Professor Abdul Razaq Primary school was not only established by the community living around the school but was also supported by community benefactors throughout its operation.
The land for the school was donated by Professor Abdul Razaq after whom the school is named, a tribute paid to his generosity by the community. The school building was constructed by the BRAC organization with six classrooms. After the construction, most of the allotted land was occupied by the building. This meant that school children had little space to roam and no ground on which to play. The Integrity Watch CBM-S focal point facilitated, through the local monitor, a community meeting in which this particular problem was discussed. The meeting was also attended by school management shura members who did their bit to find a solution for this acute problem. After the meeting, a group of community elders took the responsibility of meeting Professor Abdul Razaq whose land lay adjacent to the school. Given the convincing efforts of the CBM-S Local Monitor and support of the community elders, the land owner donated an extra piece of land for the school to solve this problem. It has time and again been proven, by similar achievements, that community involvement can result in identifying timely and effective solutions to significant problems in those local communities.
The Community Based Monitoring of School (CBM-S) Program was initiated in July 2014 in order to bring more coordination between communities and government departments, increase transparency and accountability, enhance the quality of education services through community monitoring, collaborative information sharing and problem solving. The aim of this program is to make officials more responsive, encourage communities to support education sector and advocate for policy change at local and national levels.
The CBM-S Program succeeded Integrity Watch Afghanistan’s (IWA) Community Score Card (CSC) Program in which School Management Shuras (SMS) were empowered through training of SMS members to evaluate education services, identify school problems and seeking local opportunities for solving school problems. Although the pilot phase of the CSC has successfully come to an end in Jabal saraj district of Parwan province, nevertheless, due to lack of effective monitoring system and the reactive nature of SMSs, IWA decided to alter its approach and switch CSC to CBM-S Program. This new approach has enabled community members to regularly monitor schools for an extended period of time and assist school management to resolve school problems.
