Education and human resources technical services (EHRTS)

and other donor educational projects in Latin America and the Caribbean to improve educational program/projects in that region. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the Academy for Educational Development (AED), and a third contractor will implement the project, which consists primarily in the provision of TA to Mission and host country educational projects/programs. The project will have five components. (1) During its first year, the project will conduct four cross-cutting evaluations - one each in the areas of basic education, education for the workplace (vocational skills, management education/training), Peace Scholarships/development training, and participant training. The evaluations, which will be based on a review of documentation, interviews with A.I.D./W personnel, and, in certain cases, site visits, will focus on amalgamating lessons learned from prior and ongoing educational interventions for use in designing new programs and projects. (2) These lessons learned will be packaged into guidelines for use by A.I.D. and host country personnel in program/project design, implementation, and evaluation for each of the four targeted educational areas. (3) In the project"s key component, Missions and host countries will "buy-in" to project TA to help them use the evaluations and the guidelines to develop educational sector/subsector strategies and assessments and to assist in the design, implementation, and evaluation of educational projects/programs. Planned quantitative outputs include 26 sector strategies and 8 assessments, and TA in 15 project/program designs, 24 implementations, and 35 evaluations. A total of 380 person-months of TA is anticipated. (4) The evaluations and guidelines produced under the project will be translated into Spanish and possibly into French and disseminated to host country counterparts, A.I.D. field personnel, and individuals from the development community. Newsletters targeted at host country personnel will be issued periodically, and regional and sub-regional workshops will be conducted as well. (5) Finally, the project will establish a data tracking system to help host country personnel follow key indicators both of their educational systems and of the project and its impact.