Improved Learning Environment Infrastructure Activity. The Improved Learning Environment Infrastructure Activity will rehabilitate approximately 130 existing Georgian public school facilities. Many Georgian public schools were built in the Soviet era and have been largely neglected due to the absence of any significant maintenance program. This has resulted in the school facilities being in a very poor physical condition including internal utilities such as heating, electrical, water supply and sanitation systems. The Government formed the Educational and Scientific Infrastructure Development Agency (“ESIDA”) within the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia (“XxXX”) to address issues related to school maintenance, rehabilitation and building of new school facilities. The Improved Learning Environment Infrastructure Activity will involve the full internal and external rehabilitation of selected school facilities, utility upgrades, and provision of laboratories. Such an approach addresses the key elements correlating with improved educational performance, including human comfort, indoor air quality, and adequate lighting. Using a transparent school selection process, the Government and MCC identified well-utilized schools in poor physical condition that served a high share of Socially Vulnerable students; these schools will be targeted for rehabilitation under this Activity over the course of the Compact Term. This selection of schools was based on a formula that prioritizes schools according to their physical condition (dilapidated physical infrastructure), social vulnerability (higher proportion of Socially Vulnerable students), number of students enrolled and utilization rate. MCA-Georgia and ESIDA will develop and enter into an Implementing Entity Agreement (in form and substance satisfactory to MCC) that will establish the duties and obligations associated with implementation. For the first phase of work, MCA-Georgia will manage the financial resources for this Activity. The establishment of an Operations and Maintenance (“O&M”) program in the Georgian school system is critical for ensuring the sustainability of MCC’s investment and more broadly to the viability of Georgian schools. The Government has committed to developing and funding a strategy to address school O&M and a plan for its implementation (collectively, a “School O&M Plan”) with MCC support. Key elements of this School O&M Plan include hiring permanent dedicated and technically qualified staff to develop and implement the School O&M Pla...
Improved Learning Environment Infrastructure Activity. The development and implementation of a comprehensive School O&M Plan, maintenance standards, institutional arrangement and budgetary process is a critical element of this Activity. The proposed School O&M Plan will be performed in close coordination with ESIDA to ensure human resources, program activities, implementation mechanisms and budgetary processes are well integrated and sustainable. ESIDA will hire sufficient technical staff dedicated to the Compact activities as well as provide the necessary office facilities to conduct the design activities.
Improved Learning Environment Infrastructure Activity. With respect to future operations and maintenance of school infrastructure rehabilitated under this Project, the Government (specifically, ESIDA, and the Georgian Ministry of Finance) has agreed to develop and fund the School O&M Plan for the entire public school system, during and after the Compact term. This funding will be complemented by Compact-funded technical assistance to create and implement for the School O&M Plan and a matching O&M incentive fund through the Compact term. MCC and the Government will work together to transform O&M management practices to increase the sustainability of infrastructure investments.
Improved Learning Environment Infrastructure Activity. This Activity is expected to receive independent impact evaluation in which outcomes of this Activity will be rigorously assessed and attributed to MCC investments in school rehabilitation. MCC and MCA-Georgia have developed plans to employ a Regression Discontinuity Design (“RDD”) evaluation to assess the impact of this Activity. This RDD design utilizes a scoring system to rank the program’s target population by priority for rehabilitation and through which a cutoff may be determined. The schools scoring above this cutoff will be selected as the treatment group for this Activity. The concept driving the RDD method is that those schools near the cutoff, whether above (treatment) or below (control) will be statistically comparable, allowing for an estimation of program impact. In order to ensure the validity of the Activity’s evaluation methodology, the Government will ensure that:
(A) no school facility designated as “Comparison/Control” within the impact evaluation framework will receive Government- or donor-funded rehabilitation beyond those expenditures necessary for continuing operations, insomuch as donor-funded rehabilitations are within the control of the Government;
(B) schools selected as beneficiaries of MCC rehabilitation will neither be systematically targeted nor systematically precluded from other Government activities, funding, or support; and
(C) schools designated as “Comparison/Control” will neither be systematically targeted nor systematically precluded from other Government activities, funding, or support.
