Read to Succeed (RTS) Exit Strategy

The project cycle, a popular development tool, rarely makes accommodation for an exit strategy that sustains development. This Exit Strategy is developed to correct such a flaw by revising the project cycle implementation stage to include deliberately and consciously planned actions to ensure sustainability. The project's time-bound nature, with a five-year lifespan, necessitates a deliberate plan for exit strategy to sustain successful project initiatives beyond its end date. Early recognition of the project's time-bound nature provides lead time for planning for sustainability, allowing host countries to assume responsibilities and ensure continuity after project close-out. The Exit Strategy describes the approach to ensure long-lasting benefits to the host country as a result of RTS' program interventions. The goal of the exit strategy is not only to consolidate benefits achieved but also to enable further progress toward the Sixth National Development Plan (SNDP) objectives. The immediate step will be to work with target provinces to expand RTS' interventions and good practices from target districts to non-target districts. The purpose of the present Exit Strategy is to ensure project benefits continue following the close-out of RTS, promote host-country counterparts and beneficiaries' empowerment, build local institutional and individual capacity, support local ownership, and develop agreed modalities to sustain, expand, or improve the project's impacts. The development of RTS' Exit Strategy involved a step-by-step process that ensured authentic participation of key counterparts. The inclusive and consultative nature of the work planning process provided a forum for all stakeholders to address sustainability issues. The RTS project team made it clear to key host country counterparts that the project is time-bound and therefore incumbent upon them to assume responsibilities while the project is still active in order to sustain it. The project team took the draft annual work plan to the provinces for ground-truthing in a formal two-day validation workshop, which assessed the relevance, affordability, and resonance of RTS' activities to government priorities. The provinces were requested to respond to two questions to inform their plans for sustainability: how they like RTS to operate in order to ensure sustainability in the target districts and how they see their role in this process, and assuming that RTS' interventions and approaches would show positive impact on learner performance (reading), how they plan to scale them up to other non-target districts in their respective provinces. These questions triggered a lot of discussion, and with the support of RTS staff, each province came up with a range of recommendations. The process culminated in an extensive two-day workshop in Lusaka in December, where Provincial Education Officers agreed on common actions that could ensure sustainability across all the six provinces. Province-specific approaches were also identified and jointly deliberated. The common approaches identified include forging close collaboration with the Ministry, influencing policy, building the capacity of the Ministry, working within government structures, engaging staff through "learning by doing," building NGO, PTAs, and School-Community Partnerships' capacity, developing and outreach plan to generate demand, forging strategic collaborations, and instituting accountability through external and internal monitoring. The provinces also identified province-specific approaches to ensure sustainability, which were jointly deliberated and agreed upon. The RTS Exit Strategy aims to ensure that the benefits of the project continue beyond its close-out, promote host-country counterparts and beneficiaries' empowerment, build local institutional and individual capacity, support local ownership, and develop agreed modalities to sustain, expand, or improve the project's impacts.