A monitoring and evaluation system to help develop more effective educational programmes in Morocco

In Morocco, only 8 to 9% of state school students in the final years of primary and middle schooling achieve satisfactory learning outcomes according to the national education programme. The findings of the National Learning Assessment Programme (PNEA) survey, conducted in 2019 by the Higher Council for Education, Training and Scientific Research (CSEFRS), shows low learning outcomes among Moroccan students, with children from low-income families being the most exposed to learning difficulties.

In this context, the country’s Ministry of National Education Preschool and Sports (MENPS) introduced a preschool education reform in July 2018 laid out in the Strategic Vision of Reform 2015-2030. A preschool development programme for rural areas was launched under Phase III of the National Initiative for Human Development (NIHD) aimed at creating 10,000 new preschool classes and upgrading 5,000 existing classes over a 5-year period.

Working jointly with the MENPS and NIHD, the Moroccan Foundation for the Promotion of Preschool Education (FMPS) is in charge of implementing this preschool programme nationwide. Its missions comprise direct management of preschool units, setting up an education system for educators and a system for monitoring and evaluation in schools.

Within this project, the Moroccan Foundation for the Promotion of Preschool Education (FMPS) relies on the work carried out with IDInsight since 2019. It focuses on putting in place a system to monitor and evaluate student skills and strengthen the capacity of the FMPS teams. This new approach involves a more granular use of data from 9,000 schools and 150,000 children of Morocco.

The objective of the project is to consolidate and institutionalise the monitoring and evaluation system within the FMPS. To achieve this goal, FID financing will help train operational and pedagogical teams to:

• Create tools to help collect data and define indicators
• Analyse, interpret and present data to external audiences

In the short term, the project should help improve the quality of FMPS’ preschool education for all children and enable capitalisation of FMPS’ experience by sharing it with other actors in Morocco who are convinced of the utility of evidence-based decision-making.

In the medium-term, children will benefit from longer and more effective schooling. Experience-sharing should facilitate the uptake of practices involving the use of evidence-based data by FMPS partners who will then be able to develop similar M&E tools to strengthen their decision-making capacity.