ພາສາລາວ
This is the first time that the Ministry of Education and Sports has organized a workshop on the implementation of the 9th ESSDP 2021-2025 with participation at central ministry level with support from the Government of Australia
The Department of Inspection of the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) held a workshop last month on “Identification of Monitoring and Evaluation Indicators for the implementation of the Education and Sports Sector Development 5-year Plan (ESSDP) 2021-2025”. 63 participants including 18 females from all MoES departments as well as representatives of three agencies from the former Ministry of Science and Technology (Cabinet of Lao Academy of Science, Department of Science and Institute for Science and Technology Management) joined the workshop.
The workshop received financial and technical support from the Government of Australia through its BEQUAL program. The objective focused on building capacity of all stakeholders from the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) networks of the Education and Sports sectors on identifying and using M&E indicators for the implementation of the 9th ESSDP (2021-2025).
H.E. Mrs. Khanthaly Siriphongphanh, Deputy Minister of Education and Sports of Lao PDR, reinforced the importance of the M&E activities in her closing remarks: “M&E indicators and the related M&E activities are essential to encourage effective and efficient implementation of the 9th ESSDP (2021-2025) and achieve the overall goal of “the Education and Sports Sector in Lao PDR is appropriately structured, managed and resourced to create opportunity for all Lao citizens to have equitable access to quality education and sports and to contribute to, and benefit from socio-economic development and support Lao PDR graduating from Least Developed Country status by 2025 and support progress towards attainment of SDG-4.’’ I would like to encourage all relevant departments including government organizations, the private sector and all stakeholders from each subsector to cooperate and contribute to the policies and strategies, to focus and realistically modify the outputs.”
Mrs. Khanthaly strongly reinforced the importance of the M&E activities to encourage effective and efficient implementation of the 9th ESSDP and annual work plans. The M&E Progress reports from the subsector annual plans will also provide data and information to track progress, challenges, recommendations and suggestions on how to improve our implementation monitoring and evaluation frameworks for the next plan. The overall goal is to implement successfully the 9th ESSDP 2021-2025.
The technical team from the Department of Inspection, MoES is the main coordination body for M&E. During the 4-day workshop, they presented the M&E implementation frameworks of the 9th ESSDP 2021-2025 including a draft plan, tools and templates for implementing the M&E in the different subsectors of the five-years plan. There are currently 10 subsectors: early education, primary education, lower secondary education, upper secondary education, non-formal education, teacher education, vocational education and training, higher education, sports and physical education, and educational administration. The science sub-sector is in the process of consolidating science activities into the ESSDP 9, drafting a quarterly and annual M&E implementation plan, and putting monitoring indicators into the LESMIS.
The Department of Planning of MoES presented the three-year planning template that all departments will use to develop subsector plans. It was designed to link M&E to exit data and information system.
The technical team from the Australian supported BEQUAL program also shared lessons learned from the M&E system linked to annual targets to enable collaboration between the different departments on each subsector plan to track progress of implementation of the five-year plan 2021-2025. BEQUAL team encouraged strong collaboration between departments and mutual sharing of experiences to develop implementation monitoring and evaluation strategies and key activities for the five-year plan including the definition of phases for 9th ESSDP 2021-2025 and links to the SMART indicators.
By the end of the workshop participants had achieved greater understanding of the importance of implementation monitoring and had begun developing detailed monitoring plans for each sub-sector three-year and five-years plans, and monitoring frameworks linked to target, objectives, outreach and intermediately outcomes of the 9th ESSDP 2021-2025. They will pay high attention to the progress of the implementation monitoring and evaluation frameworks.