EVENT DRIVEN PROGRAMMING GROUP PROJECT

ABSTRACT

The Government of Sierra Leone and its development partners, particularly those partners that
are focused on helping us improve on the standard of our education, decided that in order for
the country to realize the full benefit of the resources that are being directed toward our
education system, particularly in the area of improving the conditions of our Teaching force, we
need to know the exact number of Teachers we have in the country. As a result, the Public
Sector Reform Unit (PSRU), in the office of the President, contracted a private firm to conduct a
nation-wide registration exercise on all Teachers to ascertain the exact number that the
government would be catering for.

At the conclusion of our findings in this project, we realized that , the ministry Basic Education
lacks, comprehensive data for their entire teaching staffs in the country. In this report, among
other things, it was stated that 7,761 Teachers that are currently on government payroll could
not be verified(ghost Teachers). This represented 22% of our total Teaching force. The firm
however maintained that the Teachers may have been legitimately employed but at the time of
this registration exercise they either did not make themselves available or failed to submit
relevant documentation that could prove that they were genuinely hired as Teachers.

BACKGROUND

In July 2016 the then Minister of Education, Science and Technology promised to end the issue
of ‘ghost teachers’, after several years of battling to clear the payroll.

It could be recalled that the Ministry has over the years received lots of criticisms for its
‘negligence’ to include names of teachers, who have taught for many years, into the
government payroll. The Ministry on the other hand has claimed that they have been busy
weeding out ‘ghost teachers’.
Presenting the Ministry’s position in the President’s Recovery Priorities recently at Family
Kingdom, Director of the Inspectorate Directorate, Mohamed Sillah Sesay, said there were still
many ghost teachers on the payroll.

He said the Ministry needed the sum of one million United States Dollars ($1m) to clear the
payroll, but disclosed that they have already secured 20 percent of that fund.

“We hope to clear the payroll and end this ‘ghost teacher’ issue by July 2016. By August to
November this year, we hope to approve teachers’ allocation strategy. By April to June 2017,
we hope to have completed the teachers’ re-allocation into the payroll,” said by the then
minister.

TABLE OF CONTENT

INTRODUCTION

Sierra Leone's Ministry of Education has deleted the names over 1,000 non-existing teachers
from the payroll after discovering schools were claiming salaries and benefits for those teachers
will be taken off the payroll, freeing up much needed funding for education projects. There are
over 30,000 teachers on the government payroll, but a report released by the Sierra Leone's
teachers' union says up to 2,000 teachers have not received salaries for the past two year.

The Education Ministry says they have retrieved over $195,000 from corrupt schools in 2018.
With fewer "ghost" teachers on the payroll, the government hopes to get real teachers paid and
improve the quality of education in Sierra Leone's schools.

The above analysis is an indication that proper record management is key in the success of the
government flagship program in education. Therefore our project focused on developing a
system that will be able to keep track all teachers as teacher are the backbone of our
country’s education. Teacher performance plays a major role in deciding the success
of the education system in the country.

*The project is situated in solving teacher’s long standing issues. The current
system running in the country is paper based. That is the ministry is still using
cabinet files to store records of teachers and managing information. Useful data is
scattered all over the place. In this project we will discuss the solutions to the
problems being caused by the current system. We shall try to understand the
ministry’s expectations of the new system we are to develop for them.*

LITERATURE REVIEW

The mandate of the Ministry of Basic Education includes regulating,

Legislating, monitoring, coordinating and providing adequate resources with an enabling
Environment, to ensuring effective and quality performance, higher standards, transparency
and accountability among teachers and members within the teaching profession, developing AN
computer system to tracki ghost teachers teachers because we found out that the current
system is paper based. Curricula and running schools. By virtue of these functions, the ministry
becomes both a regulatory, monitoring, evaluating and coordinating body for standards in the
teaching profession and the means whereby the merits and demerits of the conduct of teachers
and members of the teaching profession are made known and addressed through dialogue and
collaboration of all stakeholders in the governance of the school. It also defines the parameters
of unethical conduct of teachers and education personnel and allows opportunities for change
of attitudes through correction and consequence in accordance with the Collective Agreement
and the existing laws of the land.
In this group project, we discuss the research design, area of study, population, sample of the
population, sampling technique, and instrument for data collection, validation of the
Questionnaire, administration of the instrument and method of data analysis.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

As a group we chose a questionnaire research design because it best served to answer the
questions and the purposes of the study.

The project research is one in which a group of people from the Inspectorate Office and the
Ministry of Basic Education in the Republic of Sierra Leone are studied by Collecting and
analyzing data from only a few top administrators considered to be Representative of the entire
education system in the country. In other words, only a part of the population is studied, and
findings from this sample population to be used to solve the problem of Ghost Teachers in the
country. We Defines the project by assessing public opinion or individual characteristics by
the use of questionnaire and sampling methods.

DATA ANALYSIS

The target population for this research defined to include the inspectorate office and Ministry of
Ministry of Basic Education

In this group project, the accessible population comprised all the administrators from ministry of
basic education and the inspectorate office are targeted because the institution that are directly
responsible of teachers affairs in the country.

the table below shows the percentage of people opinion on whether or not to use
automated system

NO INSTITUTION NO PARTICIPANT YES NO

01 Ministry of basic Education 50 48 2

02 Inspectorate office 50 47 3

03 Establishment 50 45 5
office

CHALLENGES

In this group project, the options, perceptions and attitudes of teachers and educators of the
Republic of Sierra Leone were sought on ghost teachers in the field of education

1. The time frame of the entire project duration is short.

2. Our goal is to stops the existence of ghost teacher issue in the education system. In
such quest for data, the ministry cannot really tell the exact numbers of teachers in the
country and even the method used to collect their data was not quite clear.
 3. To get access to our target population was also a difficult challenge, as office protocols
are use to unnecessarily prevent us from reaching the right people on time.
4. Transportation is another area where we encounter some challenges and it is not limited
to fear only but also the way leading to the Ministry and the Inspectorate Office is
currently on construction so we basically spent hours in and out to do our findings
5. group coordination is also a challenge , bring every member of the group to time is
sometimes challenging.
6. A team is as good as its team members. But most of the times, the team members are
assigned on other tasks in other projects. If team members are not committed enough
to meet deadlines, the challenges and the overall performance of the group can put the
development of the project in a risky spot.

LEASSON LANT

1. It is obvious that based on our challenges faced, we end of learning a lot from this
project, the unique thing that we benefited is collaboration, if we are recording success
in this project is because we effectively try as much as possible to manage our
differences and focus on one goal that to see the project succeed.
2. Secondly, proper time management without effective time management succeeding
would have been a challenge but in spite of all other challenges with other project to be
submitted with the same deadline we are able to set a unique time management
strategy to making sure that all other areas are covered completely
3. Moreover, team spirit is another lesion that actually worth mentioning, as a group we
realize that the only way out is to put all our focus in the success of our project
4. Finally, we learned that the way valuable data is captured in the country is never proper.
According to the minister of basic Education “teachers are the backbone of our free
education agenda” so if the teachers are actually the backbone of the education system
in the country then they are very important sector of our country population, the proper
documentation of such population is absolutely necessary.

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATION/CONCLUTION.

In this group project, our proposed approach and findings are recommendations for achieving
justifiable confidence in tracking Ghost Teachers software systems, by Following proven
principles for combating ghost teachers. The group proposed approach includes adherence to
the following principles:

1. Cloud storage is a very flexible paradigm for storing and retrieving data. It
means many things to many people. For some it means being able to set up a new
start-up system knowing that initial resources will be inexpensive but a sudden increase
in demand from government will not make the institution a victim of its own success, as
has happened in some cases in the past where servers have been unable to cope with
demand, and the institution/company loses data, reputation, trust, clients etc, as they
become unhappy with limited capacity, poor response times, etc. once a cloud storage
is provided it will prevent the ministry from losing valuable data in future.
2. Make the most of effective software development technologies and formal
methods. A variety of modern technologies in particular, safe programming languages,
static analysis, and formal methods are likely to reduce the cost and difficulty of
producing highly secured system to solve ghost Teachers problems. Elementary best
practices, such as source code control and systematic defect tracking (exception
handling), should be generally adopted, and school that fail to use them should not be
regarded as government or government assisted school. Furthermore, they require a
new mindset because collecting salary that you actually did not work for is a big crime
against the state and God and may demand staff with greater expertise, especially in
the early stages of implementation of the system. Nevertheless, key elements of formal
techniques will aid in the cost-effective development of dependability issue and could be
widely applied, especially in combination with the incrementality and minimality
encouraged in some development approaches.
3. Follow proven principles for combating ghost teachers. The group proposed
approach also includes adherence to the following principles:
4. Take a systems perspective. In developing a system like this, systems perspective
should be adopted in which the dependability of system is viewed not in terms of
inherent properties (such as the incidence of bugs in the code) but in terms of the
system as a whole, including interactions among people, process, and technology and
encompassing both the physical and institutional environment of the system. Our
 development of the system is driven by a consideration of risks and their mitigation, and
well-established risk analysis and reduction techniques that are applied in other system
(such as hazard analysis) should be routinely applied to software. Different levels of
assurance will be appropriate for different systems and for dependability properties
within the system.
5. Demand more transparency, so that teacher and administrator can make
more informed judgments about system. Administrators and teacher can make
informed judgments when talking to stakeholders like government and development
partners and Suppliers only if the claims, criteria, and evidence for dependability are
transparent. The willingness of a supplier to provide data beyond the dependability case
proper (about the qualifications of personnel, its track record in providing dependable
software, and the process it used) and the clarity and integrity of the data that it
provides will be a strong indicator of its attitude toward dependability. If only we can
implement this recommendations, the ministry will be free from ghost teacher issue
forever
6. This concept of having a java application to manage data for our country’s teaching
profession will have a profound effect on the Country’s Education strive and other areas
where it can be extended to manage our countries valuable data. As mentioned earlier,
this system has the capability of restoring the cabinet file system the ministry used to
have to a computerize system that can even be stored in a cloud storage somewhere,
which will actually make our data more safe and secure.
REFERENCE

1. Don Box, David Ehnebuske, Gopal Kakivaya, Andrew Layman, Noah Mendelsohn, Henrik
Frystyk Nielsen, Satish Thatte, and Dave Winer. Simple object access protocol (soap)
1.1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/ (visited 2008-01-09).
2. Guillermo A. Callahan. Suitability of Extreme Programming and RUP Software
Development Methodologies for SOA Applications. Technical report, Helsinki University
of Technology, 2007.
3. Marc Chanliau. Web services security: What’s required to secure a service-oriented
architecture, oct 2006. Also available as http://library.govtech.net/detail/
RES/1186078498 734.html