Case Centre resources

In 2015, the Ethiopian government signed the Seqota Declaration, a high-level political commitment to end stunting in Ethiopian children under two by 2030. The country’s existing nutrition programme was failing to deliver on promises of collaboration across the various federal ministries and local-government levels involved and, as a result, the different sectors were sometimes even working at cross purposes.

The implementation of the Seqota Declaration was intended to address this lack of collaboration and be multisectoral, although the Programme Delivery Unit was housed at the Ministry of Health and several other sectors believed Health was continuing to dominate the nutrition landscape. Then, just a year into the 15-year programme, one senior minister stopped attending the fortnightly meetings. With limited resources available for implementing the declaration and with the different sectors having many issues vying for their time, this case study asks students to consider how to ensure political buy-in for this supposedly multisectoral endeavour.

The education system in Campos dos Goytacazes (Campos), a municipality of 500,000 inhabitants located in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state, was badly in need of reform in 2022. The city was prosperous, but its relative wealth had not translated into success in educational results. Campos’s new secretary of education, Marcelo Feres, turned to other Brazilian cities for inspiration, among them Sobral, a municipality being presented in education policy circles as an exemplar of reform. Sobral’s education reforms had resulted in the biggest increase in education scores in the country between 2005 and 2017.

But the path had involved some politically difficult decisions, especially a reorganisation of the school network. This process had involved closing a number of small schools, and consolidating students in fewer, but larger, schools, thus allowing the city to provide single-grade classes and better facilities. Feres knew he would not be able to replicate Sobral’s reforms exactly in the Campos context, yet he believed restructuring the physical network, including closing some small schools might allow the municipality to establish more hours of schooling, improve conditions and help professionalise management, as it had in Sobral. But when a list of 20 schools being considered for closure was leaked to the teachers’ union, Feres found himself in the middle of a growing political storm in which he needed to reassess his strategy to improve Campos’s schools.

In 2014, Nana Agyekum-Dwamena was named Ghana’s Head of Civil Service, tasked with reforming the 14,000-person institution that was widely considered to be plagued by low motivation, inefficiency, and weak performance. Just a few weeks into the job, he was approached with an opportunity from the World Bank, which provisionally offered to fund a multi-year reform programme that Agyekum-Dwamena could design. In many ways, it was a compelling offer: the Civil Service had extremely limited financial resources, yet improving its performance remained a political priority.

However, Agyekum-Dwamena had seen a series of donor-funded reforms fail to deliver since he had joined the civil service in the 1980s. The donor-funded projects often came with high administrative costs, and most had halted when funding ended or a new administration came into office. Agyekum-Dwamena had to decide if he should design a wide-sweeping reform programme to pitch to the development partner, or if he had other levers available for improving performance. For Agyekum-Dwamena, this decision raised a broader question about how he should approach the task of improving the performance of the civil service. 

This case is accompanied by an epilogue which describes Agyekum-Dwamena’s decision in 2014 and how he approached reform in the years that followed.