Reflections on the Ambassadors' Girls' Scholarship Program

65 Pages·2012·1.74 MB·English

Building on Investments in Local Capacity:
Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’
Scholarship Program

February 2012
This publication was produced for review by the United States Agency for International Development.
It was prepared by Morgan Borszcz Consulting, LLC.
i

Acknowledgements

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) requested a review of the
Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program (AGSP), focusing on overarching lessons learned and best
practices in scholarship program implementation as well as capacity building investments made with local
non-governmental organizations implementing the program in the field. This review was conducted
under the leadership and guidance of Catherine Powell Miles of USAID’s Education Office in the Africa
Bureau (AFR/SD/ED). Morgan Borszcz Consulting, LLC implemented the review under contract AID-
OAA-C-10-00119.
Three United States-based contractors implemented AGSP in Africa: Academy for Educational
Development (AED; now FHI 360), Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development, and
World Education, Inc. Each organization provided documentation and reports submitted to USAID
during AGSP implementation, organized in-country meetings with their field-based partners, and worked
in collaboration with MBC to ensure that information on scholarship program implementation and
capacity building was made available for review. In particular we would like to thank Michele Akpo of
FHI 360, Kadiatou Coulibaly of World Education, Inc., and Martha Saldinger of Winrock International.
We thank them and their team members for their insights, time, helpful suggestions and assistance.
We extend our sincerest appreciation to the staff of the local non-governmental organizations and
community-based organizations that participated in meetings to share information about AGSP
implementation, their own capacity building and views on future of scholarship programs and support to
future USAID efforts in the field. Their efforts in support of education of vulnerable students have been
commendable.
The MBC team participating in the review includes Mr. Alex Amenabar, Mr. Nathan Johnson, Ms. Karen
Ramsey, and Dr. Jennipher Rosecrans. The team received support with facilitation of meetings or note
taking from Mrs. Kaye A. Efem (World Education), Ms. Michele Akpo (FHI 360), Ms. Akousua Ampofo
(World Education), Dr. Kadiatou Coulibaly (World Education), Ms. Sika Houngnihin (World Education),
Mr. Frederic Kouihongbe (World Education), Ms. Grace Sil Mabouang (consultant), Dr. Julia Miller
(Winrock International), Mr. Roger Musumari (consultant), Ms. Katie Orlemanski (FHI 360), Mr. Abdul
Sacoor (consultant), and Ms. Katharine Torre (Winrock International).

Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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Acronyms
Acronym Description
AED Academy for Educational Development
AEI Africa Education Initiative
AFR Africa
AGSP Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
CBO Community Based Organization
CSO Civil Society Organization
EDDI Education for Development and Democracy Initiative
FAO Food and Agricultural Organization
FY Fiscal Year
HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
IETC International Evaluation and Training Corporation
IGA Income generating activities
IP Implementing Partner
IT Information Technology
M&E Monitoring and Evaluation
MBC Morgan Borszcz Consulting, LLC
MDG Millennium Development Goal
MOE Ministry of Education
MTA Mid-Term Assessment
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
OVC Orphans and Vulnerable Children
PTA Parent Teacher Association
SOW Scope of Work
SSA Sub-Saharan Africa
TLMP Textbooks and Learning Materials Program
TT Teacher Training
UNDP United Nations Development Program
USAID United States Agency for International Development
USAID/AFR/SD/ED United States Agency for International Development Africa Bureau, Office
of Sustainable Development, Education Division
USAID/W United States Agency for International Development headquarters in
Washington, D. C.
US United States
USG United States Government
WEI World Education International
WFP World Food Program

Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................................ i
Acronyms............................................................................................................................................................................. ii
Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................................................... 1
I. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................ 1
II. Who Were the Local Implementing Partners? ................................................................................................. 2
III. What Was Learned from AGSP Implementation? .......................................................................................... 2
IV. How Can We Maximize on Investments Made in Local Capacity Building? ............................................. 3
V. Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................................... 4
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.0 Best Practices Review .................................................................................................................................... 5
1.1 Approach and Methodology of Data Review ....................................................................................... 6
1.2 Key Data Sets .............................................................................................................................................. 6
1.3 Deliverables .................................................................................................................................................. 7
2.0 Background Information ................................................................................................................................ 8
3.0 What was the Africa Education Initiative? ................................................................................................. 8
4.0 Why Focus on Girls’ Education? ..................................................................................................................... 9
5.0 What was the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program? ...................................................................... 11
6.0 How Was AGSP Implemented? ................................................................................................................. 13
6.1 The Implementation Model ........................................................................................................................... 13
6.2 Scholar Selection .............................................................................................................................................. 15
6.3 Scholarship Packages...................................................................................................................................... 16
6.4 Mentoring ......................................................................................................................................................... 18
6.5 Community Involvement .............................................................................................................................. 19
6.6 NGO Capacity-Building ................................................................................................................................ 20
II. Who Were The Local Partners? ........................................................................................................................ 22
III. What Have We Learned? ................................................................................................................................ 24
1.0 Scholarship Implementation Process ........................................................................................................ 24
1.1 Scholar Selection .............................................................................................................................................. 24
1.2 Scholarship Packages...................................................................................................................................... 25
1.3 Data Management ........................................................................................................................................... 26
1.4 Financial and Administrative Systems ........................................................................................................ 27
2.0 Community and Parental Involvement ........................................................................................................... 28
Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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3.0 Mentoring .............................................................................................................................................................. 30
4.0 NGO Capacity Building ..................................................................................................................................... 34
IV. How Can We Maximize and Build on Investments Made in Local Capacity Building? ..................... 35
V. What Can We Conclude on Capacity Building? ............................................................................................. 43
VI. List of References and Works Cited ............................................................................................................. 44
VII. Appendices .......................................................................................................................................................... 52
Annex A: Local NGO Listing ............................................................................................................................... 52
Annex B: Survey Instrument for Local Partners ............................................................................................. 56

Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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Executive Summary

I. Introduction
The Education Office in the United States Agency for International Development’s Africa Bureau
(USAID AFR/SD/ED) requested a review of the Ambassadors’ Girls Scholarship Program (AGSP) in
2011 to examine overarching lessons learned and best practices from the seven-year program and to
link the investments made in capacity building with local non-governmental and community based
organizations to the new procurement reforms.
AGSP was implemented in more than 40 countries from 2004 – 2011 and was funded out of the Africa
Education Initiative (AEI). The program provided more than 550,000 scholarships to vulnerable scholars
across the continent and provided mentoring services and life skills support to the scholars to increase
educational access and opportunities for positive educational outcomes. AGSP was managed by three
U.S.-based Implementing Partners (IPs) with field implementation activities conducted by more than 126
organizations1 across the continent in the respective host countries. The breakdown of IP to host
country is below:
Academy for Educational Development (AED; now part of FHI 360) – East Africa
Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea,
Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Winrock International – Southern Africa
Angola, Botswana, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia,
São Tomé and Príncipe, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zambia.

World Education, Inc. – West Africa
Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal,
Sierra Leone, and Togo

AGSP was intended to address the barriers to girls’ education and to provide girls with the means to
surmount them and excel in the classroom. Specifically, the objectives of the program were to:
 Increase girls’ access to primary and secondary school education across sub-Saharan Africa;
 Provide mentoring services to the beneficiaries;
 Increase community visibility and awareness into the importance of girls’ education; and,
 Provide opportunities to students to learn beyond the classroom.

To that end, hundreds of thousands scholarships were disbursed, thousands of mentors trained to
provide classroom and lifestyle guidance to scholars, and parents and communities energized and
engaged in the education of their children. Additionally, by using NGOs and CBOs to implement these
efforts, the organizational capacity, coverage, and service offerings of local organizations were all

1 There were 126 organizations that implemented AGSP but not all of them held sub-contracts for the duration of
the scholarship program. Two organizations did not manage scholarships but did work on mentoring and/or
training activities.
Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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enhanced. By the end of AGSP, many African NGOs were self-sufficient and able to leverage their
experience and successes into new work in the education sector and beyond.

AGSP was funded and managed out of AFR/SD/ED in Washington, DC but the program was
implemented in sub-Saharan Africa. AFR/SD/ED signed contracts with three U.S.-based IPs. These
partners managed AGSP implementation from the 2004-2005 school year through the 2010-2011 school
year. Each IP entered into an agreement with AFR/SD/ED to provide oversight of NGOs and
implementation in their respective regions, to track their metrics and outcomes, and general technical
and administrative guidance. While there was a common model for implementation, operating in more
than 40 countries with different environments meant that each IP needed to tailor project
implementation to the realities of each country to be most effective.
II. Who Were the Local Partners?
The three U.S.-based IPs worked with 126 local organizations during AGSP implementation. These local
partners worked in the field to implement the scholarship programs including financial and administrative
reporting, mentoring, scholar oversight and community outreach. All of the NGOs/CBOs identified to
support AGSP were selected by the IPs based on criteria that each established at the onset of the
program. The local organizations selected had to meet some level of competency and capability in
terms of staffing, infrastructure and ability to implement the program. Evaluation factors included:
 Number and type of staff available to work on AGSP;
 Access to the Internet and other communications infrastructure;
 Previous work on USAID-funded projects or with the United States Embassy;
 Financial and accounting systems; and,
 Ability to handle reporting on time and with information required by USAID and the IPs.
Many of these organizations were local NGOs, CBOs or branches of larger international NGOs and
worked across different development sectors. Some were based in headquarters and traveled to
remote sites, while some were more localized or regional within the country, depending on the needs
and size of the program.
III. What Have We Learned?
“What have we learned from AGSP?” is a broad question that must take into account experiences from
more than 40 different country environments, localized experiences, and cultural contexts within those
countries, as well as different management practices and organizational styles of three local organizations
as well as local NGOs/CBOs. This review examined what may be termed promising or best practices
and lessons learned but there were no proscribed or rigid ways that the programs were implemented
across the board to achieve results given the broad geographical coverage of AGSP. What worked well
in some communities or some countries did not work well in others. What was a lesson learned in one
country or setting may have been a best practice in an already established and standardized operating
system in another location.
This report covers four main implementation areas in the discussion on aspects of what we have learned
from AGSP. These areas include: the scholarship implementation process, community and parental
involvement, mentoring, and NGO/CBO capacity building. These areas are overlapping and linked as
AGSP was a dynamic program with interdependent processes. Data utilized for the analysis comes from
Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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key data sources – facilitated workshops, surveys, and reports submitted to USAID by AED, Winrock
International and World Education – with particular emphasis on insights from the field partners.
IV. How Can We Maximize and Build on Investments Made in Local
Capacity Building?
As the Agency moves forward with procurement reforms and it undertakes concerted efforts to include
a greater number of local procurement mechanisms, USAID Headquarters and Missions can build upon
AGSP’s work in capacity development. The local NGOs/CBOs have received support in specific aspects
of scholarship implementation such as mentoring and in specific functional skill sets including budgeting
and report writing. These organizations can be tapped into, if they meet technical and contractual
requirements under specific procurement actions, to implement new projects in education, HIV/AIDS
prevention, or other sectors. Local NGOs/CBOs were generally consistent during facilitated meetings
that they had a basic level of competence and skill sets to work with USAID, but would need additional
support in program and proposal design and in fundraising for sustainability.
At its earliest stages in planning and implementation, AGSP did not include provisions or requirements
for baseline data on scholars or on the NGOs/CBOs. To have some assessment of the changes in
capacity, the post-AGSP surveys completed by the local partners included questions on capacity in
eleven different areas including management, financial and accounting systems, procurement capability,
staffing levels, monitoring and evaluation, data management, organization mission and vision, relationship
with the Ministry of Education, relationships with national and regional entities and implementation. The
organizations provided a self-assessment of how they had changed or grown during the project
implementation period. This cannot control for external factors that can confuse attribution to AGSP
but does provide some measure of how the local organizations perceive capacity development.
In all of the meetings the local NGOs/CBOs highlighted those areas where they felt additional support
was needed to carry forward with working with USAID. For example, capacity building during AGSP
implementation did not include training local organizations in project design and needs assessments.
These aspects had already been determined when the local partners were brought into AGSP so the
resources were not needed in this area. When projects are pre-defined and contracted out to the local
organization they do not gain skills in pre-assessment and project design which will help them to become
more sustainable and to have deeper impact on development at the community level where they work.
This also presents issues with going to scale as the organizations may not be prepared to plan out what
is needed to ramp up activities and work plans and to look at broader coverage of a program, which
may include needs assessment.
How can USAID effectively manage the burden and risk of working with local organizations and replicate
what was done in the past with local organizations? It is clear that the three IPs allocated significant staff
resources to supporting and coaching the organizations. This will not necessarily be feasible as
contracts are shifted to direct contracts or grants to local organizations. USAID will need to determine
how they will measure capacity development prior to awarding procurement actions and how they will
provide the oversight and management needed to ensure that the selected local organizations are
performing to standards expected, especially with regard to financial management and reporting. One
benefit of these organizations is that they have been trained and work across sectors. This places them
Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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strongly in a role to work on cross-cutting issues and the whole of government encompassing different
agencies operating in a mission overseas.
V. Conclusions
Conclusions can be drawn from the AGSP experience with NGO capacity development and capacity
building. While the overall impacts of AGSP are not being measured here, it is clear that the project
was effective in strengthening capacity of the local partners. Capacity building under AGSP can bring
lessons to the new procurement reform efforts being undertaken by USAID. The longer-term process
of working closely with the NGOs/CBOs provided both formal and informal training. This can be
replicated in countries and scaled up to include local partners beyond education projects and the
momentum built with the local organizations can be carried through to new projects. Four main
conclusions are:
1) Plan the sustainability and capacity development components of the project from the outset.
2) Instead of working in reaction to the funding criteria, if the NGOs/CBOs were given a role in
the overall determination of need, they could assist with sound development planning.
3) Systems that are put into place need to be designed for long-term viability.
4) The NGOs and CBOs need effective and relevant training in budgeting, financial management,
reporting, and monitoring and evaluation.

An AGSP scholar reads in Mombassa, Kenya. Photo, David Black, Office of
Communications, USDA, 2005.

Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program
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I. Introduction

1.0 Best Practices Review
In early 2011, USAID requested a review of the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program (AGSP), a
centrally-funded program out of the Africa Bureau that operated from 2004 – 2011 to provide
scholarships and educational opportunities for children in more than 40 sub-Saharan African nations.
AGSP was managed by three U.S.-based Implementing Partners (IPs) with field implementation activities
conducted by more than 126 organizations2 across the continent in the respective host countries (a list
of local organizations is found in Annex A). The review was intended as a desktop exercise to examine
lessons learned and best practices in scholarship program implementation over the life of project and
the investments made in key areas including support and local capacity development efforts undertaken
with the local non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations (NGOs/CBOs) and
mentors in the field.
Morgan Borszcz Consulting (MBC) was engaged to undertake this desktop study. Designed to minimize
burden on the three U.S.-based IPs, all relevant project reports, case studies, country pages, and other
documentation previously submitted to USAID were to be sent to MBC for review, and to be used as
documentation source materials for the lessons learned and best practices; information on local field
partners was also to be sent to MBC. This review process was not intended to be an assessment of the
programs or partners, nor was it intended to be an impact evaluation. However, USAID had conducted
a Mid-Term Assessment (MTA) in 2007 and an outcomes and impact evaluation in 2009; both of which
provided reflection and strategic consideration of the United States Government (USG) and USAID
efforts in education reform and development
assistance efforts.
Within the context of a new USAID
Evaluation Policy, a new Education Strategy,
USAID Forward, and Procurement Reform, as
well as the new overall Policy Framework for
the Agency, the desktop review and
deliverable format evolved during
implementation to better meet the needs of
AFR/SD/ED and the overall Agency. The
requested changes to the Statement of Work
(SOW) included designing and leading in-
country meetings with representatives of the
local NGOs/CBOs and a corresponding focus
on reviewing opportunities to maximize on investments made in building and supporting the capacity of

2 There were 126 organizations that implemented AGSP but not all of them held sub-contracts for the duration of
the scholarship program. Two organizations did not manage scholarships but did work on mentoring and/or
training activities.
Building on Investments in Local Capacity: Reflections on the Ambassadors’ Girls’ Scholarship Program