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Australia Awards in Africa (AAA) is Australia’s flagship program for development cooperation efforts on the continent. The Australian Government’s announcement of its intentions to re-engage in Africa in late 2007 brought about AusAID’s development of AAA with the final design being completed in 2009. The AAA design built on the previous scholarships program that offered up to 100 scholarships a year to 12 African countries. The current program is designed to deliver a range of development scholarships across Africa and the South West Indian Ocean islands and currently provides approximately 1,000 scholarships to 50 African countries.
On 20 December 2010 AusAID signed a three-year contract with GRM International to manage AAA. GRM International has served as the managing contractor (MC) since April 2004 when AusAID began outsourcing its scholarships management in Africa. GRM International’s contract ends 31 December 2013 and has a two-year contract extension option.
2. Key Program Achievements
Strong scepticism existed during the design and the start-up of the AAA program regarding the feasibility of achieving the rapid scale up in award numbers proposed. The AAA monitoring data indicate that these output targets have been achieved, and no program-halting incidents have been reported during this period. The Independent Progress Report (IPR) acknowledges that the meeting of these output targets constitutes a very significant achievement.
The IPR team found that credit for this achievement needs to be shared between both the contractor and AusAID. This finding is based on clear evidence that both have played critical roles in shouldering the extreme workloads that delivering these targets has required, and both have been instrumental in addressing issues that, left unchecked, could potentially have become significant problems.
AusAID’s operational staff provided sustained support to the implementation of AAA. This support was necessary to ensure the AAA processes met the set targets and delivered quality outputs. Attention to detail by AusAID operational staff was largely responsible for maintaining quality products in relation to partner government liaison and program promotion. While the contractor sometimes interpreted AusAID’s attention to detail as ‘micromanagement’, the IPR team identified multiple past and on-going examples of GRM lapses in quality control in external correspondence and other externally targeted material. This suggests that AusAID’s sustained close scrutiny of GRM International’s work in these areas was necessary for ensuring quality.
Contractor staff members were also instrumental in successfully achieving the scaling up of award numbers to meet targets. AusAID would not have been able to meet these targets without the administrative and logistical resources provided by the contractor. In working with AusAID, the contractor has been willing to rapidly adapt to changing process requirements and AusAID policy revision3. Some responses, especially those related to selection processes and development of associated IT tools within SCHOLAR, have been both successful and well regarded. Others have been less successful. While there is also a perception that there is more to be done in regard to streamlining selection process and associated reporting workloads, there is a recognition that many improvements have been made, especially since the arrival of the new Deputy Team Leader who has had a clear operational focus.
During this scale-up to unprecedented award numbers across an unprecedented number of partner countries, both AusAID and contractor staff members have needed to go well beyond the levels of adaptability and effort required by other AusAID Australia Award programs, especially in the area of promotional activities and course provider liaison. The design document for the program also makes it clear that these very ambitious target numbers (both awards and countries) were set by a range of administratively desired outcomes, rather than a more rational feasibility assessment.
The program has also been highly successful in specific areas. The program pioneered short course awards, and during the short life of the program to date, these have become well established and are highly valued by all stakeholders. The level of visa overstays and Protection Visa issues have been far lower than anticipated in the design’s risk assessment. An approximate gender balance has been maintained in award provision, and AusAID staff members have been active in valuable gender initiatives, such as linking in the Governor General to provide networking opportunities for outstanding African women. Awards have clearly been inclusive and supportive of participation by a significant number of persons living with disabilities. The failure rate of AAA awardees has been extremely low, suggesting that selection approaches are obtaining high quality candidates.
Australian Leadership Award Scholarships and Australian Leadership Award Fellowships have also been successfully incorporated into the program, although they were not considered in the design.
Therefore the IPR Team explicitly recognise and commends the level of dedication that was required to achieve the results observed.
In addressing the unprecedented tasks associated with the scale up of award numbers in Africa, a significant number of compromises have needed to be made. The contractor, in particular, has not been able to provide the expected level of attention to its full scope of services. Some of these compromises were necessary and some may have been avoided (discussed in Section 4). However, it would be wrong to judge this program’s overall performance in comparison to the more routine operation of other AusAID Australia Awards programs. This program spent much of its relatively short implementation period to date (less than two years) in uncharted territory. This suggests that the demands placed on both AusAID and MC staff generated frenetic activity for the entire implementation period. That some compromises were made is therefore unsurprising.
The format of an IPR requires that this program be rated against a number of criteria. The level of these ratings is primarily based upon whether the current situation is ‘satisfactory’ or not. Given that such a huge amount of effort has been needed to simply achieve the unprecedented output targets and the subsequent compromises made to do so, it is impossible not to recognise that more may need to be done against many of the IPR assessment criteria to bring this program in line with the standards generally set by other (less onerous) AusAID Award Programs. The IPR team therefore provides these rating as an indication of where the next round of effort needs to be focussed, rather than as a statement of relative program performance.
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