In President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s second term, the Government of Liberia embarked on an ambitious education transformation program – seeking to rapidly improve the quality of education in a context of severely constrained resources and competing priorities. At the time (2015), Liberia was the sixth poorest country in the world, with nearly half its population illiterate, following a decade of civil war and the outbreak of Ebola.
In developing countries, most resources in social sector ministries are locked into recurrent costs. This was especially true in the education sector in Liberia in 2016, where 92.2% of the Ministry of Education’s budget was earmarked for teacher salaries and personnel costs. In addition to leaving little room for reform, Minister of Education George Werner suspected that much of the payroll was going either to people who were not actually teaching – “ghost workers” – or to people severely underqualified to teach. To make headroom to upgrade the education sector, President Sirleaf and Minister Werner determined they needed to eliminate any expenses that were not contributing to children’s learning so that they could maximize every dollar they had.
Minister Werner launched a vetting exercise of the entire 18,000-strong teacher workforce. The exercise ultimately enabled the government to remove 2,000 “ghosts” from its payroll, freeing up more than $3 million in annual savings, which was reinvested in the education system. The Ministry employed around 1,800 new, qualified teachers and began training for existing, under-performing teachers. To build confidence, an independent auditor validated the removal of teachers and the redeployment of these funds toward new hiring and training.
