Good Governance in Secondary Schools: Data-Driven Analysis and Recommendations from Community Monitoring

To ensure good governance in the education sector for the overall development of Bangladesh, the active participation of local citizens alongside the government is crucial for monitoring and improving the quality of education. One of the primary objectives of Transparency International Bangladesh’s (TIB) ongoing project, Participatory Action Against Corruption: Towards Transparency and Accountability (PACTA), is to identify existing problems in key service-providing institutions through local-level community monitoring and to initiate citizen-led efforts to resolve these issues by engaging with the relevant authorities. Under the PACTA project, 108 secondary schools were selected for community monitoring via a specialized app from January 2023 to December 2024 (Appendix-1). This initiative is supervised by the Committees of Concerned Citizens (CCC) formed with TIB’s inspiration across 45 regions of the country, supported by Youth Engagement and Support (YES), and led by the Active Citizens Group (ACG). For each of these schools, an ACG was formed comprising local service recipients, men, women, youth, various professionals, and marginalized groups who have been regularly monitoring the schools. ACG members identify various problems and their causes through community monitoring in the respective secondary schools, ensure public participation through Community Action Meetings (CAM), and conduct advocacy activities with the respective institutions and local authorities to resolve the identified issues based on their collective experiences. Advocacy initiatives are undertaken to prompt appropriate actions at the policy-making level of secondary education for problems that remain unresolved at the local level, considering the nature, severity, and resolution process of the issues.

Analysis of data and information obtained from the app-based community monitoring and Community Action Meetings reveals that various problems persist in the 108 secondary schools (106 MPO-enlisted and 2 government schools) included in the monitoring. In these schools, the respective ACGs identified a total of 681 problems across 20 categories up to February 28, 2025. Notable among the identified problems are teacher shortages, irregular student attendance, infrastructural deficits, lack of cleanliness, absence of disability-friendly infrastructure, ineffective management committees and Grievance Redress Systems (GRS), and the failure to disclose necessary updated information.

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