-- Related Links -- Education Projects World Bank Experts: Ruth Kagia Elizabeth King "I go to collect water four times a day, in a 20-litre clay jar. It's hard work!... I've never been to school as I have to help my mother with her washing work so we can earn enough money… If I could alter my life, I would really like to go to school and have more clothes." --Elma Kassa, a 13-year old girl from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Excerpted from the World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People)

AT A GLANCE:

Education is universally recognized as one of the most fundamental building blocks for human development and poverty reduction. When given the opportunity to achieve their own goals, people are empowered to contribute fully to the development of their communities, societies, and economies. Education remains one of the most powerful instruments for reducing poverty and inequality and helps lay a foundation for sustained economic growth. For this reason, it is at the center of the World Bank’s mission of poverty reduction.

The Bank helps countries integrate education into national economic strategies and develop holistic and balanced education systems that produce results. The aim is to help countries achieve universal primary education, and quality learning for all while investing in the skills and knowledge necessary for their growth and competitiveness.

The Bank began lending for education in 1963 and today is the world’s largest source of external financing to the developing world for education. For the past five years, the Bank has averaged about US$2 billion per year in loans, credits, and grants to support education (double that of the previous five years). In FY 2009, new lending to education totaled US$3.4 billion—a sharp increase over the previous five fiscal years. Of total education lending, US$1.6 billion was for International Development Association (IDA) credits and/or grants, and US$1.8 billion was for International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) loans. New IDA education lending (and grants) represented 48 percent of total education lending this past fiscal year and was nearly four times that of IDA lending in FY00. Pakistan received the largest amount of IDA funds in FY09, with two new operations, totaling about US$650 million, working to ensure that children in the country’s Punjab and Sindh provinces receive access to quality schooling and the essential resources they need to learn.

Apart from lending activities, the Bank serves as a knowledge bank for data, research findings, and best practices in policy design and implementation. Generating and sharing this knowledge through media, training activities, and technical advice is a key Bank priority. The Bank continues to take a lead role in many countries in terms of education policy advice, sector analysis, and aid coordination. It is a major player in various international education partnerships such as the Education for All Fast Track Initiative (EFA-FTI). The Bank’s particular comparative advantage is promoting education’s links to economic growth.

Summary of Key Issues in Education

With just more than five years remaining until the deadline for reaching the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), substantial progress has been made toward full primary completion and gender equity in keeping with MDG 2. The Bank and other donors have directly contributed by promoting better policies and leveraging more resources for education.

The pace of primary school enrollment and completion has accelerated globally in recent years. According to the latest UNESCO findings, the number of primary school-aged children not able to attend school has fallen by 28 percent during the last nine years from more than 100 million children at the start of the new millennium to an estimated 72 million youngsters today. Globally, primary school completion rates have risen to 87 percent from 82 percent in the year 2000. This success owes much to the international focus on increasing access to and quality of education brought about by the MDGs.

 However, progress toward the education MDGs has been uneven. Where it has taken place, it has been founded on country commitments to internationally established Education for All (EFA) goals and improved policies. The Bank’s Global Monitoring report estimates that three-quarters of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific have met or are on track to meet the MDG of universal primary education completion. In contrast, a majority of countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are not on track to meet the MDG of Universal Primary School Completion by 2015. In 2007, half of the world's out-of-school children lived in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a quarter of them lived in South Asia. Inequities within countries such as income, gender, regional disparities, and ethnicity greatly affect a child’s chances of attending school.

Progress on access and completion rates is insufficient if the education that many children receive is of low quality. Education quality is as important as access to school. Studies show that quality is, in fact, the key determinant of the impact of education on economic growth and is essential to sustaining the gains achieved in education access. More attention by governments and donors is needed to make sure that once in school, all children gain the skills and aptitudes that will allow them to participate successfully in the global economy. Today, both national and international assessments reveal pervasively low education achievement in most developing countries. Improving education quality is a priority for governments and donors in nearly all countries. Yet, many low-income countries lack the capacity to assess what their children are learning and how to monitor progress over time.

A combination of increased primary education completion and globalization is creating increased demand for secondary and tertiary education. Recent estimates show approximately 264 million adolescents of secondary school age are not currently enrolled in school. The need for increased investment in the expansion and quality of secondary and tertiary education cannot be ignored and should not be delayed until primary enrollment has been achieved.

Progress in the education sector may slow down in the coming years as those children currently not in school are often the most difficult to reach, and issues regarding education quality and increased access to post-basic education still require much work and additional donor and local commitment. Increased resources will be even more important in the years to come, and the current economic crisis threatens many of the gains achieved so far.

The Bank promotes the integration of education into national economic strategies and the development of holistic and balanced education systems that focus on learning outcomes. The Bank aims to help countries achieve universal primary education and learning for all while investing in the skills that are essential for national growth and competitiveness. Specifically, the Bank seeks to help countries achieve a number of goals.

World Bank Support for Education

The World Bank promotes the integration of education into national economic strategies and the development of holistic and balanced education systems that focus on learning outcomes.  The Bank aims to help countries achieve universal primary education and learning for all while investing in the skills that are essential for national growth and competitiveness.  Specifically, the Bank seeks to help countries achieve a number of goals.

· Quality Learning For All.  The Bank assists countries in providing quality basic education, which serves as a minimum threshold for poverty reduction and a foundation for further education and training. It aims to help “on track” countries sustain their progress, and jump-start those countries that need to do better. The Bank also supports better measurement of learning, an important tool for helping countries focus on improving the quality of education, and works to provide access to those hardest to reach, such as children living in fragile states, and those marginalized due to poverty, gender, ethnicity, or HIV/AIDS.  

· Skills and Knowledge for Growth and Competitiveness.  The Bank also helps countries provide education that creates a skilled and productive labor force, leading to economic productivity and competitiveness, knowledge generation, and increased earning potential. The Bank helps countries link education policy to labor market outcomes and works with countries to meet a rapidly growing demand for secondary, tertiary, and vocational education as more people require skills with which to compete in a global economy. The Bank supports improving education through the more appropriate and effective use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and helps build science, technology, and innovation capacity to reduce poverty, generate wealth, and enhance competitiveness.  

· Education Systems for Results.  The Bank supports the development of education systems that produce results by examining the relationship between policies, systemic change, and institutional strengthening on the one hand, and educational and labor market outcomes on the other. The Bank works with countries to develop the tools and knowledge to improve learning outcomes through accountability, governance, effective financing, and system-wide reforms. Impact evaluations enable the evaluation of country reforms and help countries better measure the impact of their interventions.

World Bank Support for Education 

Operations.  The Bank continues to be the world’s largest source of external support to the education sector; in several countries the Bank is the only significant source of support. During the past five years, Bank lending for education has remained at a steady US$2 billion per year, about half of that on IDA terms. At the end of FY09, the active Bank education portfolio consisted of 152 operations in 86 countries, amounting to US$8.8 billion in net commitments. In FY09, education lending reached US$ 3.4 billion, an all-time-high. The high volume of lending this past year is due in part to several large operations. The most notable ones are Indonesia’s School Operational Assistance Knowledge Improvement for Transparency and Accountability Project with US$600 million in lending, along with two education projects in Pakistan totaling US$650 million. Additionally, in response to the current economic crisis, there have been increases in multi-sectoral loans and credits that include education components. In FY09, more than 40 percent of education lending was provided through multi-sector investment projects and multi-sector development policy loans.   

Knowledge. In addition to financing and leadership in the sector, Bank lending for education is accompanied by substantial analytical work, knowledge sharing, capacity building, and policy advice. The Bank produced more than 100 knowledge products and analytic work in education this past year, including education sector work, publications, policy notes, research, impact evaluations, and strategy papers. The Bank also produces a number of sector analyses and specializes in analytical work—such as poverty assessments, expenditure reviews, and competitiveness studies—that puts education into a broader context and links it to other sectors (health, HIV/AIDS, governance reform, etc.). Analysis is carried out in close collaboration with countries and development partners, both to build capacity for analysis and to build home-grown ownership for reform.

The Bank’s analytical work has contributed to global knowledge and has helped individual countries design and implement successful reforms in areas including the following.

• Quality of education and learning outcomes. Recent research has helped link the quality of education with economic growth.
• Reaching poor children, especially girls, through demand-side financing. The Bank is helping countries design targeted subsidies to get and keep disadvantaged children in school, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
• Impact evaluation. The Bank provides significant support for rigorous impact evaluations in education to generate stronger evidence about what works under different country conditions.
• School-based management. The Bank has been at the forefront of efforts to bring decision making closer to the service-delivery level in dozens of countries.
• School-to-work transition. The Bank works with countries to help improve the link between education policy and labor market outcomes.
• Reduction of school fees. The Bank’s analytical work and policy dialogue, both in education and on fiscal management, have encouraged governments to reduce or eliminate fees at the primary level—a policy measure that is often key to increasing education access for the poor and for girls.
• Private-public partnerships. Recent work in this area provides an analysis of the evidence base for such initiative and helps guide governments interested in leveraging the capacity of the private sector to improve access, quality, and equity in education.
• Assessment. The Bank provides tools to help countries with measuring student learning outcomes and to use the results to improve the quality of education. To this end, the Bank has published a series on creating and implementing effective national learning assessments.
• Education and the Economic Crisis. The Bank is working to assess the impact of the economic crisis on the education sector and to help countries protect education investments and the most vulnerable.

Partnership with donors.  In addition to its own lending, the Bank is a partner to a number of key education initiatives and programs. The Bank continues to play an important role in the Education for All-Fast Track Initiative (FTI) partnership. FTI’s mandate is to promote coherent education sector strategies, better policies, more effective education spending, and an increased volume of better-aligned and harmonized aid from donors. The Bank hosts the FTI Secretariat and is the trustee for the FTI Catalytic Fund, which totals US$1.54 billion in pledges, and the Education Program Development Fund, which has pledges of more than US$116 million aimed at helping countries with strategy development and capacity building. As of September 2009, 38 countries were fully endorsed by the partnership, 31 of which are receiving Catalytic Fund support for implementation. Overall, a total of 60 countries are receiving support through FTI’s capacity building fund (the Education Program Development Fund).

Resource mobilization is a key priority for FTI, given the need to scale up investments to ensure access for all and, importantly, improvements in education quality. One of the main impacts of the financial crisis seems to be deteriorating education quality. The needs are greater than previously envisioned, and entail more long-term, predictable funding than what is currently committed. The mobilization of funding is for FTI countries that are not able to produce and/or implement a full-fledged Education Sector Plan. Another high priority for FTI is a focus on results, with significant efforts to ensure that Education Sector Plans and FTI Trust-Funded programs identify interventions to support improved learning outcomes, without which the benefits of education will not be realized. Preliminary estimates indicate that primary education funding to low-income countries with endorsed FTI sector plans require at least an additional US$1.2 billion through 2010.

Results focus. The Bank’s Education Sector Strategy Update committed the Bank to improving its results-focus in education. Actions taken to advance this agenda include creating indicators and a database for the education MDGs, maintaining an education statistics database, carrying out impact evaluations, and a renewed focus on the measurement of learning outcomes in most Bank-supported operations.

A critical challenge in most developing countries is to build country capacity for measuring progress on learning outcomes. Although more than 80 percent of Bank-funded projects provide support for improving the quality of education programs, only about half of projects include baselines with which to systematically monitor learning achievement. Building the capacity to undertake educational measurement will be one of the Bank’s top priorities in education in the coming years.

For more information, visit the World Bank Education website: www.worldbank.org/education

Media Contact:

Phil Hay: (202) 473-1796

phay@worldbank.org

Updated September 2009