EDUCATION INVESTMENT DECISION-MAKING FRAMEWORK

Education Investment Decision-Making Framework. "Comprehensive Inventory and Property Conditions Assessment" – WYG/IPF, 2011

This project was commissioned by an EU financed project under the Infrastructure Projects Facility in the Western Balkans (IPF). The project started in April 2011 and was aimed at gathering data on the physical conditions of buildings/facilities of Ministry of Education pre-university school/ facilities (about 3349) all over Albania.

Initially IDRA in close consultation with the client, developed an accurate, comprehensive and logical data collection instrument (School Audit Form) that responded to the overall project objectives and was crucial for the success of such a massive endeavor. It was important not to have a data collection instrument just for a one-time ‘initial survey/census’, but also a system for updating and modifying information in different upcoming data collection waves (to be undertaken by the MoES). The institutional and infrastructure situation of schools changes constantly, so it is important to have a system that allows for accurate data collection and processing at any given time.

At the end, the School Audit Form was composed of:

1. A school Identification and Location Module (GPS coordinates of buildings/institutions)
2. An Institutional Module, which asked about the institutional data (type of school, dependent or independent, level, number of students, number of teachers, staff, transport, budget etc).
3. A Building Module, which looked at the conditions of the building both on the outside as well as inside. Infrastructure situations were included, such as evaluation of walls, roof, stairs, foundation etc. The number of classrooms, laboratories, toilets, other building facilities etc, was also observed.

About 12 regional coordinators (supervisors) and 50 field auditors were involved in the process of data collection which lasted 4 months. An online platform was created in order to have a complete view on the progress of the fieldwork from all the teams in the field so that measures could be taken if necessary.

The data gathered by this project assist the Ministry of Education in the decision making process for the allocation of public funds in rehabilitation investments for existing schools, construction of new schools and implementation of MOE policies in the area of capital investments, as well as rationalization and optimization of educational buildings / facilities depending on latest demographic developments.

IDRA Main tasks in this project consisted in:

1. Designing the research instrument and the whole implementation plan,
2. designing of the complex data entry form as well as the online fieldwork reporting format,
3. data collection and quality control,
4. data entry, cleaning and processing,
5. Report Writing.