INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Liberia : impact study (LIS)
Evaluates the impact of a project to establish a Liberian Institute of Public Administration (LIPA) to assume a leading role in the Government of Liberia"s (GOL"s) efforts to reform its Civil Service Agency (CSA).
1982
Sign in to readA free account is required to download.
Abstract
Special evaluation covers the period 1972-78 and is based on document review and interviews with USAID/L and GOL personnel and project beneficiaries. Twenty-eight LIPA professionals (9 of them women) received M.S. training abroad and a wide range of middle management course materials were developed for their use in subsequently training some 600 civil servants. While most trainees felt that they had benefited from the experience, the project"s overall impact on Liberian public service performance was minimal, due mainly to poor leadership at LIPA, the GOL"s failure to provide top-level support or formulate a public sector training policy, and A.I.D."s premature termination of the project in 1978. Moreover, LIPA suffered from lack of credibility among its target group and from an incompetent administrative and logistic staff. Those who attended LIPA programs were not always key mid-level managers, as planned; the training provided at LIPA was not pertinent to CSA realities; and LIPA"s other planned roles, such as research and consulting, never came to fruition. The project was not a complete failure. The establishment of LIPA by a government steeped in patronage and nepotism was itself a signficant achievement, as were LIPA"s ability to become operational after only 3 years of technical assistance and its continued existence 10 years later. Lessons learned are: (1) the project was too ambitious, allotted insufficient time for institution building, and wrongly presupposed a reformed CSA and the evolution of a GOL policy regarding public sector training; (2) some problems could have been avoided had the target group - mid-level civil servants - been consulted; (3) little can be accomplished without top-level political support; (4) conflicts between the directors of CSA and LIPA undermined CSA reform; (5) Liberia was not not ready for host-country contracting in 1972 (and still is not); and (6) poor-to-average USAID/L monitoring and contractor performance indicate an A.I.D. quality control problem.
