Pathways to self-reliance and sustainability: reflections from USAID program implementation

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)

Group Submission Type: Refereed Round-Table Session

Proposal

From the earliest days of development assistance, the long-term goal has been to provide a boost in economic growth and institution building to enable countries to reduce dependency on aid and manage their own growth. This goal is variously framed as sustainability, ownership, local systems, or self-reliance. This goal is challenging even to define and measure. Efforts to operationalize the goal confront an inherent tension between longer term development goals and the more immediate sector impact goals relating to access, equity, quality, or learning outcomes.

The 2019-2023 United States Government Strategy on International Basic Education and related USAID Education Policy place increased emphasis on country-led development, sustainability, and self-reliance while retaining a clear focus on improving sector performance in learning outcomes, equity and access, and resilience in conflict areas. The strategy acknowledges that the processes for supporting improved sector performance are as important as the outcome of an educated populace to building self-reliance. The new strategy implies a rethinking of the trade-offs between the technical aspects of educational pedagogy and the development aspects of fostering system change and institutional strengthening. In light of this emerging strategy, it is an opportune time to bring together evidence and practical experience on how program design, implementation, and evaluation can best contribute to self-reliance.

The panel is composed senior specialists from implementing organizations and USAID, each with decades of experience at policy, strategy, program implementation, evaluation, and technical quality. The format will foster an open discussion that combines practical experience and evidence-based lessons from different perspectives. The panelists will draw their own expertise, evidence from their organization’s research and project experience (many of which will be presented at CIES), and observations from a select set of other panels at CIES with relevant content.

A conceptual framework, drawing on existing research on systems change and sustainability, will be used to organize the discussion. At the beginning of the CIES conference, the group will identify a number of presentations from the final program with relevant content (from panelists’ organizations as well as others). Each of the panelists will attend designated presentations and will incorporate these along with their own experience and insights into their presentation. The format will be a facilitated conversation starting with a short presentation from each panelist, directed questions, and then open Q&A with the audience. The diverse experiences and contexts presented by the panel will emphasize that there is no single answer for all contexts, but rather there are multiple pathways to self-reliance that may rely on common principles.

The conceptual framework and framing questions will be developed collaboratively by the panelists, to focus on such illustrative issues as:
• What is the implication of self-reliance in development programs and how might it differ from sustainability?
• What are the implications of a focus on self-reliance for program design? For Implementation? For evaluation?
• What are meaningful examples of self-reliance and system strengthening – and what were the key factors that enabled them?
• What are the implications for international assistance programs?

The discussion will be used to clarify and challenge the framework, sharpen the distinctions, and provide insights for both donor program design and implications for operational implementation.

The discussion is directly relevant to the major theme of the conference -Education for Sustainability, which ultimately must address questions central to both development (who determines the directions for sustainable development for a country) and sustainable improvements in education outcomes. These issues are ultimately determined by national self-reliance; independent capacity for developing and implementing policy in the context of international engagement.

The problem being addressed in this panel is both part of the thematic core of CIES 2019 and also at the heart of the international system of development assistance– the tension between short-term and long-term goals. The tradeoffs and tensions are reflected not just in development theory, but in the practical, operational application of development policy, program design, implementation, and evaluation of education programs. The immediate need, as noted above, is to inform the implementation of a new whole-of-government strategy and USAID policy for education development that explicitly establishes self-reliance and capacity building as an overarching goal. Practical lessons in applying the principles established in the new policy are found in the experience of implementing projects in different contexts and political/policy environments. The insights from this panel will influence both future program design as well as how implementing partners approach the problem.

The central issue of the panel addresses the last two questions relevant to Applied Research topics: what would be done differently in the project and what was the impact on the problem. The panel will be drawing on the experience and insights from dozens of projects as they apply to the specific issue of sustainability and self-reliance of national systems. The projects discussed may cover a variety of contexts from countries in all parts of the world, with many different technical goals (i.e. literacy, youth development, education in crisis, equity of access). However, all will be viewed through the common lens of how the programs contribute to the development of capacity for self-reliance and sustainability. An outcome of this panel is expected to be a paper submitted by the panel for use by donor agencies as well as for publication in journals.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Individual Presentations

• A framework for self-reliance from a systems perspective - John Gillies, FHI 360

• Managing expectations on system-level improvement of donor programs - Amber K. Gove, RTI International

• Sustainability and capacity building in the conflict context - Eileen St. George, Creative Associates International

• Institutional capacity and sustainability in education policy - Haiyan Hua, World Education, Inc.

• Design for purposeful planning for sustainability and scale - Joshua A. Muskin, Geneva Global

• Systems and stakeholder empowerment for sustainability - Rachel Christina, Education Development Center (EDC)

Discussant

• Patrick Glenn Collins, US Agency for International Development (USAID)