Pierre Varly, Zakaria Benhoumad, Nazi Boumzough
February 7, 2025
Mea culpa: USAID and RTI International changed our lives
In 2013, I, Pierre Varly, wrote a rather critical article about USAID and the 501 NGOs that work in the field of education. At the time I was a consultant mainly for RTI international and I had also founded my small consulting business : Varlyproject in 2010, which was progressing slowly.
When I started my career as an individual consultant in 2009, after UNESCO BREDA, RTI was one of the first to hire me to work on EGRA secondary analyses in Mali and Senegal and to train the national team in Ghana (an article is been drafted on the USAID outcomes there). Needless to say, this helped a lot to make references (the Mali report is cited in the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report) and to launch my business. I learnt a lot from them at this time. As Denzel Washington says :”First, you learn, then you earn and return”.
Subsequently, from 2014, RTI International, with whom we had made the first Moroccan EGRA, contracted us in Morocco as a company to do several studies on reading.
Thanks to USAID and others, reading scores have been improving in Morocco since 2011.
These studies have largely contributed to changing the vision and conversation on the methods of teaching reading in Morocco. Reforms have been carried out, particularly following the publication of the PIRLS and TIMSS results.
In primary schools, the reading scores of Grade 4 students increased from 310 to 372 points between 2011 and 2021. In mathematics, they went from 334 to 383 points in elementary school (2011-2019), according to this paper by the Policy Center for the New South.
USAID has helped recruit, train, and provide opportunities for youth
The contracts we had with RTI also allowed us to recruit young staff and train them. The diverse team of young people: young Moroccan LGBTQ+, African women, young Moroccans on internships (or on well-paid contracts when the means allowed it) and the white old male produced and the work atmosphere was good. Enumerators were also recruited to go into the field, offering them decent contracts and insurance (something that was unusual in Morocco at the time).
Some continue to work with me on data analysis and visualisation tools, such as Zakaria Benhoumad or have successfully pursued a career in educational project management (Naji Boumzough). We remember with amusement the Due Diligence Packages that we had to hand in to get contracts. This helped us to put together administrative and financial files to respond to calls for tenders from other clients and consolidate our management procedures.
Despite a little bit of bureaucracy, RTI International and later USAID as a contractor and subcontractor, trusted the young people. We have successfully conducted studies, workshops, analyses and even pilot projects that had many impacts and not just on reading skills of grade 2 pupils.
At a time when the team of the multi-convicted Trump and the neo-N… Musk are seeking to close USAID and by ricochet the NGOs that implement projects on the ground, we would like to thank RTI International and USAID on behalf of the former Varlyproject team for their impact on our lives and especially those of Moroccan schoolchildren.
