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Good practice Imported

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

Sierra Leone · Waterloo · See the Sierra Leone profile · See the Waterloo profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 70% 40/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

MBSSE and Fab Inc built a WhatsApp RAG chatbot giving Sierra Leone's school inspectors (SQAOs) instant access to census data and policy guidance on visits. A 4-week pilot with 5 officers showed strong engagement, and the report also candidly names an assignment-list glitch.

5
SQAOs in pilot
6
Average queries per officer by pilot end
4 weeks
Pilot duration

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
MBSSE & Fab Inc (SSEIP II 'Leh Wi Lan')
Period
2026 (four-week pilot, Western Area Rural)
Keywords
education administration, school supervision, government data systems

Context

Sierra Leone's Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, through the FCDO-funded Secondary Education Improvement Programme II, commissioned Fab Inc to build a WhatsApp-based RAG chatbot for School Quality Assurance Officers.

Activities

The tool gives officers on-demand access to Annual School Census data and MBSSE policy-library guidance during school visits; a four-week pilot with five SQAOs in Western Area Rural district ran weekly focus groups after initial training.

Results

All five officers maintained full attendance and were submitting an average of six queries each by pilot end; officers confirmed retrieved census figures matched their own paper records.

Conclusions

A Week 1 mismatch between two school-to-SQAO assignment lists blocked several officers from seeing their own schools' data, an unresolved dependency on a separate management system; findings feed into a Phase 2 pilot with a wider cohort.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
Fab Inc developers, MBSSE

Conditions for success

  • Resolving SQAO-to-school assignment-list mismatch
  • Continued FCDO funding

Common failure modes

  • Week 1 assignment-list mismatch blocked several officers from seeing their own schools' data

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Data sources

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