In late 2015, Liberia’s newly appointed education minister, George Werner, recognized that the government school system was wasting money and failing its students. Shortly before Werner assumed office, a pilot project had identified significant numbers of ghost workers (teachers who never showed up for their jobs or were fraudulently included on the payroll) as well as teachers who lacked even basic qualifications. Although the project covered just three of Liberia’s 15 counties (the most populous counties of Montserrado, Nimba, and Bong), the findings illuminated a long-standing national problem. Resolving to put an end to the abuses, Werner and senior ministry officials created a program implementation unit dedicated to the nationwide project, refined vetting procedures for assessing qualifications, and introduced mandatory competency testing that laid the foundation for additional reforms. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf provided crucial political support when the project ran into resistance from the national teachers’ association. By February 2018, the education ministry had removed 83% of the 2,046 ghost teachers, and planned to remove the remaining 17% that it identified during the last six months of the project. Overall, the project generated $2.3 million in annual savings that opened spaces for new teachers in the school system and budget, with the ministry expecting that this number would increase to $3.1 million once all ghost teachers were gone. As a result of the project, the ministry hired 1,371 trained new graduate teachers. Still, challenges remained: 49% of public school teachers had failed the competency tests. Armed with this important baseline data, the ministry had to decide what to do to improve teacher quality.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study with assistance from Blaykyi Kenyah based on interviews conducted in Monrovia, Liberia, in August 2017. Case published February 2018.

At the end of March 2014, the nongovernmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières warned that an Ebola virus disease outbreak on the border between Guinea and Liberia could unleash an epidemic of unprecedented scale. Its capacity still limited after a 14-year civil war, Liberia’s government was struggling to mobilize and coordinate the extra assistance its health ministry needed to respond. How to recruit, train, protect, and pay a labor force that included government employees, temporary workers, and many international volunteers were central concerns. In the best of times, coordinating this kind of skills supply chain would be challenging. But from June to the end of August, conditions became increasingly difficult. As the infection spread, many health workers died. In the absence of facilities and equipment that could provide protection, fear slowed recruitment—a problem made worse by severely constrained medical evacuation services and reduced airline access. Mobilizing personnel to respond raised questions about how to fulfill a duty of care toward employees, adhere to commitments to equality, and promote longer-term institutional sustainability. The Liberian government, UN agencies, and a wide variety of other organizations worked together to identify and deploy essential skills, develop shared practices, and find ways to pay Liberian temporary workers whose support was essential. UN organizations alone recruited and deployed 19,367 staff during the crisis, including Liberians, but questions remained about how to best meet the ethical and practical challenges that arose.

David Paterson and Jennifer Widner drafted this case study with advice from Béatrice Godefroy.

Princeton University’s Grand Challenges program supported the research and development of this case study, which is part of a series on public management challenges in the West African Ebola outbreak response.

Timeline: West African Ebola Outbreak (poster infographic)

Timeline: West African Ebola Outbreak (page version)