“We saw a big change in the way we were identifying priorities. The difference we found in this particular process was that we concentrated on coming up with the bottlenecks. … This was a very useful process because the ministry, technical team, and development partners in the country were able to put our heads together and reason and see what exactly is hindering us to achieve systems transformation. This was a departure from the past, where we came up with wish lists of challenges affecting the sector. This time we were focused on the bottlenecks, and I found this very useful.”

“There were so many priorities, and we had a very long list, maybe a wish list, but they were all priorities. In the end, we had to start clustering them, and eventually come up with not even one but about 20, and then eventually we focused on one. …With collective effort and all the evidence and data gathered around each of those, finally we could go to that one position.”

"We had a lot of discussion and involved the [local education group] in several rounds on narrowing down from the 12 issues that we had found to 3 areas. …We’re finding it hard to now de-prioritize 2 of them. We’re still moving forward wanting to keep all three of them in our compact."

“First of all, a roadmap needs to be clear, precise, with schedule guidelines, and with those who are going to be responsible for the process – what we’ll do and how we’ll do it. Second, we need a leader; we need to show the institutional leadership from the education sector the changes we want to carry out, whether it is a change in the syllabus or quality of learning – very clear. Third, we need to say, from the beginning, this is based on evidence.”

“The GPE process, particularly in developing the partnership compact, has revitalized sector dialogue. The exchanges and discussions around the main reform have interested many stakeholders (technical and financial partners, civil society organizations, teacher unions, etc.). This dialogue around the main reform was led by the Technical Working Group stemming from the Sectoral Consultation Committee (CCS) which regularly reported the conclusions of the discussions to the members of the CCS. The sector dialogue was dynamic and, above all, inclusive. Moreover, we welcomed the participation of the ministries providing public resources – the Ministry of the Budget and the Ministry of Finance – which endorsed the choice of the main reform. The representatives of these ministries especially insisted on the alignment of resources allocated by partners with the resources and policies of the State.”

“Nepal has recently gone through a federal transition. We have 753 new key stakeholders – the local governments, which have the main mandate for the implementation and management of school education. …Going through compact guidance and undertaking the consultations further helped us think of how to systematically engage with local governments, so it’s not just a one off asking for input, but we have a system where we go back to the local governments with next steps and allow space to validate.”

“All our partners came together like never before. We’ve never seen such inclusive sector dialogue the way it has happened at the moment. Even private foundations have come in. Every partner wants to hear what is the thinking of the government as contained in the partnership compact.”

“The process will help us set up a national coordination council so that we can monitor and oversee the implementation of our strategic documents and our programs in the education and science area in Tajikistan. The joint work with the local education group and joint efforts with other non-government actors have helped us in the process of preparing and putting together [the compact].”

"It is not realistic to expect that the ongoing partner support will necessarily always align with the identified priorities. That’s another issue we are fully aware of as we continue and go along with this process."

“I think a major point in this reform was realizing how to disseminate and use data. And most importantly, I think the realization that having a strong strategy doesn’t necessarily help monitoring and implementing it, unless we have strong indicators and capacity to monitor those [key performance indicators] at the country level.”

“On the sector coordination, and the inclusive sector dialogue, this review and the validation through the [Independent Technical Advisory Panel] led us to discuss this in our budget review meeting, which is a joint sector review, and agree that we need to do a landscape exercise, map the composition and the types of CSOs that are engaged in or have a stake in the sector, and we need to find ways to facilitate meaningful engagement for the different type of CSOs.”

“I have seen our development partners go to the top level of government to say ‘let’s increase financing to education’. I’ve seen that commitment, but they are not able to move at the pace we want them to go. It remains a challenge, but I really appreciate this process because up to the top level of government, now everyone knows, there is this pressure, a need to increase the budget for education.”

“There is a national strategy on gender equality and girls (2015-2025), but there is no recent diagnostic on the education of girls and gender equality theme. …The work on the partnership compact and the enabling factors analysis has allowed us to work with partners and the Ministry of Education to better harmonize and coordinate our interventions as well as to better analyze the problem to respond in a more coordinated manner within the compact. There is still work to be done, and we will pursue this work, particularly with the funding window of the Girls Education Accelerator, to define interventions.”

“When we analyzed the sector evaluation, we saw gaps when it came to gender equality. The compact allowed us to deepen the dialogue and identify those gaps clearly. Many of the activities proposed include the gender equality aspect in a transformative way. We included an expert in gender equality from the Ministry of Education team in all dialogues, working groups, local education group meetings, etc. I would like to add that the support from our GPE focal point was key, and support from KIX which also helped us prepare the spaces for dialogue and hence count on the support of CSOs. They know how to integrate the gender aspect into all of it.”

"In Kenya, at the national level we have realized gender parity. But you find that we have serious disparities in certain regions. So we are now saying let us zero down in those particular areas. One lesson I want to give to colleagues – do not just concentrate on the national level data. It might be misleading. Dig into the subnational level and have interventions that will ensure that everyone, every child, girl and boy is on board."

"The question was, by making [gender] a mandatory priority, might it get less ownership than the other priorities coming up through sector dialogue, and through the analysis, and through the validation? … And we felt gender cannot be seen as standalone. In Nepal, disparity isn’t just gender, but it is gender combined with caste/ethnicity, remoteness, socio-economic status, ability, etc. By itself, there is gender parity, but if you take these other factors into account, there is intersectionality."