Time for change

International development senior consultant Marc van der Stouwe looks back on the successes and lessons of English in Action. He proposes the magic – and often missing – ingredient for sustainable change.

If I had to capture in one word why English in Action (EIA) achieved so many of its sustainability objectives, it would be ‘patience’. The Department for International Development (DFID) had a long-term view at the outset, and designed a nine-year programme. They chose to start with a model that had some time to prove itself, rather than a ready-made solution that might be immediately embedded within government policy.

We could then ‘sell’ that model to the government based on physical and technical evidence that it worked. Many international development projects simply do not have the chance to take into account the learning from implementation experiences, as well as institutional and contextual factors.

Another hurdle that all projects need to leap is how to create demand. Initiatives that are pushed onto a country rarely last. Our two-stage model allowed us to build strong demand in Bangladesh, based on the acceptance that improvement could only be achieved through radical change in classroom practices. We therefore had ownership from the key decision-makers from the start.

Even then, if the teachers hadn’t found the initiatives useful, momentum would have soon petered out. They needed to feel that the training and materials were making their work easier.

Again, time was crucial for getting the teachers on side. We were able to take a panoramic point of view and work on the dimensions that support teacher development – a challenge that would have proved too complex an issue to solve in the standard four or five-year project lifetime.

EIA therefore became part of wider system reform, even though that was originally outside the scope of the project. Again, this would have been hard without the luxury of a decade-long trajectory. Our iterative process had the freedom to adapt organically and so find an institutional model that worked within local constraints.

Much more than English

That said, the journey towards sustainability encountered severe challenges, and at times, partial failure. The biggest realisation was that English was only the tip of the iceberg. We simply couldn’t institutionalise changes to English teaching without first adapting the whole system, including policy, curriculum and implementation across all subjects. This made the scope of the institutionalisation efforts broader in range, higher profile in political terms, and thus harder to negotiate.

In hindsight, we also fell into a common trap by approaching institutionalisation from the position of the project. We thought: What can we design that will fit neatly within the system? We should have instead looked at it from the perspective of the system. How much could the system absorb? What is the maximum level of change possible? When going for real change, you need to understand the realistic absorption capacity of systems and people.

Another key lesson was that sustainability doesn’t happen by accident. We agreed on deliberate sustainability goals and strategy from the beginning, as moving from a ‘project-based’ to an institutional mode of implementation is a lengthy and complex process. I’d say now that well-defined sustainability strategies must be integrated with the overall programme strategy and adjustable over time. Our first strategy was kick-started in 2011, a full six years before the end of the project.

At the same time, with the wisdom of hindsight, I’d argue that even more time and resources are required to fully achieve sustainability, particularly in terms of building capacity within the government institutions. The duration and investment in systems strengthening are too often grossly underestimated.