Note No. 55 March 2001 A Social Development Saga: India Uttar Pradesh Basic Education and India District Primary Education Projects Social Development Best Practice Elements · Formulation of social development outcomes · Institutionalized mechanisms for participation and decentralized implementation · Ongoing monitoring and evaluation of social development outcomes by the government and community The Uttar Pradesh (UP) Basic Education Pilot From its inception, the project sought community Project and the national India District Primary involvement. Social assessment aided a Education Project exemplify good social decentralized approach to project preparation. development practices. The pilot project in UP to Surveys and focus group discussions identified a assist girls to achieve better education proved so wide-range of educational issues at the village level. successful that it was scaled up to a national project. Problems ranged from caste discrimination to The guiding principle of both projects is to improve debate on the language of instruction to the impact education by building capacity at the community of weather on educational opportunities. In some level. villages, girls were not attending school because of their responsibility to care for younger siblings. In From a Pioneering Pilot to a National Project other places, the issue was girls' safety. In 1992 the Government of India presented an One of the key elements of the UP pilot project was educational reform proposal to the Bank. The the development of local Village Education objective was to assist UP, one of India's poorest Committees (VECs) with representation of women states, through a statewide primary educational and minority groups. VECs are involved in school initiative targeted at improving the status of women construction, community mapping, monitoring and girls. The female literacy rate in UP is the third teacher attendance, and processing the funds from lowest in India, and the estimated enrollment rate of the government. 6-10 year olds is the fourth lowest. The project aimed to increase female enrollment, reduce Capacity building through NGO involvement also dropout rates, improve learning achievement, and occurs through Mahila Sakhya , the women's strengthen community ownership of schools. empowerment movement. It works to improve ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ This project was recognized as Best Practice in Social Development by the Social Development Family and received an award for Excellence in Supervision (QSR) from the Quality Assurance Group (QAG). John Middleton and Marlaine Lockheed were the task team leaders. This best practice note was prepared by Kathleen Kuehnast. The views expressed in this note are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the World Bank. enrollment, to increase attendance retention of girls, the UP project, the government agreed that the and to make accessible early childhood education decentralized approach worked effectively and and alternative schooling. NGOs are involved in decided that the UP project was exactly the kind of decisionmaking through representation on the primary education program needed nationally. By General Council and Executive Committee of the scaling up the project to the national level, this UP Education for All Project Board. Teacher proposal became the District Primary Education Associations, including district-level chapters, are Program Project (DPEP), which was implemented consulted and involved in implementing in 1995. curriculum, instructional materials development and training programs. Lessons Learned By the mid-term review in 1993, the UP project had · Community support for education is a central developed an in-service teacher training program, element of a successful school development which was also decentralized at the level of village program. blocks and clusters. These local efforts were · Community implementation is a cost-effective way supported by improved capacity building for to achieve large-scale school construction. Institutes of Education and Training at the district · Block Resource Centers and Cluster Resource level and through the creation of a State Institute of Centers can serve as effective mechanisms to provide recurrent in-service training and school- Educational Management and Training. Capacity based professional support for teachers. building also occurred for Indian scholars through · Improving the quality of education and grants to conduct research and assessments. The strengthening institutional capacity are long-term Bank compiled an implementation training manual processes. to translate Bank experience into applicable steps. · Microplanning is necessary to assess the need for new schools and additional classrooms and teachers. The UP project built on good practices from prior Indian primary education projects. Throughout the During the preparation phase, the DPEP relied UP project, the Government of India independently heavily on beneficiary assessments that included an hired highly trained educational specialists to emphasis on girls and tribal children. In addition, shadow the Bank staff. The government had been Indian educational institutes conducted learning accustomed to running top-down programs, so achievement tests of 40,000 children and extensive developing a program that took its directions from teacher interviews. the ground up was a new approach. Given India's geographic, cultural, and linguistic Local politicians have promoted the UP project's diversity, a major challenge for the DPEP was how educational objectives. Local politicians were to supervise the national program. The project pleased to find an approach that worked at the benefited from the collaboration of India's community level and that they could champion as education officials and researchers, who possessed their own, regardless of which government was in specific regional and local expertise, with Bank power at the state level. staff, who provided technical advice. Foreign donors collaborated through creating one vehicle Targets set for female participation in primary for channeling funding, which enabled institutions education were exceeded. The enrollment gap to work together toward the same objectives. between boys and girls decreased, and dropout rates for girls were halved. Learning achievement The two projects are good examples of flexibility in improved in 8 of the 10 districts, particularly in the project design, scaling up and increasing the second grade. Due to this project, two million girls capacity of a successful pilot program, and are in school who otherwise would not be. sustainability of the program over the long-term. These projects also offer a model for country- One of the major hurdles in the project was centered ownership. The project has helped convincing the central government that the Bank establish monitoring and evaluation systems that could provide useful technical advice to an have been adopted by the state governments. educational project. In reviewing the outcomes of World Bank User "Social Development Notes" are published informally by the Social DevelopmentL:\Dani-Diss Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Family in theNotes\55-formattedIndia Education pl.ed.jc.doc Development Network of the World Bank. 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