Improving access and equity to middle school education

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 evaluation team implemented a longitudinal political economy analysis using 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 the team used graphics and delphi processes to tell a story about the structural features, institutions, and agents related to 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 delphi methodology helped evaluators to support stakeholders and local education experts to tell a story about the barriers and facilitators to improved teacher recruitment and helped identify key pain points related to the financing of secondary education. The results show that while the Ministry of Education supported the creation of the new systems, changes in the administration focus, the lack of a change agent, and lack of internal capacity continue to undermine system change.