Projects and evaluations should invest in improving the quality and availability of administrative data. Initially, the plan was that much of the data used for these evaluations would come from administrative records from MINED. However, within MINED, school-level and student-level data come from two different departments, and they are not consistent with each other. The two data sources use different definitions for counting enrollment, drop-outs from one school are not tracked to see if they enroll in a different school, and some records have been found incomplete. For the final evaluation, MCC used a third-party data collector to gather data directly from schools. MCC did not design the project or the evaluation to invest in improving data quality or availability and therefore, the MINED data has significant weaknesses which limit the quality of decisions that can be made based on those data. The quality of data and the use of data within MINED could be improved to help manage El Salvador’s education sector and improve the accuracy of evaluation analyses.
Lesson Learned