Challenges

A recent ECA education strategy paper identified the following five broad challenges for education in the region which translate into five development objectives for ECA's education sector.

• Alignment: Educational quality is contextual; it is not a constant under all conditions. ECA education systems that were a good fit with planned economies and authoritarian political systems do not fit open market economies and open political systems well. 

• Our assistance goal: Realign education systems with market economies and open societies.
  
  
• Fairness: Education is an important mechanism for reducing and preventing poverty. Differences in children's learning opportunities are emerging in ECA at the very point in the region's history when human capital increasingly determines individual and family incomes and the likelihood of transmitting poverty between generations.  Our assistance goal: Combat poverty by raising access and the level of investment in the poorest students.
  
  
• Financing: ECA countries need to realign the financing of their education systems within their fiscal constraints while preserving to the extent possible the fairness and quality of education services. Their failure to rationalize education finance is eroding the achievements of the pre-transition period and undermining the sector's ability to respond to the challenges of a market economy. Our assistance goal: Finance for sustainability, quality, and fairness.
  
  
• Efficiency: Most ECA education systems use funds ineffectually. These inefficiencies are the legacy of centrally planned economies, where allocation decisions were made in physical terms and subsidies were hidden. Our assistance goal: Spend resources more efficiently.
  
  
• Governance, management,and accountability: Most ECA education systems do not perform well against standards of transparent and effective governance, efficient management, and vigorous accountability to a range of stakeholders. The sector is still dominated by government inadequately counterbalanced by competition (choice) and participation (voice). Our assistance goal: Restructure the sector's governance, management, and accountability.