By: Haja Hawa Koroma
The Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education has on Saturday 15th June 2022, disbursed school grants of Fifteen Billion Seven Hundred and Twenty Nine Million and Two Thousand Leones directly to 5,058 public schools that are running on a full cycle primary education from classes 1 to 6. These grants were based on data collected in March 2022 and were disbursed as Performance-Based Financing for Term 2 of the 2021/22 academic year, to improve various components of quality education at the school level.
Ever since the introduction of the Free Quality Education introduced by the Bio government, this government has been providing large-scale support, including the provision of teaching and learning materials and the financing of government assisted schools at all levels.
Regardless of the immense support that the government has been rendering in this pursuit, the resources are not always adequate to cover all expenses and needs of beneficiary schools and ‘unapproved’ schools do not currently receive such mainstream government financial support.
However, the size of the support rendered to these schools is strictly dependent on performance metrics, meaning, a school gets more of the standard PBF grant if it improves student attendance, retention and progression and also improves its teaching and learning outcomes.
The schools with special needs and circumstances, like unapproved and small schools, schools in poor communities or schools with disabled students also receive extra funds.
All School Management Committees and Head Teachers are provided with guidelines and are also trained on the use of the PBF grants as part of these resources could be used for payment of stipends to community and volunteer teachers, the payment of staff bonuses based on performance and supporting school operations.
Therefore, as part of this project implementation, MBSSE received technical assistance under the Free Education Project from the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovations to introduce the Open ‘Government to Person’ framework to accelerate cash transfers to the schools. This platform integrates the data collection on the schools’ performances on the PBF indicators, calculation of the grant and transfer of funds to the schools’ accounts in a secure manner as this payment mechanism provides rigour transparency and efficiency to the system when sealed in the future.
