Our approach involves staff from Twaweza and a partner organization spending three nights and three days with a previously identified host family, sleeping in their homes, sharing meals and life as it is lived, having long conversations often late into the evening. Staff members participate in community living unencumbered by normal professional roles and hierarchies, with no pretense to profer solutions or help 'bring development'. This type of participation offers a chance to scrutinize our personal and professional assumptions about development and the lives of ordinary citizens: a chance to listen to people’s perspectives and observe the mechanisms people employ to thrive and survive. In our experience so far, families respond with great generosity and curiosity, as interested in our varied lives as we are in theirs. Our internal note with further details is attached below.

And somehow, we hope, that the immersion will complement our other monitoring and evaluation activities to help us better think through, adapt and evaluate our work.

Our offices in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda will be closed starting 18 May and reopen on Monday 27 May, 2013. During this time we regret that we will not be able to respond to emails, process contracts and payments, and so forth. Please bear with us. If absolutely urgent please contact respective staff on their mobile phones.

For Twaweza and Uwezo, who have long been calling for this re-orientation of education policy-making, the report is a welcome addition to the growing body of research that echoes our findings.

“For the last ten years, the major focus of the global education community has been on getting children into school. And that effort has been a success: most of the world’s children live in countries on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary completion by 2015.

But behind that progress is a problem—one that grows with each additional child that walks through the classroom door. Some children in those classes are learning nothing. Many more are learning a small fraction of the syllabus. They complete primary school unable to read a paragraph, or do simple addition, or tell the time. They are hopelessly ill-equipped for secondary education or almost any formal employment. The crisis of learning is both deep and widespread. It is a crisis for children, too many of whom leave school believing they are failures. And it is a crisis for their communities and countries, because economic analysis suggests it is what workers know—not their time in school—that makes them more productive and their economies more prosperous.

Fixing the learning crisis will take systemic reform stretching beyond the education sector. It will take teachers, headmasters, and education officials with the mandate to focus on learning. And it will take those officials being held accountable for learning outcomes by informed stakeholders including parents, parliamentarians, and employers.

Assessment regimes are a central part of this reform effort. They can provide evidence on the scale of the learning crisis as a lever for reform. They can track progress on improvements and provide the evidence base for what works. They empower parents to demand better outcomes—or move their kids to where they can find them.”

Background
The OGP is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. To become part of OGP, participating countries must sign a high-level Open Government Declaration, deliver a country action plan developed with public consultation; and commit to independent reporting on their progress going forward through theOGP Independent Reporting Mechanism.

The IRM is a key means by which all stakeholders can track progress within participating countries. By tracking and publicizing progress, it promotes strong accountability between member governments and citizens.

The IRM works primarily by disseminating annual independent assessment reports for each OGP participating government. Each national progress report will assess the implementation of action plans and progress in fulfilling open government principles, and will develop technical recommendations.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated history of policy-relevant research.
• National reputation as objective, impartial, and thorough.
• Track record of producing clear, policy-relevant publications.
• Ability to facilitate stakeholder dialogues, research, interviews, and institutional analysis.
• Specific experience working on public policy issues related to governance, transparency, accountability, or public participation more broadly.
• Experience working with and engaging civil society, the government, and the private sector.
• Demonstrated ability to solicit, incorporate, and respond to official and public comments on
• Ability to carry out research within a strict time frame.
• Demonstrated capacity and willingness to engage broad range of stakeholders in a neutral and objective fashion including high level officials and broad network of civil society actors.
• Strong English-language or Spanish skills.

Duties

• Clear regular communication to IRM Program staff in Washington, DC and to International Experts Panel.
• Attendance of two or more in-person sessions including a training in early 2013.
• Independent research using focus groups, interviews, and document review.
• Completion of online research questionnaire.
• Publication of one national research report including executive summary.
• Contribution to international synthesis report in mid-2013.

Compensation
OGP will offer honorarium (to include salaries, overheads, and incurred costs) and cover costs of participation outside of country, where applicable.

Decision-making process

• Interested parties should submit an English (preferred) or Spanish CV to the IRM Program Manager at joseph.foti(at)opengovpartnership.org. Please use the following email title: “OGP IRM Researcher [Your Country]”.
• Third-party nominations may also be made through the same address. Please confirm with nominees their availability and willingness to participate prior to submission of their name.
• National researchers for the IRM will be approved by the Independent Experts Panel and IRM program staff, with an opportunity for comment and input by the respective national governments and civil society focal points, where applicable. Each applicant will be weighed against the set of criteria listed above, based on interviews, review of prior work, and references.
• There is a strong preference for nationals of the country to be evaluated and for those with experience relevant to country action plans.
• Because of the volume of applications, we will not be able to respond to every applicant. We thank applicants in advance for their expressions of interest.

The call will remain open until close of business, Eastern Standard Time, June 21, 2013.

These findings were released in a Twaweza brief titled Form Four Examination Results:  Citizens report on the learning crisis in Tanzania. The brief is based on data from Sauti za Wananchi, a nationally representative mobile phone survey of households across mainland Tanzania. Respondents were asked questions about their views on education, and to identify challenges and ways to improve. The views were sought from 18 March to 3 April 2013 before the recent announcement by the government of the annulment of the 2012 Form Four results.

Of all those surveyed, almost 7 out of 10 citizens (68%) were aware that the Form Four results for 2012 had been published. Respondents overwhelmingly perceived a decline in the quality of secondary education in the past 10 years with about 8 out of 10 citizens (83%) indicating that they felt education had deteriorated. This is consistent with official statistics including the Ministry of Education’s Basic Education Statistics in Tanzania (BEST).

Twaweza's Learning, Monitoring and Evaluation (LME) unit is looking for competent and reputable organisations who can implement the activities that this work entails.

Interested parties may contact vlipovsek@twaweza.org for further details or to submit a proposal.

The data provide a valuable snapshot of the state of the services, and, perhaps even more importantly, a snapshot of what “wananchi” do (or do not do) to make services work for them.

Moreover, they will be used as a baseline in an assessment of Twaweza’s effectiveness, as a follow-up study is planned for 2014. Key highlights are presented herein; a more detailed report is also available.

Two stark findings in terms of information transmission and citizen agency cut across the three service delivery areas.

• 
  For most people the most significant source of information is word of mouth. All other sources, including radio and mobile phones, feature only marginally.


• 
  Citizens largely do not report taking action to improve service delivery. With a few highlighted exceptions citizens are either too afraid to act, do not consider it their responsibility or do not know what to do.

Read the summary of findings or the full report.

And so it was when we met with the producers from Buzz Media about the music videos that we were working on together. All of our gesticulating and efforts to explain this core concept did not seem to be making a strong impression. We weren’t sure what was going to come out of the process.

But then we showed them the public service announcements (PSAs) from the Ni Sisi campaign. And the room changed. Some were deeply moved, everyone was touched in some way, relating these incidents to their lives and the things they had personally experienced. And we breathed a sigh of relief and waited to see what would come.

So now the videos are complete and we are extremely excited to share them. We have also included links to the Ni Sisi PSAs so you can see how inspired the artists and producers were by these stories of change.

Education - Jackie Chandiru

Fenna wamu tusobola - MUN G, T-BRO and Akello

Obuvunanyizibwa - Bebe Cool

Twefeeko - Michael Ros O S Rema

Ni Sisi PSAs

Playground
Daladala
Clinic
Bridge
Pollution
Logging

Read more about the partnership with Buzz Media that lead to these videos and the songs themselves.