Guest blog written by: Lindiwe Chide, Joan Keaney-Bray, Grace Milner, Martha Sineta, Joshua Valeta, Arianna Zanolini
Our Malawi team of six just ended a 12-week journey into Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) for Education through the Harvard Executive Education Course. We were a group of Directors at the Ministry, a District Education Manager, and two Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office education officers. We were asked to borrow PDIA for 12 weeks, but- as it turns out-we won’t be returning it.
It started with a mindset change. We had to shift from focusing on solutions and instead start zooming in to understand problems better. We had to forget about trainings, workshops, “best practice” solutions coming from abroad. We began to ask more questions leading deeper into the roots, like figuring out the fish, from the head, through the lateral bone and fins to the tail. What was the actual problem, and why did it matter, to whom, and how would things look when it was solved? We chose perhaps the fundamental problem in Malawi’s education sector: like in most of the region, children are enrolled in school but not learning. Only about 13% of children 7-14 can read a simple paragraph with comprehension.
Within that problem, and after speaking with stakeholders, we identified two specific contributors that we gauged to be resolved with the current level of funding from Ministry and Development Partners. As the causes weaved together- for example, poor teaching exacerbated by large classrooms and lack of resources- it was a good exercise to focus on what had authority, ability, and acceptance – the change space. In Malawi, end-of-term assessments take two weeks out of the school calendar and are not actually used effectively by learners. Two weeks three times a year is almost 15% of precious time on task lost. We wanted to find out if there was a way to reduce all this time away from learning. But, as PDIA demands, when we engaged our Authorizer, the Secretary for Education, we discovered an even more fertile ground for inquiry and iteration – the lack of focus and accountability of the Primary Education Advisers (PEAs), which are officers in charge of schools in a zone who are supposed to ensure quality of the schools, and report back to the district. That question even came closer home brushing the skin of the very Directors who were part of the team, as the Authorizer steered our minds back inwards to search the soul; “…and what about directors such as you, how are you making sure that the beautiful policies that we have are being followed?”
We had to dig deeper, by asking more why’s – four, five and sometimes a few more to get down to the underlying causes of the problem. This helped us to look through the status quo with a different lens and challenge it. At that time, the assumption implied more that the PEAs mainly needed training; and that district education managers needed a tool to better supervise their PEAs. However, talking to stakeholders on the ground, we realised that the problem is deeper. Primary Education Advisers are responsible for too many things; in many cases, they move with motorbikes that are 20 years old and constantly broken, so they depend on NGOs for support, therefore ending up working almost as NGO employees rather than following Ministerial priorities. Schools have wonderful innovations that are sometimes actively shut down by the Advisers because advisors have no channel for mentorship- for example, we found a school led by an innovative head teacher, that had structured their lesson plans ahead as a group, printed together with record books and distributed to teachers. Another school adopted this and, in a few years, joined the former school in the top performance chart. But that was discouraged by authorizers in a neighbouring jurisdiction, where schools continued to trail behind. We are determined to engage those who are opposed to understand why and encourage them to try out practices from the positive deviants discovered just next-door. We learned right there, that through talking to people, and more people, you can discover diamonds lying just below the dusty surface, which only need dusting off, and shaping them into the ‘problem solved’, through iterations.
Twelve weeks later, we are not done yet. We are still understanding and working on these problems. We have agreed that we will continue working on these and we will update you in a few months. As you can see, we have had some wins and some lessons. For example- we need to bring people with us and create allies if we want them to resolve the problems- not just impose and hope they comply. For now, the main thing we learnt is the power of asking questions and listening. We have been missing out a lot because we have not been asking people who are truly living the system and the problem as, and what do they think some small steps towards the solution could be. And this learning journey has leveraged the power of teams, the beauty of diversity and the resonance of different experiences, knowledge and skills.
By asking questions, from different dimensions, we realised how many innovations are already happening on the ground. In Phalombe, for example, results in education are incentivised with additional funding to schools. In Zomba, teachers were getting together for Continuous Professional Development helping each other. Yet instead of listening and starting from these local innovations to then iterate, people often impose fully-made desk-designed solutions that don’t take off because they simply don’t fit. There is a case of double shifts introduced to solve the space problem, which we are pursuing further to understand it better.
We will continue our work on the PEAs and have connected to a $100m World Bank governance programme to ask to lead the process of improving effectiveness of education advisers; this was approved, and our thinking will feed into the mid-term review and into the pot for activities to improve this result. We will also connect with the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) grant to ensure that minimal time away from task is taken from the revised end-of-term assessments that they will be funding, and to ensure that the results are used. We will also use PDIA to understand if we are taking the right approach to school leadership training, and to mediate the conversations around the new GPEs compact, which requires an identification of key bottlenecks. One of the Directors has already disseminated how PDIA works with their staff and applied it to the process of developing a new strategy aimed at solving the problem of very limited access to quality secondary education.
This is just the beginning of our journey into asking, listening, and iterating from the ground up. We are all screaming “this is a supposed solution!! Let’s start from the problem” whenever someone comes about proposing something off the shelf. We are committed to asking and listening from the ones who will live the consequences of policies and reforms, and act and iterate from there. PDIA is a precious process, but interestingly not all altogether new, as we continue to discover isolated cases with similar approaches tried out in the past, but with slight differences and wrapped in some faded colours. PDIA truly requires commitment to the ground; talking to stakeholders again and again and again while iterating and starting small; taking ownership and sharing the problem. It requires understanding the accumulated power of the small steps, and that powerful changes can happen in a short space of time, and without having to break the bank. But watch the change space, as authority, ability and acceptance can be dynamic. Keep talking to people, listen carefully, negotiate a small step, pause to reflect, share and celebrate that small win that comes, and keep iterating. These have been our PDIA lessons.
This blog was written by the alumni of the PDIA for Education Systems Online Executive Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 56 participants from 8 countries successfully completed this 12-week program from September – December 2022.