A coalition of civil society organizations has released a scathing report accusing the Liberian operation of Bridge International Academies, an offshoot of New Globe Schools, the US-based for-profit company, of conflicts of interest, and a lack of transparency and accountability in its management of Liberia’s public schools.
By Anthony Stephens with New Narratives
The 61-page report by the Coalition for Transparency and Accountability in Education, covering the period 2017-2022, praised Bridge (BIA) for “improving relationship with local stakeholders; modest learning gains, and frequent school visits/monitoring.” But it said senior former Liberian government officials, including Gbovadeh Gbilia, Bridge’s current Country Director, and George Werner, Liberia’s ex-Education Minister, had conflicts of interest by advocating for the organization, while still in their previous jobs.
Gbilia served as Deputy Education Minister of Planning and Research during the administration of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and later headed Education Delivery Unit (EDU), at the ministry. The coalition report said he became “a strong internal supporter and advocate of the program,” while still in government and that he “co-authored the 2019 internal evaluation report of BIA’s activities” and as such was “required to be a neutral player providing oversight and guidance to all providers and stakeholders in the sector.”
The coalition said Werner, who advocated for the company to come to Liberia in 2016, was also “still actively involved with BIA’s operation in Liberia, after having left the Ministry in 2018,” and that “he strongly defended the company’s operations in Liberia and decision to dismiss some of its employees who were termed as being ‘deeply political.’”
The report also found Bridge’s operations are opaque with little accountability.
“Financial information on BIA’s operation and activities in Liberia remains inaccessible,” the report said. “To date, there is no publicly available, independent audit and detailed financial reporting that clearly demonstrates how much Bridge International Academies has mobilized and expended on LEAP and the schools assigned to it in Liberia.”
Front Page Africa/New Narratives’ investigations found United States tax records that show
New Globe Schools had sent more than $9m from 2018 to 2022 to Liberia through a US based parent organization called the Liberian Education Achievement and Resource Network. New Globe is a private entity that does not need to disclose its current investors but in the past they have included the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The report called for “a comprehensive and independent audit of the company’s operations in Liberia to provide a detailed account of its financial records since 2016,” and that the findings should be publicly available and accessible.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Anderson Miamen, Executive Director of the Center for Transparency and Accountability in Liberia, which led the research, called for a clear exit strategy for Bridge. It also called for Liberian government to adequately fund education to enable MOE [Ministry of Education], schools and local education officials to properly function, insisting that education was “a human right.”
“We are not against public private actors intervening in education,” said Anderson. “But partnership that portrays or projects Bridge as a savior to the sector or the other providers is that kind of partnership that we oppose.”
The event was attended by stakeholders in the education sector, including the National Teachers Association of Liberia whose President, Mary Nyumah, expressed unhappiness over Bridge’s alleged ill-treat of teachers and urged the new Boakai government to end the agreement.
“For us, Bridge must go,” said Nyumah. “We don’t need them because they aren’t doing us any good. This is the right time. We have a new government.”
In a rebuttal to the report’s findings, Bridge International sent FPA/NN a seven-page statement accusing the coalition of bias, as well as harboring “a planned agenda to erode Bridge Liberia’s image and the gains the social enterprise has made in the education sector.”
It claimed that Gbilia worked for Bridge only after “he resigned from government in 2017” and that it he “was a contractor for an international NGO contracted to work with the government. There is no law that prohibits a former government official from working with a private company.”
In a Whatsapp message Werner dismissed the allegations as “entirely fabricated.”
“Although not without flaws, I take great pride in our foresight regarding the collaboration between the private and public sectors to develop human capital for Liberia,” he said.
Bridge’s operations in Liberia as well as Kenya, Uganda and India have been deeply controversial. Independent evaluations and a 2023 FrontPage Africa/New Narratives investigation found that enrolment had dropped in Bridge’s schools, including in River Cess, Grand Bassa County, Lofa County and rural Montserrado, with poor learning environments, a lack of learning materials, desks in classrooms and hanging ceilings due to leakages. The coalition report, which covered the same counties, except for River Cess, found similar problems.
A 2020 report by Center for Global Development, a global think tank, also cited by the coalition, found that children in Bridge schools in Liberia were reading only 2.2 additional words per minute over non-Bridge schools and that dropout rates had increased by more than half, with fewer children moving to secondary schoo. It also found Bridge failed to reduce sexual abuse. This despite Bridge’s vastly higher cost per student.
Bridge had expanded over the years to take control of 350 schools in Liberia or two in every three schools run under the public/private partnership started by the Sirleaf administration in 2016. Local operators had dropped out because of a failure to raise funds.
In its rebuttal of the coalition’s report Bridge pointed to a recent study in Kenya that had shown Bridge schools “had significantly improved learning outcomes for children across the country” and that “students in Bridge-supported schools effectively achieved 5.5 years of schooling in just 3 years.” The report, conducted over two years and including 10,000 students from across Kenya, found “among the largest learning gains ever measured in international education.”
In Liberia, Bridge denied that it had poorly treated and failed to pay teachers, saying the teachers were “government teachers and are directly paid by the government.” While admitting that teachers had left the program, Bridge said a special program with community-based volunteer teachers “to fill classroom gaps” had “increased teacher attendance from 40% to 85%.”
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia program. Funding was provided by the Swedish Embassy in Liberia. The funder had no say in the story’s content.
