Meet CLEF: Pioneering Public-Private Coalition for Education in Côte d’Ivoire

There are at least three reasons why CLEF is unique and powerful.

1. First and foremost, CLEF illustrates that cross-sector collaboration to address complex social challenges is possible and that organizations can collaborate despite vastly different institutional missions and cultures.
2. Second, CLEF demonstrates strong national leadership and ownership, with the government providing financial resources and chairing governing boards comprised of philanthropic and private sector partners.
3. Finally, CLEF is a powerful coalition because it shifts attitudes away from fragmented projects and toward a large-scale, coordinated program aligned with national education priorities.

Take the government of Côte d'Ivoire, for example. Although the education sector receives the largest share of the national budget, the available funds remain insufficient to meet the country’s critical educational needs. With most of the educational budget dedicated to salaries,  little money is left for investments in school infrastructure, textbooks, teacher in-service training, pedagogical supervision, and other measures that are also necessary to ensure all children in Côte d’Ivoire have access to quality education. By leveraging and matching resources with private businesses and philanthropy, the government can ensure that additional investment goes directly toward enhancing educational access and quality in underserved areas.

Now, consider chocolate and cocoa companies. To address the fundamental needs of the communities from which they source their cocoa, they have financed a range of projects throughout the years, including initiatives in education. However, there are limited chances for small-scale initiatives that exist outside of a broader systemic consideration to be maintained and expanded. Collaborating with the government offers the opportunity to operate at a systemic level and achieve sustainable change.

And let’s also look at philanthropic foundations. Philanthropy has a distinct advantage compared to governments and traditional donors—it provides an opportunity to deploy patient capital to increase the chances to unveil the best solution or the most powerful innovation. However, without the government leveraging public resources and embedding programs within the established public system,  the goal that motivates organizations like the UBS Optimus Foundation to create inclusive and equitable education systems cannot be realized.

CLEF is built on evidence-based teaching approaches such as structured pedagogy and teaching at the right level, which have been adapted to the local context, piloted with encouraging results for learning outcomes, and for this reason they have been integrated by the Ministry of Education in the new foundational learning program.

But scaling a national program is a different business than succeeding a pilot, as you correctly point out: just 5% of social innovations reach scale. The reality is that many innovations addressing social concerns, such as low learning outcomes, are effective in the pilot stage but are either unsuitable for large-scale implementation or go awry during the scaling process.

In our case, CLEF builds on previous work conducted through the TRECC program which means we have direct experience navigating the education ecosystem in Côte d'Ivoire. To avoid the first pitfall in a scaling process, when we first piloted the teaching at the right level approach, we did so with scaling in mind, which means we adapted the approach to the ministry of education's standard processes and functioning, and we simplified the approach by prioritizing the core elements and eliminating the nice-to-haves in order to increase teacher adoption and reduce unit costs. @ TARL Africa has been and continues to play a key role in supporting the government of Cote d’Ivoire to adapt and improve the approach to remain efficient at scale. They have extensive experience working with governments across the continent. Now that the scaling-up process has started, it is crucial to monitor and document the process in detail and ensure that it is in line with the operational implementation plan. For example, in the classroom, teachers may struggle to integrate new pedagogical approaches, either because they do not completely understand them or because they are not adequately supported to achieve effective practice change. It is essential to gather information on these and other challenges in order to resolve them and enable more effective implementation moving forward.

To help the Ministry of Education to navigate the pitfalls of scaling,  @  Innovations for Poverty Action has accompanied the design and now the  implementation a comprehensive monitoring, evaluation and learning system that tracks the implementation and outcomes of CLEF. Your team at the UBS Optimus Foundation is also providing additional resources.  Further, @ The World Bank, who is also supporting the scaling of the foundational learning program, will mobilize additional expertise to monitor and document the scaling process, identifying bottlenecks and propose remediation.

As you’re aware, scaling entails much more than just replicating an educational intervention in more schools. We must ensure that our impact extends throughout the educational system. It's easier said than done. This is why we need more partners like the UBS Optimus Foundation who are willing to invest in implementation research to help and inform the scaling process.

CLEF is currently in its first year, with activities implementation starting in October 2023. During the first year, key achievements included training 120 national trainers, 300 pedagogical advisers and inspectors, and 7,054 teachers in the new foundational learning program's evidence-based pedagogical techniques. Furthermore, 4,277 out-of-school children in remote rural areas, including 44,3% girls, were integrated in formal schools after following an accelerated learning program. Most of these children, aged 9-13, have never been enrolled in school before.

The lessons learnt thus far pertain to implementation, of course, but they also cover partnership setup and governance. I'll concentrate on the latter.

The first thing that stands out to us is the time lag between signing the agreement that established CLEF and the launch of activities to implementing the program. In the case of CLEF, it is important to remember that we started from scratch—none of the parties had prior experience with entering similar partnerships because CLEF was simply unprecedented. CLEF was truly a co-creation effort, and considering the amount of partners involved, it took some time.

A second important lesson from the set-up phase of CLEF is the role of philanthropy as a bridge builder between public and private sector. Philanthropic organizations, such as the UBS Optimus Foundation, share their non-profit mission with governments and understand private companies' desire for results within short periods of time. As such, they are well positioned to broker meaningful cross-sector collaboration, which is critical if we are serious about achieving sustainable development goals.

Finally, we have realized that, just as we identify friends in difficult situations, difficult circumstances serve as a litmus test for the quality of leadership and collaboration in a partnership like CLEF. As we recently encountered some challenges with implementation management, the Minister of Education stepped in to assess the situation and take prompt action to address it, while seeking buy-in from business and philanthropic partners represented in the joint governance boards. In addition to enhancing the parties' trust, this experience has shown how important government leadership is to these kinds of partnership.

We have a lot on our plate for this second year! One of the priorities for the CLEF coalition is thus to complete construction of 35 schools and begin work on at least 30 more. The Ministry of Education will pursue scaling the foundational learning program, with CLEF helping to train an additional 10,000 teachers. For this new cohort, the Ministry will use a hybrid training approach, combining in-person training and remote pre-training using digital content and short videos developed with CLEF support. Last but not least, 4,950 more out-of-school children are expected to sign up for the bridging classes and complete the accelerated learning program in order to access formal education.