The monitoring as well as implementational duties delegated to local EFA Commissions will be considerable. It is, therefore, a reasonable requirement that these Commissions as well as many of the educational officials, particularly school directors, who sit on the Commissions, receive considerable technical support to ensure that they can execute these tasks at a reasonable level of effectiveness. EFA capacity building plans will complement and coordinate with Annual Capacity Building Work Plans developed by each department under ESSP. These and other expectations fit well with the desire of the RGoC to decentralise the planning, management, and implementation of basic education services to provincial, district, and commune levels. The capacity building process will facilitate four steps in promoting the EFA strategy: (i) approval and internalization of the process; (ii) dissemination of procedures and processes; (iii) implementation; and (iv) monitoring.

To this end, there will be support to the Government in establishing a capacity building plan for local EFA Commissions by providing a specialist in the areas of management, planning, and monitoring . An early phase objective in this regard will be to assist the national and local EFA Commissions to develop a commune-level EFA planning procedure on a pilot basis. The process through which this will be done will include (a) reviewing the national policy context for decentralised planning including the Village and Commune Planning Process supported under Seila and related initiatives of the Ministry of Interior; and (b) reviewing the National EFA Plan, SEDP II, PRSP, ESP and ESSP in order to derive a framework for local level planning for EFA.

Following the completion of the above tasks, the National EFA Commission and the local EFA Commissions in a limited number of communes will then develop their respective Commune EFA Plans that fit local needs. Based on the experience of the development of these plans, guidelines will be developed for a nation-wide Commune EFA Planning Process. These guidelines will then be used as primary training documents in building capacity of key officials within the EFA Secretariat at all levels, which will be responsible for nation-wide replication. It should be noted that budgetary provisions for these capacity building requirements are included in the budget outlined in Table 3.5 (see Section 3.5.4).