Institutional strengthening and the centralization of power: A political economy analysis of middle school education in Guatemala

• In Event: Evaluations of MCC investments in education programs in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Morocco

Proposal

MCC’s $28 million Guatemala threshold grant agreement (2016-2021) funded the policy and institutional reforms aimed at providing quality and equitable educational opportunities for Guatemala’s youth that have relevance to the labor market and mobilizing additional government resources that are needed to address binding constraints to economic growth. The Education Program consisted of three activities: (1) Quality of Education in Support of Student Success; (2) Improving Technical and Vocational Education and Training; and (3) Strengthening of Institutional and Planning Capacity. This evaluation brief focuses on Activity 3. Activity 3 (IPC) of the GEP focuses on improving MINEDUC’s institutional capacity to plan and budget so that it can provide an equitable and high-quality secondary education (MCC 2016). It complements Activity 1 by seeking to improve teacher recruitment and selection processes and increase MINEDUC’s budget for secondary education. Activity 3 comprises three main components, which are referred to as the “change strategies”: (1) Strengthen teacher recruitment and professional development system; (2) Develop and apply evidence-based Service Standards across modalities of Ciclo Básico for planning and budgeting; and (3) Strengthen or develop decision support systems and capacity to utilize new information for planning and budgeting. The longitudinal political economy analysis used a mixed methods approach, drawing on multiple rounds of key informant interviews, a stakeholder power analysis, and two rounds of a quantitative Delphi survey to gather information linked to DFID's Drivers of Change (DoC) framework. The DoC framework is an analytic framework for applying PEA that enabled us to systematically assess how project design and implementation decisions accounted for contextual factors that affected the achievement of project goals. This presentation focuses on how structural features, institutions, and agents for each change strategy determined the effectiveness of planning, the budgeting of middle school education, sustainability of the interventions, and incentives to make systems change and move towards data-driven decision-making. The results show that changes in the administration focus, the lack of an internal change agent, lack of internal capacity, and the lack of civil society engagement in middle school education continue to undermine system change in middle school education. The presentation will focus specifically on the shift in power towards more centralized decision-making and the role that civil society actors could play in the new administration to support deeper changes in middle school education.

Author

• Audrey-marie Moore, Mathematica