Innovative Finance
August 1, 2024
Context and Issue
Liberia, like many emerging democracies, confronts challenges to consolidating its democratic processes due to weak institutions, corruption, marginalization, and restrictions on democratic rights. Scholars emphasize the importance of fostering citizens with strong democratic values to sustain democracy, underscoring education's role in promoting such attitudes. Civic education, tailored to this objective, aims to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors necessary for active participation in democratic societies. In post-conflict settings like Liberia, civic education promotes peace, stability, and social unity by fostering a collective civic identity.
Solution
The Ministry of Education (MoE) and implementing partners (IPs) aim to enhance students' understanding of democratic systems, cultivate civic responsibility, and bolster Liberian democracy through increased civic engagement, social cohesion, and a decrease in lawlessness and political violence by introducing a new civic education curriculum in primary schools. The EDA civic education component supported the Liberian MoE in introducing the 2014 National Curriculum on Citizenship Education for "lower basic" (i.e., primary) grades one to six. The program delivered the curriculum using textbooks developed by WAHALA Publishing House in 2021 and approved by the MoE (MoE & GC, 2014). The textbooks were finalized. DI worked with local subgrantee UMOVEMENT and the MoE to finalize remaining materials (i.e., teacher guides and potentially student workbooks), trained teachers, piloted the program, adapted it based on the results of an IE, and supported its scale-up.
Impact
The diversity in methodologies, curriculums, settings, and assessment criteria within existing research, combined with limited experimental data from emerging democracies and post-conflict regions, notably a deficiency in studies focusing on primary school students, restricts the ability to draw definitive conclusions about effective strategies for enhancing civic outcomes applicable to USAID's and DI's civic education initiatives with primary school students in Liberia. Insights from evaluating the intervention in Liberia could fill crucial knowledge gaps in this area.