One of the institutions in Sierra Leone that can help shed light on how data can be used to support problem solving is the President’s Delivery Team. This Unit nested under the Office of the Chief of Staff was set up to support key government Ministries and Agencies to implement the country’s two year Post-Ebola Recovery Plan.
One of the Ministries that the PDT supported was the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. One of the initiatives during the 10–24 months phase of the recovery program was to launch a nationwide school feeding program. The schools that were targeted were all Government-owned and Government Assisted Primary Schools that passed a key criteria. The criteria included having a safe and secure cooking space, water and sanitation facilities and volunteers to cook the food.
Schools applied and submitted the completed checklists. The Ministry of Education transferred funds to all those that met the selection criteria and passed the checklist with the expectation that all receiving schools would commence school feeding by December of 2016.
With support from the President’s Delivery Team (PDT), a database of all the school feeding benefiting schools was developed. The PDT Members embedded in the District Councils around the country with support from the Ministry of Education’s Deputy Directors in every district reached out to 1, 043 schools in December 2016. Of these 1,043 schools, they found out that only 46% had started feeding.
The main issue was primarily with banks transfers. Some schools had submitted personal banks accounts of schools heads, some had incomplete BBAN and some had clearing issues especially those that banked with community banks. Armed with this data, the PDT worked with the Ministry of Education, the Bank of Sierra Leone, the commercial banks and the affected schools to problems solve on the bottle necks. From the figure above you can see that the Team was progressively able to not only reach more schools but the number of schools that were able to commence school feeding continued to increase. That’s the power of data!!
Data is sourced from the President’s Recovery Priorities and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.
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