Consider early on how to incentivize and build momentum for partner country institutional reforms. Institutional reforms would have been easier to facilitate if more was accomplished during the earlier years of the Threshold Program when MCC had an in-country presence. For example, one of the important policy reforms of Activity 3 was to reform teacher recruitment in Guatemala to require a subject matter content test for newly hired teachers. The ministerial decree for this reform was enacted only near the end of the program. MCC incentivized this change by proposing to co-fund a second round of teacher training, outside of the scope of this evaluation, conditional upon the policy reform. Ideally, this reform would instead have been a condition precedent on the first round of training. In future Policy and Institutional Reform-related projects, MCC should engage early and often with partner countries to identify these conditions before spending the majority of program funds.
Lesson Learned