Haggar Hilda Ampadu

"Through this work, I realised that there were insufficient documentation processes and effective systems-approaches in many organisational operations, mainly across Africa. This realisation is what motivated me to work in policymaking and implementation; and now I work to promote integrity and transparency in Ghana’s education sector."

"Over the course of my career, I’ve worked across 36 African countries to develop and strengthen health systems. This was mainly in the domain of medicine safety for the World Health Organisation (WHO), which required me to understand quality control, supply chains, and other systems and processes."

"One of my main goals is to continually identify areas that can be improved for better organisational capacity and effectiveness. For example, the National Schools Inspectorate Authority previously had a series of ad-hoc processes for inspections and audits to assess the quality of education for learners."

"However, digitising many of our inspection processes has enabled us to work within these constraints. For example, by adopting a statistical sampling approach for selecting schools for inspection, we have increased the number of schools inspected from about 50 to now 2,341 per academic year—this is a huge win for us."

"I am committed to continually improving the quality of work at the Inspectorate Authority by institutionalising data-driven processes and decisions."

"More importantly, with this approach and the expanded sampling we have, we can confidently extrapolate the results across all schools in Ghana. We’ve also focused on reducing manual and human efforts in our operations. For instance, school registration and payment processes at NaSIA are now automated and done online, which allows us to more efficiently track these processes and assess support for schools regardless of their location in the country."

"The pandemic has seriously affected our school inspections. We recognised the need for continuation of teaching and learning in this time of crisis, and we were thus inspired to conduct virtual school inspections. In addition, in partnership with the UNICEF-Ghana office, we developed and published the National E-learning Standards and accompanying guidelines for pre-tertiary schools in April 2020, in response to COVID-19 and school closures. This has been a key resource for schools nationwide over the course of the pandemic."

"In June 2019, with technical assistance from IPA and DFID-Ghana in the form of four personnel forming a part of our core digitisation team, we digitised the inspection approach; and this significantly streamlined data collection processes. As a result of this digitisation, data to support policy decisions is collected at the school level and received in real-time by headquarters in Accra for reporting and analysis. This approach better ensures that each inspection report is based on objective evidence, and thus limits subjectivity and opportunities for bias."