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Faith-based organizations are major providers of education services, especially in poor areas. Faith leaders have also traditionally been active towards mobilizing a global campaign for education financing. In addition, in education policy as in other areas, policy makers are confronted with a range of choices that can be informed by ethical and distributional analysis. This makes work on achieving universal education important for DDVE. Our work in this area includes the following:
- Role of FBOs in education service delivery. DDVE is preparing country case studies in Latin America and the Caribbean in partnership with the World Bank Institute and the World Bank’s Latin America region in preparation for a workshop with the Fe y Alegria Movement to be held in the fall of 2009. In addition, a number of country cases studies on the role of FBOs in education systems are also prepared in Africa. In Sierra Leone for example more than half of all students going to school benefit from services provided by FBOs, and the DDVE team is using household survey data to assess the comparative performance of various types of education service providers.
- Benefit incidence analysis for public spending for education. Benefit incidence analysis is often used to assess who benefits from public services, but it is often conducted with imperfect data, and therefore with assumptions that can have a large impact on the results obtained. DDVE is working on an analysis of who benefits from public spending for education in Sierra Leone, suggesting that not taking unit costs and needs properly into account can lead to serious bias in results. The unit is also doing comparative work on the performance of public, private non-religious and private religious providers in reaching the poor.
- Gender equity in education. Cultural and religious factors have historically limited access by girls to education. In Bangladesh, World Bank staffs have conducted research on the role of religious organizations in providing education. S ignificant steps to reform the Madrasa (Islamic) school system at the secondary level have included fiscal incentives to orthodox unregistered all-male Madrasas high-schools to register and include modern subjects such as physics and mathematics. Thanks in part to this support, most Madrasa secondary schools are now registered, follow a modern curriculum alongside traditional religious subjects, and they have become coed (50% of the enrollment in Madrasa high-schools are now females). Bank staffs have shown that the impact of financial incentives was significant in transforming Madrasas and promoting female education. Work is also underway to assess the quality of religious education, its effects on labor market participation. Some of the results of World Bank staff work on Madrasas in Bangladesh are available as DDVE working paper 2008-9.
- Affordability of education and impact of education policies. DDVE is analyzing data on the cost of education for households, with a focus on affordability and a comparison of education spending for households with children in public, private non-religious and private religious schools. DDVE is also analyzing the impact of policies to reduce or eliminate school fees. For example, a case study of the impact on school enrollment of the abolition in 2005 of fees for public primary education in Burundi is underway.
- Vulnerable groups - street children. As part of preparatory work towards a potential World Bank operation, DDVE conducted a survey of 600 street children in February 2009 and about 50 organizations (many of which are faith-based) providing services to these children in Kinshasa. The survey was implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Affairs, REJEER (a federation of organizations providing services to street children), and World Bank staff from the Africa region. One of the objectives of this work is to see how to ensure that street children have opportunities to continue their education, or go back to schools. DDVE is also finalizing a study on street children in Ouagadougou and Abidjan based on primary data collection and additional insights from qualitative work. The study also provides a brief overview of the services provided by organizations, many of which are faith-inspired, to these children.
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