Education is a priority for any country seeking broad-based economic growth and poverty reduction. Support for primary education in particular has been one of the highest priorities of the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s fund for the world’s poorest countries, over the past decade. Thanks to success in raising primary school completion rates, country demand for assistance in expanding secondary and higher education is now growing, and may absorb a higher share of IDA resources in coming years.
IDA is the largest source of education assistance for low-income countries, with over US$8 billion in support channeled to 71 countries over the past decade alone. About US$5 billion of this has been for primary education, with the key goal of helping countries achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary completion by 2015. Much remains to be done, but low-income countries have achieved clear results in primary education over the past decade, and IDA has played a role.
At a glance
The share of children completing primary school has risen to 79 percent in 2005 from 69 percent in 1995.
65 million additional children have gained the chance to attend and complete primary school in IDA countries, one of the largest schooling expansions in history.
Over 37 million of the newly-enrolled children are girls, shrinking the gap in girls’ access to 88 percent of boys’ enrollments in 2005 from 80 percent in 1995.
The Education-For-All (EFA) Fast Track Initiative, founded in 2002 with IDA leadership, is providing an essential framework for harmonized donor support, more effective country policies, and faster progress on MDGs.
Education governance has improved in many countries, with increased funds devolved directly to schools and increased voice for parents in school management, to promote accountability.
A growing number of countries are participating in international and national assessments to benchmark student learning and track progress.
SECTORAL CONTEXT
The pace of primary enrollment and completion progress in IDA countries has accelerated, especially over the past five years. IDA and other donors have directly contributed, but progress is founded on country commitment to Education for All goals and improved policies.
Progress on getting children into school—and making sure they complete primary school—has been notable in many countries.
Measurable results.
Table 1 shows the top 10 IDA countries in terms of increases in absolute enrollment numbers. Between 2000 and 2004, India’s primary schools absorbed almost 23 million more pupils.
Many of these countries have achieved increases in primary completion in recent years that exceed anything achieved in OECD countries at similar points in their history (Table 2).
Table 1: Primary School Enrollments (‘000s)
Country
1991
2000
2005
1
India
99,118
113,613
136,194 (2004)
2
Afghanistan
628
749
4,319
3
Nigeria
13,777
18,802
22,267
4
Pakistan
N/A
13,987
17,258
5
Tanzania
3,512
4,382
7,541
6
Ethiopia
2,466
4,874
8,019
7
Mozambique
1,217
2,544
3,943
8
Madagascar
1,571
2,208
3,598
9
Indonesia
29,754
28,202
29,142 (2004)
10
Kenya
5,456
5,035
6,076
Table 2: Percentage of Children Completing Primary School
Country
1991
2000
2005
1
Mozambique
27.1
16.2
42
2
Cambodia
N/A
46.6
92.3
3
Benin
18.4
34.9
65
4
Rwanda
45.3
22.4
39
5
Niger
15.2
16.8
28.1
6
Guinea
18.7
33.3
54.5
7
Madagascar
34.9
35.6
57.7
8
Sao Tome & Pr.
N/A
44.3
77.2
9
Ethiopia
25.5
36.7
55
10
Senegal
41.7
36
52.2
Progress toward getting more children into school and completing primary education has also meant significant progress toward gender balance in all cases. These results reflect the impressive extent to which IDA countries have made Education for All their national priority. But they also reflect the sustained financial and technical support which IDA and other donors have provided.
Yet many challenges remain.
Although the estimated number of primary school-aged children out of school has been reduced to 77 million today from 100 million in 2000, the question of universal access is far from resolved.
Given the very low educational base that many countries started from, only 25 of 81 IDA-eligible countries in 2006 had achieved or were on track to achieve universal primary completion (MDG #2) by 2015.
Twenty-eight countries were considered off-track, 16 others were seriously off-track, and 12 countries had inadequate data, but were also likely off-track.
While there is very limited evidence on learning levels that can be directly compared across low-income countries, the evidence also points to serious problems of schooling quality and student learning.
The challenge for IDA and other donors over the next decade is to bring at-risk countries closer to achieving the education MDG and at the same time help these and other countries raise the quality and economic benefits from schooling.
New research suggests economic benefits flow almost entirely from increasing cognitive skills and not from merely increasing the average years—or quantity—of schooling attained.
There are additional challenges at the secondary and tertiary levels: an estimated 264 million adolescents of secondary school age are also not currently enrolled, and both general and technical/vocational education systems suffer from low quality and weak relevance to the labor market.
Higher education systems are generally too small to meet the needs of growing economies, and marked by low academic quality, inequitable financing sources, and inefficient student flows
IDA CONTRIBUTIONS
IDA funding for education has averaged about US$775 million per year since 1995 (equal to 8 percent of total IDA commitments).
About 44 percent of IDA lending in this sector has been for primary education and 24 percent has supported sector-wide reforms. Disbursements have averaged about US$570 million a year. The Africa and South Asia regions have each represented about 38 percent of IDA education lending since 1995—about US$3 billion apiece.
A move towards policy lending.
The majority of IDA education projects provide funding for inputs such as classroom construction, teacher training, textbooks, curriculum and testing. But support for policy and institutional reforms—often provided through advisory services and development policy lending—is just as important for long-term development; and much of this support is aimed at linking education to broader country-wide poverty reductions strategies.
Over the past five years there has been a sharp upward trend in development policy lending (DPL) for education. The most effective DPLs complement investment lending by financing recurrent teacher costs and allowing countries to eliminate school fees, which have been binding constraints in many IDA countries to scaling up service delivery and schooling access for girls and poor children.
Prior to the mid-1990s, IDA and other donors supported education in low-income countries with uneven results. However, over the past 10 years, progress in terms of improving access to school in low income countries has been comparatively rapid and well measured.
Several factors account for the recent expansion in school access.
Substantial, predictable and sustained support.
It takes time to lay the ground for education results. Much of the accelerated progress of the past five years can be traced to the previous decade of sustained IDA support for training teachers, updating curricula, building schools, delivering textbooks and improving education governance and management.
In most low-income countries, IDA is the largest source of external support and in several, IDA is the only significant source.
A systemic, multi-sectoral approach.
Because of its grasp of macroeconomic issues in client countries, IDA can help countries develop coherent education sector plans that are nested in a broader national strategy for poverty reduction and economic development.
This has played a crucial role in helping IDA countries generate stable and sustainable increases in domestic financing for education. Many countries are now adopting comprehensive or sector-wide approaches to scaling up their progress. These strategies entail a mix of supply- and demand-side efforts to expand access by eliminating obstacles to participation in schooling and providing targeted support to the most vulnerable populations.
These can include coordinated investments in water supply near schools, de-worming and other health interventions at the school level, and repair of roads to reduce the opportunity costs of travel to school.
Exploring New Paths
Recent years have seen funding for education channeled through non-education projects rise to US$500 million in 2005, equal to the volume of direct IDA project lending for education.
Quality advisory and analytical work and building local capacity.
IDA’s nearly 200 full-time staff working on education issues constitute a global reservoir of sectoral expertise and ensures that IDA lending for education is accompanied by substantial analytical work, capacity building and policy advice.
IDA produces about two dozen major pieces of education sector work each year and numerous policy notes and strategy papers. The Africa Region’s mix of country status reports and region-wide studies that put education into a broader context (including secondary education, girls’ education, tertiary education, HIV/AIDS, and the impact of debt relief on education spending) are good examples.
The IDA book A Chance for Every Child in 2003 identified the role that cost-effective standards for education service delivery have played in countries’ primary completion progress and became the basis for the FTI’s performance benchmarks.
A brief listing of other topics on which IDA’s analytical work has contributed to global knowledge and helped individual countries design and implement successful reforms include:
School-based management: IDA has been on the forefront of efforts to bring decision-making closer to the service delivery level in dozens of countries.
Reaching poor children through demand-side financing: IDA is helping countries to design targeted subsidies to get and keep disadvantaged children in school, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Reduction of school fees: IDA 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 which is often key to increasing education access for the poor and for girls.
Impact evaluation: IDA also provides significant support for rigorous impact evaluations in education, to generate stronger evidence about what works under different country conditions.
IDA’s analytical reports on all levels of education are global goods: recent examples are secondary education and tertiary education strategy papers: Expanding Opportunities and Building Competences for Young People: A New Agenda for Secondary Education (2005) and Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education (2002).
Convening development partners.
IDA’s convening power helped bilateral leaders from Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and France create the global Education for All Fast Track Initiative (FTI) in 2002, a results-based partnership that is proving to be an effective framework for faster primary education progress in countries and increased aid effectiveness.
The FTI’s mandate is to promote coherent education sector strategies, better policies and more effective education spending by low-income countries and an increased volume of better-harmonized aid from donors. IDA hosts the FTI secretariat and manages the US$1 billion FTI Catalytic Fund and US$57 million Education Program Development Fund which donors have established to support the Initiative.
IDA’s staffing depth in borrowing countries allows it to contribute to many of the FTI’s country-led donor groups, which are credited with achieving concrete progress on harmonization—reducing transactions costs and improving aid quality for low-income countries.
IDA is also a founding partner of the FRESH initiative, a multi-donor effort to improve school health. This group’s work on HIV/AIDS prevention through the schools in Africa has been chronicled in an award-winning documentary called Education and AIDS: Window of Hope and a book by the same name.
Successfully supporting countries.
At the end of Mozambique’s civil war, IDA was one of the first partners to re-enter the country with investment lending for education. A series of direct investments in primary education and development policy credits from 1994 to 2007 helped the government to rebuild and expand schools, recruit thousands of new teachers, revise the curriculum and improve textbooks. In 2003, Mozambique became one of the first countries to join the FTI, and the government’s leadership has spurred donors to achieve concrete harmonization progress on the ground that surpasses most Paris targets. Mozambique is one of two countries that appear on both tables above, meaning it has achieved significant growth in getting children into school and keeping them there .
Cambodia has raised its primary completion rate to more than 90 percent from less than 50 percent in only five years. Through a series of investments, IDA and other donors have helped the government decentralize funding to schools, reduce student fees, upgrade the skills of teachers, begin to measure learning outcomes and harmonize donor aid to the sector. Cambodia may be the best example of how a country can focus on maintaining quality in the face of rapid expansion of its education system.
Madagascar is the other country that appears on both lists of top performance. Through successive education projects since 1995, IDA has aided Madagascar to eliminate school fees and devolve grants to schools, to offset the loss of fee revenues and help schools maintain quality. As an FTI country since 2005, Madagascar is, along with Mozambique, one of the best practice examples of harmonization of government and donor programs and the reliance on government systems to measure and monitor performance, both in terms of outcomes and effective allocation and management of financial resources.
IDA has been the largest source of external financing for primary education in India since the mid-1990s. Under the current project, IDA is providing US$500 million to support the innovative sector-wide Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program. IDA has assisted the government to develop accountability and feedback systems between the central government, states, districts and schools that have allowed donor funding to be disbursed using local fiduciary procedures, and significant improvements in results tracking at all levels. With IDA support, the government has also introduced rigorous impact evaluations of key new reforms. India’s policy progress and substantial national investment in education, along with IDA and other donor support, have contributed to the enrollment of close to 25 million previously out-of-school children over the past five years.
Using Local Procedures
IDA can increasingly rely on local fiduciary procedures for implementation: The primary education program in India is a good example of the use of decentralized government procedures for financial management and procurement, along with the establishment of agreed accountability mechanisms. Increased use of local procedures will accelerate harmonization progress.
A sweeping education sector development program launched by the province of Punjab in Pakistan has been supported by three successive sector policy credits since 2004 totaling US$300 million in budgetary support from IDA. As a result, enrollment in grades 1–10 in public schools in Punjab has increased by 28 percent with approximately 2.5 million more students in three years . Girls’ enrollment in grades 6-8 in government elementary schools have increased by 40 percent. The continuity of IDA’s support, in terms of both financing and advisory services, has been acknowledged by the government, which is extending the approach to other provinces.
Ghana’s primary school coverage was already high in 1995, so enrollment growth has not been large. But the country has made notable progress in improving the quality of schooling over the past 10 years, with a series of IDA-financed projects for education as well as budget support under Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs). The PRSCs enabled the country to eliminate school fees, introduce capitation grants, create incentives for teacher trainees in rural areas, expand textbook delivery, and transfer resources to districts. IDA project lending has helped build the Ministry of Education’s core management systems. This is a model that IDA is perhaps uniquely positioned to deliver. Ghana is also one of the few low-income countries that has systematically tracked learning outcomes, and results show clear improvements in English and mathematics scores over the past 10 years, for children at all income levels.
Bangladesh is an example of successful expansion of secondary education, particularly for girls. IDA and other donors have helped take Bangladesh’s innovative targeted girls’ stipend program to a larger scale. Rigorous evaluations have demonstrated the program’s impact on girls’ retention in school, learning outcomes, and lower fertility. Girls’ share of secondary enrollments grew to nearly 56 percent in 2005 from 34 percent in 1990; secondary certifi cate pass rates for girls rose to 46 percent from 39 percent in 2000-05.
CHALLENGES AHEAD
Despite many success stories, progress is far from uniform.
Many Sub-Saharan African countries are making tremendous strides but are still off-track to achieve the MDGs. The countries mentioned above do prove that very significant progress is possible over a relatively short period if government commitment and donor support happen together.
High marks and lessons learned.
IDA’s support for education has received generally high performance ratings from the Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG). Eighty-two percent of projects that support primary education have been rated at least moderately satisfactory, which is above the Bank-wide average (72 percent) and above the average for projects supporting other levels of education (78 percent).
More Schoolwork
Key challenges for IDA over the coming years will be:
At the primary level, to continue to provide stable, long-term financing in substantially scaled-up volumes to help “on track” countries sustain their progress, and to help jump-start those countries that need to do better.
To support better measurement of learning progress, a key incentive to help countries focus on the issue of low quality.
To increase IDA support for secondary education to help countries meet rapidly growing demand for this level of education as more children complete primary school.
To increase IDA support for cost-effective early child development and pre-school education, for which countries are also facing major increases in demand.
To support countries through policy advice and selective lending to reform and improve the quality of higher education and lifelong learning.
The sustainability of education projects is improving. Three-quarters of projects that closed in the past five years have been rated likely or highly likely to be sustainable, reflecting an increased focus on strategic planning and results.
However, an IEG report noted in 2006 that in too many cases, IDA and its clients have failed to measure the impact of education programs on learning outcomes. This is more important than ever, given new research suggests cognitive skills of a population matter more than the average levels of schooling attained.
The next big challenge for IDA is to work with other donors and client countries to ensure that all children achieve basic skills in reading, math and social interaction that will allow them to continue to learn over a lifetime. IDA’s technical depth and convening power can contribute to a global effort to help developing countries monitor learning outcomes effectively and improve the quality of education service delivery.
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