Going Back to Look Forward - A review of the sustainability of the Gansu Basic Education Project

• In Event: Strengthening systems for sustainable change: lessons learned from four large-scale education programs

Proposal

Very few project reviews take place more than a year after they end. Yet judgements are frequently made in final project reviews about the sustainability of interventions. Project teams and donors alike look for evidence that interventions will stand the test of time, however this is often little more than guesswork. This paper seeks to provide some lessons in sustainability by reflecting on the lasting successes (and some failures) of the DFID-funded Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP) 10 years after its completion.

GBEP, which ran from 1999-2006, was initiated in China’s distant North West frontier, as Gansu was ranked as the second poorest province in the country with an average wage of less than US$270 per year. Prior to 1999, almost half of Gansu’s 87 counties were designated as poor and with very low levels of learning achievement. The GBEP aimed to improve access and learning outcomes in Gansu and at its conclusion, was considered to be a highly-successful project by the Chinese government. It celebrated many notable achievements including the provision of 14,000 scholarships for marginalized students, the building of 197 earthquake-resistant schools, and training for more than 6000 teachers and 700 head teachers. There were also many innovations including school development planning, free lunches, textbook revolving funds, supplementary readers, posting of female teachers to remote schools, and a new inspection system. Moreover, GBEP influenced two larger scale projects implemented in poor areas of China.
In May 2017, ten years after the project’s close, the authors returned Gansu to answer some key questions:
•What do we mean by sustainability?
•How do we know if it was achieved?
•What can we learn from this program to enhance the sustainability of subsequent programs?

In answering these questions, the authors set out to see what remained of the initiatives piloted in GBEP, whether institutional and individual capacity had been built and sustained, and what ripple effects could be identified.
Findings showed that there had been lasting impact both for individuals as well as the education system, and we will discuss how these impacts were demonstrated and assessed. Findings also provided examples of interventions that failed to take root in the system and we will reflect on what could have been done differently to mitigate this outcome. This paper will also provide insights and analyses on improving project design for system strengthening programs in other contexts, particularly with regard to issues such as shifting political will and priorities, competition for resources, and the success or failure of knowledge sharing from one cohort of professionals to the next. We will also consider how and to what degree a Power and Systems Approach (Green, 2016) might have been beneficial during the initial project design and how reflections such as these have (or have not) been taken up in subsequent projects. Finally, we will discuss and reflect on how short donor cycles are potentially, and paradoxically, inimical to the achievement of long lasting behavioural change.

Author

• Andy Brock, Cambridge Education