Reaching All Children with Education in Lebanon Support Project

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The development objective of the Support to Reaching All Children with Education (RACE 2) Program for Results Project for Lebanon is to promote equitable access to education services, enhance quality of student learning, and strengthen the education systems in the Recipient’s education sector in response to the protracted refugee crisis. Lebanon’s education system is governed principally by two entities: Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) and Center for Educational Research and Development (CERD). MEHE is responsible for overseeing the overall education sector, from the approval of national policies to the provision of service delivery in public schools, as well as regulation of private schools and other education service providers. CERD, an autonomous public institution under the tutelage of the Minister of Education, is responsible for informing and supporting improvements in education quality through, among other tasks, conducting educational research and national educational statistics, reforming the national curriculum, strategic planning nationwide, and providing in-service training to education staff. The RACE 2 program aims to achieve three outcomes and nine outputs that are structured around three pillars: i) Equitable Access, ii) Enhanced Quality, and iii) Strengthened Systems. The results chain of the RACE 2 program, and the corresponding DLIs in the Bank-supported Program, provide a complete story from select activities to the desired end results. The DLI in support of Pillar 1, equitable access, takes into account the fact that not all students need the same type of support. Pillar 2, enhanced quality, is supported by four DLIs, each one calibrated to a specific step in the results-chain. Pillar 3, strengthened systems, is focused on enhanced governance and managerial capacities of MEHE and CERD to plan, budget, deliver, monitor, and evaluate education services. The second phase of the Government of Lebanon’s RACE 2 program (2016-2021) is estimated to cost approximately US 2.1 billion dollars over five years. Overall, the technical assessment finds that the RACE 2 program has been satisfactorily designed. The Bank-supported Program objectives are spread across all three pillars, and exclude activities that are directly implemented by international partners,such as United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Although these activities are not part of the Bank-supported Program, they continue to be core elements of the overall RACE 2 program.