Results-Based Financing for Enhancing Book Distribution in Cambodia
Since 2017, World Education, Inc. and John Snow, Inc. (JSI) have received funding from the World Bank under the Reach for Reading initiative to help improve the transparency and accountability of the education supply chain in Cambodia. Under this project, WEI, JSI and the government redesigned and piloted the Track and Trace digital platform. Track and Trace (TnT), originally developed by JSI and WEI with funding from the All Children Reading Grand Challenge, is a technology solution that uses cost effective technology tools to allow school directors, school support committees, government staff, and textbook distributors to track, in real time, the ordering and distribution of government textbooks to ensure that they reach the schools they were destined for in a timely manner and in the right condition. TnT enhances the central government and community’s visibility into the location of textbooks during the distribution process.
World Education and JSI have worked closely alongside the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MoEYS) to design and pilot the Track and Trace digital platform that utilizes tools ranging from a chatbot to a smartphone app and web-based dashboard. TnT was trialed at 416 schools across Cambodia and the project trained over 600 school directors and 800 School Support Committee members on its use. The project has met with great success. The central ministry received digital book requests form 100% of pilot schools within two weeks, compared to the usual six months in the paper-based system. During book distribution, all pilot schools and District Offices of Education submitted digital receipts and dispatch records on TnT. TnT generated comprehensive data on the progress and accuracy of deliveries that was available to MoEYS officials from district up to central level through web-based dashboards and reports.
Based on this success, in April 2019, the Minister of Education declared that the government will take over the management and funding of the TnT platform and will begin using it nationwide in 2020. WEI and JSI will continue to support the government in this national scale up.
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