SQAO AI Support Tool — WhatsApp RAG Assistant for Sierra Leone's School Quality Assurance Officers

Sierra Leone's Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE), through the FCDO-funded Secondary Education Improvement Programme II ('Leh Wi Lan'), commissioned implementing partner Fab Inc to build a WhatsApp-based, retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) chatbot for School Quality Assurance Officers (SQAOs) — the field inspectors who visit schools to review teaching and management.

The tool gives officers on-demand access to Annual School Census data (enrolment, facilities, teacher counts) and retrieves guidance from MBSSE's policy library, so officers can ground recommendations in national standards during visits rather than relying on memory or paper records.

A four-week user-feedback pilot with five SQAOs (three men, two women) in Western Area Rural district ran weekly two-hour focus groups after an initial four-hour training. All five officers maintained full attendance and, by the end of the pilot, were submitting an average of six queries each. Officers confirmed retrieved census figures matched their own paper records and used the chatbot's policy-grounded advice on topics ranging from school management to gender-based-violence protocols.

The pilot also surfaced a genuine limitation: a Week 1 mismatch between two different school-to-SQAO assignment lists blocked several officers from seeing their own schools' data until developers temporarily widened access. The report treats this as an unresolved dependency on a separate SQAO management system rather than glossing over it. Findings are feeding into a Phase 2 pilot with a wider officer cohort, with national scale-up contingent on that phase's results.

Read the full analysis: https://mbsseknowledgeplatform.gov.sl/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Report-on-SQAO-AI-tool.pdf