Country: Sierra Leone (AFR)
Project: Monitoring Post Ebola Recovery Funds: A Focus on Service Delivery
Organization: IBIS Sierra Leone
Sector: Human Development – Health (50%), Education (50%)

This PPP is open for public comments until August XY, 2016. Please use the comment section below. 

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I. PROJECT DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES

A. PDO

The development objective of this project is to contribute to the effective utilization of post-Ebola recovery funds in the health and the education sectors by strengthening monitoring and evaluation mechanisms at the chiefdom level in four selected districts.
This project will strengthen service delivery and accountability through national and sub-national approaches. At the national level, it will develop and disseminate an annual service delivery index capturing citizens’ perceptions of service delivery in their communities. At the subnational level, it will work with the community structures such as Citizens Budget Oversight Committees (CBOC), Ward Development Committees (WDC), Village Development Committees (VDC), and Health Committees to strengthen their capacity to better track service delivery and to inform policy design in order to strengthen government responsiveness and accountability in local service delivery.

B. Project Beneficiaries

The Project’s direct beneficiaries include:

• Women, school-going children and children under five on the four targeted districts that will benefit from improvements in health and education services.
• Existing community structures such as Citizens Budget Oversight Committees (CBOC), Ward Development Committees (WDC), Village Development Committees (VDC), and Health Committees that will be benefit from the strengthening of their capacity to conduct service monitoring and advocacy activities.
• The Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) that will benefit from the information produce to ensure a more efficient and effective use of resources.

The Project’s indirect beneficiaries include:

• The population of the Sierra Leone that will benefit indirectly from the improvements in expenditure allocation.
• The Government of Sierra Leone that will better understand where are the leakages in the system.

II. PROJECT DESCRIPTION

A. Project Components

Component 1: Development and Implementation of tools to monitor Education and Health services
The objective of this component is to develop and implement tools, including the service delivery index, to monitor Health and Education services. The main activities include:
(a) Develop indicators for monitoring health and education in collaboration with key stakeholders.
(b) Develop a sampling frame and data collection tools.
(c) Administer field questionnaires in key service delivery areas of health and education nationwide.
(d) Create and maintain a database and use the collected survey data to conduct preliminary analyses.
(e) Produce a draft service delivery index report in consultation with stakeholders.
(f) Develop a communication strategy to promote the final service delivery index report.

Component 2: Strengthening community-based structures to monitor service delivery and promote social accountability
The objective of this component is to strengthen available Community-Based Governance Structures for effective oversight of service delivery. Overall, this component will build partnerships and establish mechanisms at both local and national level to voice complaints and trigger a response.
(a) Identify and conduct capacity needs assessment of Community-based Governance Structures (CBGS), including the Ward Development Committees (WDC), the Village Development Committees (VDC), and Citizens Budget Oversight Committees (CBOC).
(b) Formalize partnership arrangements with high-level policy actors, implementation partners, local service providers and CBGS.
(c) Conduct training sessions on the post-Ebola recovery programs related to service delivery, oversight and grievance mechanism.
(d) Support Community-based Governance Structures (CBGS) to track resources going to peripheral health units and schools.
(e) Establish grievance redress mechanisms at the local level through which Community-based Governance Structures (CBGS) can express concerns with service delivery to policy actors and other appropriate audiences.
(f) Establish mechanisms at the national level to aggregate recurrent complaints at the local level to feed the policy making cycle.

Component 3: Managing and disseminating knowledge and learning
The objective of this component is to manage and disseminate the lessons learned during project implementation. The main activities include:
(a) Share best practices captured in the field through various mediums including policy briefs, policy dialogue forums, print media, community radio stations and social media
(b) Generate new knowledge through circulating policy briefs among development partners, CSOs and government officials. These briefs will be published on IGR Website and GPSA online platform
(c) Conduct exchange visits between community groups in targeted districts to share learning and hold accountability forums where government officials and service providers respond to community concerns.
(d) Disseminate project’s challenges, and accomplishments at academic policy conferences as well as in publications.
(e) Establish a development learning center for civil society with ICT capabilities that will serve as a resource for information on existing laws and policies on health and education.

B. Project Financing

The financing instrument elected for this project is a Recipient Executed Trust Fund (RETF) Grant. The source of financing for this Grant is the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA), housed within the World Bank. As per World Bank Trust Fund guidelines, given that this Trust Fund is smaller than US$5 million this Project is subject to World Bank procedures related to project preparation and supervision of Small RETF Grants. The Project cost is estimated to be US$684,000 to be financed completely by the GPSA grant. Additionally, the World Bank will commit an annual Project supervision budget in the amount of US$20,000.

III. IMPLEMENTATION

A. Implementation Arrangements

The Project will be led and coordinated by IBIS. The organization will bear all reporting obligations, and their offices will be utilized for meetings and learning sessions in the districts. IBIS’s experience in strengthening civil society organizations to claim access to quality education goes back to five years of implementing a combined grant of over $10 million (DANIDA, DFID, UNICEF, EU, and SIDA) in Freetown, Kono, and Koinadugu.

The Institute of Governance Reform – SL (IGR) will serve as implementing partner to IBIS in delivering the project results. IGR will be the key link with external stakeholders. The project will rely on IGR’s experience and capacity in policy-oriented research and advocacy. IGR is implementing a two-year project funded by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) focusing on producing a service delivery index for health, education, water, and sanitation sectors and promoting citizen’s participation in governance through advocacy training for improved service delivery in selected districts.

IBIS will also engage with the Budget Advocacy Network (BAN) to complement their budget tracking work. BAN is a network of local and international organizations that focuses on promoting inclusiveness in the budget process, increasing access to information and improving responsiveness geared towards achieving gender sensitive and pro-poor budget and programs.

B. Results Monitoring and Evaluation

Service delivery will not be effective if the M&E approach taken is only specific to its programs, and fail to provide useful information on progress towards, or impact on, the wider objectives of addressing reform in Sierra Leone. The M&E of this program will, therefore, be directly anchored on the overall M&E framework of GoSL’s Agenda for Prosperity (A4P) that is implemented by the Ministry of Finance. The project will contribute to measuring performance on Pillar (1) Economic Diversification and Inclusive Growth, Pillar (3) Accelerating Human Development, Pillar (7) Governance and Public Sector Accountability and Pillar (8) Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. Thus, the product of this project will not be a standalone activity tracking parallel indicators, but instead benchmark performance of A4P in the four pillars highlighted.

The project’s M&E team will design an M&E framework for the project once it is approved for funding. The framework will present an approach for tracking activities and monitoring the impact of publications, advocacy, and training. IGR will produce reports on activities and undertake internal and independent end of project evaluation. A before and after scorecard system will be used among targeted institutions as well as users to measure/track changes and advise on areas for improvement. The project will also promote action-oriented monitoring throughout the course of the project which will help IGR and stakeholders measure and reflect on achievements in months or even weeks rather than the more typical annual cycles for programmatic M&E.

C. Sustainability

The Project aims to achieve the goals of sustainability by working with existing structures and strengthening their capacity rather than building new ones. The impact of the activities of this project on the budget processes and in ensuring the realization of the A4P will play a crucial role in guaranteeing its sustainability. Although the task of delivering inclusive growth is high on the agenda of the A4P, which takes basic services as the fundamental building blocks for achieving economic empowerment, there is no institution responsible for tracking services and ensuring that citizens’ voices are taken into account in planning and resource allocation. The project will raise the profile of this activity through sharing the achievements of the project through joint meetings, and mass media campaigns, especially given the importance of service delivery in the Post-Ebola recovery plan.