Thank you all for coming today. My name is natt malcus, an Education Research fellow here at the American Enterprise ens tut. I would like to thank everyone joining us here today, also those who are joining on live stream and for our friends watching on cspan. Our event today, Charter Schools in the developing world with a keynote from Liberian Education minister george k. Werner. We have a simple program. After a few introductory remarks, we will have a brief video. A picture is worth 1,000 words, so we will give you a come of minutes of those, to root todays conversation about schools in liberia. Then we will turn it over to minister werner who will give his keynote address. Following that we have a fantastic panel today with seth andrew from democracy builders, amy black from results from development, and alejandro ka brar owe from the International Finance corporation. I will introduce them in detail when the panel joins me up here. We will have about 45 minutes of q a time with some opportunity for the audience to join as well. For those following on social media, we have a hashtag for our eye vent. It is developingworldcharters. You can comment and also send questions, which i will be checking on during the q a time. The event, again, is being live streamed and the full video will be posted online after we conclude todays event. Of course, were here today to hear from minister werner about liberias bold approach for school reform. But first, i want to give a little bit of context for those who dont already have it. Liberia is a west africa nation, founded by freed slaves from the United States, primarily in the 1800s. Over the past decade, liberia has seen some no small tumult. The 1980s saw multiple coup detas and sort of a cycle of violence and unrest that culminated in 1989 in first of two civil wars that lasted for 14 years with hundreds of thousands of casualties and more than 1. 3 million liberians displaced. The country stabilized in 2003 to some degree, and further in 2006 with the election of president Ellen Johnson surleaf, former World Bank Economist and eventual Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Under the president , liberia continued to stabilize to build Democratic Institutions, difficult work after years of war and political instability. In 2014 the ebola out brabreak killing thousands of liberians, and of course a difficult emergency and destabilizing event for the country, which has come out trying to build Economic Growth and Democratic Institutions since then, combatting poverty and strengthening and Education System that was shuttered for the better part of a year. On many Educational Measures liberia lag behind its other african peer countries with low levels of Primary School attendance and completion, low literacy. An illustrative statistic, in 2013 nearly 25,000 students took the university of liberia Entrance Exam and no one passed. This led the president to call the Education System a mess generally and she charged Education MinisterGeorge Werner, here today with us, to chart a new course for Liberian Education. Mr. Werner has taken up the challenge, and in 2016 he announced a bold plan, the Partnership Schools for Liberia Program in which Independent School operators would run 93 Primary Schools that were partially funded by the government. The program, as most ambitious reforms do, has drawn criticism and praise alike, detractors, fearing the consequences of Public School privatization, and supporters cite the need for change in a Failing School system. 28,000 Liberian School children attended 93 psl schools those are Partnership School for Liberian Schools, run by eight liberian and international providers. These educational reforms come at a time of Major Political change. In october liberia will elect a new legislature and president in the first democratic transfer of power since 1944. This will be a test of liberias young Democratic Institutions, and with a new administration on the horizon and bold reforms underway, liberia and its School Reforms face both great change and great opportunity. Now, a picture is as good as 1,000 words, so before we bring up minister werner to the podium we have a brief video to give you a sense of the schools in liberia and the context for psl reforms. All right. I hope that short video gives you some view on Liberian Schools, and now i would like to invite Education MinisterGeorge Werner to come up and give his keynote. He has previously taught at the high school and college levels. He was the director general and head of Liberian Civil Service from 20132015. He currently chairs liberias Health Workforce task force and of course is minister of education. Join me in welcoming minister werner. [ applause ] thank you, nat, for the kind introduction. Thank you to aei for welcoming us here. I am here today to discuss liberias experience with Public Private partnerships in education. First, let me say that i am honored to be here on behalf of the liberian government and our president Ellen Johnson surlief. As most of you know, president surlief became the first democratically elected female president in 2005. That election was also another first for liberia. It was the first president ial election since the brutal rule of Charles Taylor and the devastating conflict that c cripple our country and took more than 200,000 lives. President surlief will be leaving office in january of next year, having served two terms. Her departure from office, respecting constitutional term limits, marks another important milestone that should not be overlooked. It will be the first peaceful transfer of power in my country since 1944 and will consolidate our post war democracy. As the president ial campaigns gather pace in advance of the elections in just a few months time i am struck by just how far we have come. When you pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio in liberia you will see and hear evidence of spirited political debate, a vibrant press and an engaged civil society. This is an achievement we should not take for granted, though i must say occasionally i remind myself that when i am one of the last one in the line of fire of criticism. Beyond our democratic achievements over the past decade, liberia has emerged as a postconflict success story. Innovations in Public Private partnerships have been introduced, skilled and are creating new platforms for collaboration in health care, human and Institutional Capacity building, fill philanthropy, infrastructure and education. We owe a debt of gratitude to the United States for serving as a partner along the journey. Through both democratic and republican administrations, through war and through peace, and most recently through the fight through ebola, the United States has been an essential partner. I want to thank the American People for your steadfast support. I want to thank all who contributed to ending ebola in my country. I know i speak on behalf of not only the liberian government but also the liberian people when i say that we look forward to continuing our Partnership Long into the future. When you look at the democratic trends not just in liberia but across the continent of africa, it becomes clear why International Partnership and collaborations are more important than ever before. Today there are 420 million africans between the ages of 15 and 35. That number is expected to nearly double to over 830 million by 2050. This youth bulge can either be a Demographic Dividend with a potential to transform our economies, or it can be a ticking time bomb which depends on one thing, education. 10 to 12 million African Youth currently enter the workforce every year, many without the literacy or numerals skill they need to succeed in finding meaningful employment. Our Education Systems are failing to prepare our children for the jobs of yesterday let alone the jobs of tomorrow. Too many of our young people faced with a hopeless future at home are fleeing the continent and are risking their lives to find opportunities abroad. At the same time countries across the country are facing increased demand and pressure not only on their Education System but also health care and social services. Budgets are stretched to the breaking point. In this context African Leaders need to think outside the box and find innovative solutions. In liberia this is exactly what we have done. We are educating the first generation of liberian children who have not known war or conflict. They are too young to have experienced the days when children rather than going to school were recruited as soldiers in the bloody conflict that tore our country apart. We hold the dreams and aspirations of this new generation in our hands. It is our responsibility to ensure that they have opportunity to succeed. That responsibility was front and center in my mind when i was appointed Education Minister by president surlief in june of 2015 and it is still what drives me every day. When i took the helm at the ministry of education i already understood some of the challenges that i would face. I knew that our Education System was failing to educate, that 35 of our young women and 21 of our young men could not read a single sentence. I knew about the gender gap, and that only 39 of women across liberia completed Primary School, and i knew about the inequality in Education Access in our rural areas with only 26 of women and 58 of men were illiterate. I read all of the studies and knew all of the staff, and as a former teacher myself i had seen it firsthand. But when i began traveling across the country visiting schools, speaking to teachers, parents and children, it became clearer that both reforms were urgently needed. Maintaining the status quo was not simply an option. We absolutely could not risk failing this or any future generation of liberian children. So we embraced the opportunity to implement bold reforms and truly transform our Education System. We launched a threeyear plan that includes increasing professionalization of teachers and principals across the country and conducting rigorous monetary and evaluation to ensure we stay on track to reach our goals. We have undertaken an aggressive project to identify and remove ghost workers from the teacher payroll. To date we have removed nearly 2,000 ghost workers which have led to 2. 5 million u. S. Dollars in annual savings that can be reinvested in education. We also launched an innovative Public Private partnership that is testing new models for improving liberias Public Schools. That program, Partnership Schools for liberia or psl for short, is what im here to discuss today. As i mentioned earlier, psl has an important distinction from Charter School from the Charter School model that you have here in the United States. All the schools in the program remain within the Public School system and employ teachers on the government payroll. They also do not admit students selectively, not based on socioeconomic status or on academic performance. Through the psl program we partnered with eight education providers, some local, some international, some nonprofit, some for profit, each with a different model but all with proven experience in delivering quality education and improving literacy and numeral outcome. Those are Bridge International academies, which im sure we will speak more of during the discussion. I have seen the operations in kenya firsthand and in uganda and was impressed by the learning outcomes they were able to agree, and they partners with the government of liberia to do the same. A nonprofit which was already running an academy in monrovia, the capital of liberia, providing both education and Services Like health care, Psychosocial Support and a feeding program for vulnerable girls. Free child, another not for profit provider which also operates in sierra leone and nigeria and has the focus not only on providing education but also training and supporting communities to manage and hold their schools to account. Rising academy, which also operating a network of schools in sierra leone and has a whole child approach to education. Rack, an ngo founded in bangladesh that has experience working across africa. Ominga, which runs a network of schools in nearby ghana. Last but not least, the Liberia Youth Network or fourchette for short, fynet. In the first year of psl which just concluded, this eight providers operate d as we heard earlier 93 schools across liberia providing free quality education to around 27,000 children. Following the first year we have seen some encouraging initial results. According to the baseline data we have seen both increase in enrollment and beneficial impact on teacher behavior, including reduced absenteeism and greater time teaching. Teacher attendance rates are above 90 on average across all psl schools and are as high as 98 in the case of one provider. Teachers are also 9 less likely to be up task or outside the classroom at psl schools. These may seem like small things that should be taken for granted, but necessary are they achievement in the context such as liberia. To date the program has also delivered muchneeded resources including desks, chairs, infrastructure, lending material, a teacher for every classroom and expanded teacher training opportunities. They have also generated a new appreciation for longer school days, all without charging any fees. Just this week four of the eight providers in our psl Program Released their own midline reports, assessing their efforts during the first year of the program and highlighting key successes in improving learning outcomes. It is deeply encouraging to see not only their commitment to measurement and evaluation, but also their positive impact on crucial areas including literacy and numeracy. Teacher training and engagement of parents, communities and teachers learning. Rigorous independent measurement and evaluation has been bit into the program from an early stage. We are currently awaiting results of an independent assessment being carried out by the center for Global Development in partnership with innovations for poverty action. While we await those results we will move into yet two with the increase in the number of psl schools from 93 to 200, about 70 of liberias Public Schools. In the coming year we will prioritizing reaching remote regions such as the southeast of liberia which has socioeconomic conditions that make its needs particularly acute. Psl is an innovation that has the potential to accelerate the providing quality education and ultimately make it accessible to all liberian students in a way it has never been before, but in program is strictly evidencebased. So we will not move forward with any largescale expansion until we have received the completed independent assessment and can judge the impact on psls on the student and the school system. As we assess what the future of psl will look like, what remains clear is that bold action is needed if were going to properly educate and prepare our children for the future. A study conducted by the Brookings Institution where i was before i came here estimates that there is a 100year gap between the developing world and the developed world when it comes to academic achievement. 100 years. If were going to leap frog that divide, innovation isnt an option, it is a necessity. If the results are as compelling as we think they will be, psl could serve as a model for high quality, low cost education that can be scaled not only in liberia or even in africa but in other countries around the world that are recovering from conflict and crisis. We look forward to harnessing opportunities like today to share our story with colleagues and partners across