DDP 760. Conrad Wesley Snyder, Jr. "Program Evaluation Guidelines and Framework for Ghana Education." June 2000. 42 pp.

Ghana education basks in a mythical history of quality and efficiency, where an imposed education system produced many exceptional itinerant scholars and professionals. The apparent quality was an artifact of a highly elite, subsidized, small education system with strong external ties for the privileged few. The system did not provide a broad base for development, was not stabilized within the local cultural and institutional context, and was inherently inequitable. Ghana’s legacy is a schooling system characterized by low quality, few resources, and ideational and moral corruption. What happened and what can be done are interesting questions with few answers. Evaluation plays a ritual role in Ghana and it has not become a tool for reflection and learning at the organizational level. This paper presents guidelines and a rational framework as part of a training program for Ghana educators from the Ministry of Education. Evaluation can redirect the system, provide clues for remedial and corrective action, and pull the system out of recurrent failure, but only if there is political will and a dramatic change in organizational culture.

Keywords: educational reform, learning organizations, monitoring and evaluation

JEL Codes: I20

Wes Snyder is Faculty Associate of HIID, Professor at the University of Montana, and field leader for the HIID Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) team in Ghana. The work in Ghana focuses on professional training and the development of a systemic M&E system. The PME project is part of the Quality Improvement of Primary Schools (QUIPS) program of USAID/Ghana.