Improving the quality of schools and the achievement of students remains a priority throughout the world, not least in the developing countries. To monitor quality, national authorities rely strongly on the school supervision system. But that system has not always been able to play that role, plagued as it is by a lack of resources, an inefficient structure and an ambiguity about its main functions. Much of our knowledge about the challenges facing supervision services and individual supervisors is based on anecdotal evidence and the somewhat repetitive complaints of supervisors themselves and of school staff. This publication intends to make up for this lack of data by examining the situation of four countries in the Eastern- and Southern-African region: Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
