Description

World Vision Armenia in close collaboration with partners has always advocated for school budgets transparency and participatory planning and reporting of those budgets based on CV&A work. This is directly linked with quality education and accountability because schools always mention the lack of allocated budget versus required obligations but it is hard to monitor if the process is not transparent and one has to rely on what school principles say.
Also, the School Governance Boards are subject to conflict of interest because in most of the cases parents “elected” in these bodies are also teachers in the same school. Obviously impartiality is questionable.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP, see below for details) framework has been a real opportunity to suggest solutions to the above mentioned. World Vision Armenia advocacy team was heavily involved in the working groups initiated by the Ministry of Education and Science in framework of OGP. The two below mentioned changes are suggested by World Vision Armenia and considered as real achievements in policy change at the National level.

- The procedure of the election of the school Governing Board adopted in November 2014 has been amended: The given school pedagogical staff (even if they are also parents) cannot be elected in the parents committee representing the school board.
- The Minister of Education and Science approved the procedure developed by the working group related to school budget public hearing and school budget expenditure reporting. Now this procedure is mandatory in all schools of Armenia. Schools will present their draft budget to citizens and CSOs through websites or school info corners prior to adoption, comments and suggestions will be collected, public discussions will be organized by education service users and the school budget will be finalized only after that. Also schools have to publish on quarterly basis the budget expenditures.

“World Vision had very important role in including RA educational process transparency and accountability into the 2nd action plan of OGP. This resulted into development of legal acts endorsed by the Minister of Education ensuring transparent election of school governance bodies and accountability of school budget to service users” stated Aram Asatryan, Counsellor to Public Administration of RA Government.

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The Open Governance Partnership (OGP) was launched in 2011 to provide an international platform for domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Since then, OGP has grown from 8 countries to 65 participating countries. Armenia is part of OGP since September 2011.

The OGP countries governments work together with civil society to develop and implement ambitious open government reforms. The Open Governance Partnership Armenian Working Group (WG) was set up in 2014 by the decree of the RA Prime Minister . State bodies jointly with NGOs initiated development of the OGP second action plan for 2014-16 approved by the Government. The Plan covers various sectors of Armenian economy and social life such as mining, health, education, local self-government, freedom of information and others relevant to furthering the objectives of the OGP in the country.