Rationale, Issues, and Conditions for Sustaining the Abolition of School Fees • 23
school fees and were not available in a timely manner. The studies stress the importance of conducting rigorous assessments of the additional needs for teachers, classrooms, and training materials and of exploring what type of short- and longer-term measures can be implemented to meet these needs. In turn, this requires a solid database on key inputs such as location and utilization of existing classrooms (an up-to-date “school map”), the deployment and utilization of the existing teaching force, and availability of textbooks by subject and grade. Such information was not readily available in these five countries when the fee abolition policies were introduced. Developing implementation and monitoring capacity is a very important element of the preparation process and is emphasized in various ways in all the case studies. In addition to stressing the importance of capacity building for effective implementation, the Kenya study also points out the important lesson that “there is a critical need for continuous reassurance and confidence building among stakeholders to prevent them from giving up under extreme pressure” (chapter 4, Lessons Learned).
COMMUNICATION AND BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS Ideally, preparation of fee abolition should include comprehensive communication and consultation to explain the content, impact, and implementation process of the new policy to key stakeholders such as parents, teachers, local communities, political constituencies, and education administrators. It may also require consensus building with opposition politicians who may not have supported the new policy during the election campaign (as referred to in the Kenya case study), or with parts of the administration that may not be on board. However, in several of the five countries, the very short time between the decision to introduce the policy and the implementation itself meant that most of this information and consultation process needed to be conducted as part of the implementation process. The challenge faced by planners and implementers is described aptly in the following quote from the Kenya case study (chapter 4, Process of Planning and Implementation of Free Primary Education): Upon winning the December 2002 election, the NARC government implemented one of its preelection pledges to provide universal primary education. It declared that as of January 4, 2003, all Kenyan children were entitled to enroll in public primary schools. Following the initiation of free primary education, the new Minister for Education clarified that no child would be required to pay