CBLD-9 Guidance for the Education Sector
CBLD-9 Guidance for the Education Sector provides guidance for USAID operating units and implementing partners on using the Capacity Building-9 (CBLD-9) indicator in education sector programming. CBLD-9 is one of the three standard foreign assistance indicators that USAID uses to measure the performance of local organizations that receive assistance from the U.S. government (USG).
The CBLD-9 indicator is designed for use by USAID implementing partners to measure whether the organizational capacity strengthening efforts they support have led to improved performance in local organizations. CBLD-9 represents the percentage of USG-assisted organizations with improved performance out of the number of USG-assisted organizations that have planned and pursued performance improvement with USAID support. The indicator allows USAID to learn about and track agency-wide progress in strengthening the performance of local organizations.
This how-to document complements existing cross-sectoral CBLD-9 guidance and provides recommendations for employing CBLD-9 across the education continuum, from pre-primary through higher education, as well as how to apply the indicator to support education systems strengthening efforts. The guidance encourages innovative, fit-for-purpose operationalization of the indicator while promoting alignment with related resources, including USAID’s Local Capacity Strengthening (LCS) Policy and the Strengthening the Capacity of Local Education Systems guidance.
Key takeaways from the guidance:
- CBLD-9 can and should be used to support USAID systems strengthening efforts. The guidance describes how to count departments or offices of large institutions as sub-units under CBLD-9.
- Generally you should not consider schools as “organizations” for the purposes of CBLD-9 because they usually do not receive direct support for performance improvement within USAID activities or the number of schools covered would require sampling, which is not appropriate.
- Applying CBLD-9 requires two different measurements: one for selecting priorities (capacity action planning) and one for measuring performance improvement.
- To measure performance improvement, it is important to select an outcome-focused metric that is sufficiently within the control of the organization. Prioritize simplicity in metric selection.
- Learning outcomes are usually not an appropriate metric for performance measurement under this indicator.
- You should use the education disaggregate for any organizations directly involved in teaching and learning.