given technological and capacity limitations, particularly lack of electricity and internet access in conflict-affected areas. ACR worked with the MoE to develop OTIMS as a customized version of TnT that would enable national scaleup of textbook tracking while also overcoming these conflict-related challenges.

OTIMS is a cloud-based system capable of tracking and reporting on the delivery of TLMs at all levels of the education system in Afghanistan, from printers to distribution centers to provinces, districts, and schools. Based on principles of transparency and accountability, the system can track and report on every book issued into the education system from Grade 1-12, a total of 320 titles in both national and regional languages. The system enables education leaders and managers at all levels to remotely monitor the flow of TLMs, identify blockages, losses, and damages for better internal control, and prevent leakage. In addition, as compared to the TnT pilot, which was completely technology-based, OTIMS relies on both paper-collected and mobile-collected data, enabling data collection to continue even where internet and electricity are not available.

The Afghan MoE is currently implementing OTIMS for TLM distribution in two provinces, and will use OTIMS to track and manage flows of TLMs during the upcoming distribution of 49 million TLMs to over 17,000 schools nationwide. To operationalize OTIMS nationally, ACR plans to continue building the capacity of the MoE to use the system at the central, provincial and district levels through the cascade model. On this panel, Creative will share its approach to working with the Afghan MoE on systems building, capacity development, and creating buy-in, as well as the results of the OTIMS pilot and plans for national level implementation. Creative’s presentation will also touch on best practices and lessons learned (for example, that the use of highly sophisticated technological solutions can lead to challenges in implementation, that tablet-based technology can threaten end users in strained security conditions by drawing the attention of armed groups, and that off-the-shelf solutions for textbook distribution were less attractive to the MoE as they lacked control over the design) around ensuring ICT for education in crisis settings is both scalable and sustainable.

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