Rwanda agricultural education project (USAID 696-0109) : project completion report

The project was only a limited success. Perhaps the largest constraint was the 3 years" delay between project design and the arrival of the TA team. By the time the team arrived, the project"s institutional context had changed completely as Rwanda"s Ministry of Education had been divided into two separate Ministries, while responsibility for adult education had been transferred to a third. The project should have been formally redesigned at the team"s arrival, not 2 years later as was the case. This delay reduced A.I.D."s role in reshaping the project, but it did give the team an opportunity to review CERAI operations and those of the newly created Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (MINEPRISEC), which led it to focus on on-the-job training for CERAI personnel in school management and curriculum adaptation, through an "open university" style series of workshops. Planned adult education activities were dropped and only limited TA was provided to the Nyagahanga Secondary School. Another project output, computer training for MINEPRISEC personnel, was not fully successful: more computers, more trained operators, and Ministry policies that encourage the use of computers will be necessary to fully realize the potential of this component. Although 30 CERAI"s were constructed as planned and major emphasis was put on the training of agricultural teachers, facilities and learning materials are not adequate at all CERAI"s and, most importantly, the project"s impacts on the skills training (and hence employability) of CERAI students remain uncertain. The project teaches that TA contracts should not be "set aside" unless it has been determined that the needed services are in fact available from the recommended source (in this case, the TA contract had initially been set aside for land grant universities, but proposals from these institutions were found to be nonresponsive). Secondly, since Rwanda and cooperating donors (e.g., UNESCO) had gone ahead with the project prior to the arrival of the TA team, when the team did arrive it was hard for them to be accepted as valuable contributors. This weakness was exacerbated by the low rank of many of the team"s MINEPRISEC counterparts. Thus, although the team proved highly capable, it was unable to get beyond basic implementation issues, and had little effect on rural education policy. The team also became overly involved in administrative details, due to a lack of support staff.