By George Werner (former education minister)
From post-war recovery and Ebola’s devastation to a decisive national investment in Liberia’s human capital
Class, this is for the history books.
Yesterday, as Liberia launched the Excellence in Learning in Liberia (EXCEL) program, I felt something deeper than professional satisfaction. I felt vindication—not of an idea, but of a long and difficult argument many of us have carried for years: that Liberia cannot rebuild itself without deliberately investing—and yes, borrowing—to educate its people.
This moment did not begin yesterday. But yesterday made it unmistakably real.
In 2015, in the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic, I was serving as Minister of Education when we assessed the damage done to Liberia’s schools. They had been closed for nearly six months, one of the longest nationwide school closures globally at the time [UNICEF, 2015; ReliefWeb, 2015].
When schools reopened, many were barely recognizable as places of learning. Buildings were abandoned or occupied by livestock, furniture had disappeared, sanitation systems had collapsed, and some facilities required fumigation before a single child could safely re-enter [World Bank, 2016].
The damage was not only physical. Ebola shattered confidence—among parents fearful for their children, teachers traumatized by loss, and communities unsure whether schools could again be trusted as safe spaces. Many children never returned to school at all, and learning losses—especially in early literacy and numeracy—deepened sharply [UNICEF, 2015; GPE, 2016].
By 2016, the evidence was undeniable. Data from the Population and Housing Census, administrative records, and learning assessments showed that Liberia was facing a structural education emergency, not a temporary disruption [LISGIS, 2016; World Bank Education Sector Analysis, 2017]. The scale of need—school rehabilitation, teacher development, learning materials, and system reform—far exceeded what short-term grants could address.
Contrary to popular belief, Liberia’s education reform journey since the war has followed a discernible policy thread, even when progress was uneven. In the immediate post-conflict years (2006–2010), government policy rightly focused on restoring access—reopening schools, rebuilding basic infrastructure, and re-enrolling children displaced by war [Ministry of Education Sector Plan, 2007; World Bank Education Reconstruction Support, 2008].
The subsequent phase (2011–2014) shifted toward system rebuilding, including curriculum reform, teacher payroll cleanup, and early engagement with learning assessments, signaling the first move from access to quality [MoE Education Sector Plan II; USAID/RTI EGRA Liberia reports].
Ebola did not erase this reform logic; it exposed its fragility. Post-Ebola recovery strategies explicitly linked school reopening with learning recovery, psychosocial support, and renewed attention to foundational skills [UNICEF & MoE Ebola Education Recovery Framework, 2015].
Anchoring this reform journey was a critical but often overlooked milestone: the Education Act of 2011. Passed a decade after the civil war, the Act provided Liberia with its first comprehensive post-conflict legal framework for education governance, standards, and accountability.
It clarified the state’s responsibility for education, defined the roles of the Ministry of Education and non-state providers, and affirmed education as a public good requiring deliberate regulation, financing, and oversight [Education Act of Liberia, 2011].
Later reforms—including Liberia’s return to WASSCE and the reinstatement of national learning assessments—were therefore not policy improvisations, but legal obligations finally being acted upon.
What remained missing for many years was not authority, but financing.
It was in the post-Ebola recovery window that the Getting to Best strategy emerged—not as a break from earlier policy, but as a consolidation of it. Getting to Best marked a deliberate pivot away from celebrating enrollment alone toward demanding learning outcomes. It forced a hard reckoning: too many Liberian children were in school but not learning.
Crucially, the strategy restored measurement and accountability. Liberia re-engaged with regional benchmarks, returned fully to the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) framework, and reinstated national learning assessments at Grades 3, 6, and 9, including the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and the Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA).
These steps re-anchored policy in evidence, restored system credibility, and allowed decisions to be guided by data rather than anecdote.
Early grade mathematics, long neglected, finally received the attention it deserved. EGMA exposed persistent weaknesses in number sense, basic operations, and mathematical reasoning—deficits that, if left unaddressed, cascade into poor performance in science, technology, and vocational pathways [World Bank, 2018; UNESCO, 2021].
But Getting to Best also confronted an uncomfortable truth: system reform requires system financing.
Liberia’s post-war development model had normalized borrowing for roads, bridges, ports, and power—the visible architecture of recovery. Education, however, remained largely dependent on grants and donor cycles. Human capital sat outside the country’s borrowing logic, even as it was repeatedly described as a national priority.
As Minister of Education, we challenged that separation—armed with evidence. Using enrollment projections, demographic trends, unit-cost analysis, and learning data from EGRA and EGMA, we made the case to the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning that Liberia could not meet its education obligations without borrowing. Education was not consumption; it was productive infrastructure.
To its credit, the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning listened. Working with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the fiscal framework began to evolve, and discussions advanced around leveraging concessional IDA financing for education reform. Much of that groundwork was ready—but political transition intervened before it could be completed.
Which is why yesterday mattered.
President Joseph Nyuma Boakai, together with the current leadership of the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, deserves credit for completing a journey years in the making. At the EXCEL launch, President Boakai said, “This is not just a project; it is a declaration of our commitment to the children of Liberia.” That statement reflects an understanding that education reform is not episodic or symbolic—it is a matter of state responsibility [Executive Mansion Press Release, 2025].
The US$88.7 million EXCEL program, financed through World Bank IDA credit and Global Partnership for Education grants, is the financing expression of Getting to Best. Its focus on foundational literacy and numeracy, teacher coaching, structured pedagogy, school leadership, and system accountability follows a straight line from the diagnosis reached a decade ago [World Bank, 2025].
EXCEL does not stand alone. Alongside it, the Mastercard Foundation’s investments in secondary education through the Leaders in Teaching (LIT) initiative address a long-recognized but under-financed gap: the quality of teaching and learning in secondary schools. EXCEL fixes early-grade failures that derail children before they gain momentum. LIT strengthens teaching quality, school leadership, and learning outcomes for adolescents—particularly those at risk of dropping out or leaving school without usable skills.
Together, EXCEL and LIT create something Liberia has long lacked: vertical coherence across the education pipeline—from early literacy and numeracy to adolescent learning and readiness for work or further study.
This strategic maturity was evident earlier at the launch of the LIT program, where the Minister of Education deliberately invited the Chairs of Education of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, signaling an understanding that reforms of this magnitude require early legislative ownership and cross-branch alignment if they are to endure.
What must be stated clearly—and recorded honestly—is that this moment did not happen by accident. The leadership of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning deserves real credit for shepherding this decision from analysis to action.
Education reform at this scale requires technical clarity, fiscal discipline, political patience, and the ability to align partners, legislators, and development institutions around a shared national logic. Both ministries demonstrated that capacity, reconciling reform ambition with debt sustainability and anchoring EXCEL within a credible financing framework.
What gives this moment additional weight is the strength of the current leadership team in the Ministry of Education. The team in place understands both the technical demands of reform and the political discipline required to sustain it. They have aligned partners, navigated complex negotiations, and anchored EXCEL and LIT within a coherent national framework. These are demanding initiatives—and the leadership charged with implementing them is more than up to the task.
Equally important, Liberia’s decision to borrow for education has changed what is now possible. By breaking with long-standing reluctance to finance human capital through concessional borrowing, the country has opened the door to additional, sequenced investments across the education system. EXCEL and LIT will not be the last reforms—only the first beneficiaries of a new policy reality in which education is treated as national infrastructure.
Liberia’s post-war years were about reconnecting territory. The post-Ebola years were about survival. This moment—if we protect it—can be about building national capability, from early literacy and numeracy through secondary education and into productive adulthood.
In choosing to borrow for education, with the coordinated leadership of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, the clear backing of the President, legislative alignment, and complementary investments from partners like the Mastercard Foundation, Liberia has taken a step that history is likely to remember—not for the size of the financing, but for the maturity of the choice. And for the first time in a long time, the country is structurally prepared for what comes next.
