iiG Workshop: Accountability and Management in Primary Education

The Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC) and the iiG at CSAE Oxford, hosted a half-day workshop on Accountability and Management in Primary Education at the Protea Hotel in Kampala on December 2, 2011.  This workshop brought together policy makers, practitioners, and researchers involved in the management of primary education and in programmes to improve quality of primary education through accountability in particular. The workshop provided a forum for discussion of lessons from a recent policy experiment in Ugandan primary schools in the context of related policy evaluations in Uganda and beyond.

Strengthening accountability is a key policy mechanism for the improvement of education quality, particularly in remote schools. There have been a variety of approaches to increasing accountability, both from above – by improving information flows to District and Ministry officials – and from below – by improving information and delegating control to the affected communities. However, little systematic evidence has been gathered on the relative effectiveness of these alternative approaches. This workshop presented results from a randomized, controlled trial of policies to strengthen local accountability in rural, government primary schools in Uganda, and discussed these results in relation to other ongoing pilot projects sharing the objective of improving accountability mechanisms in the delivery of education.