Education Policy Reform: Regional Responses to Global Challenges, ECA Region

InfoBox

Dates: March 24-28, 2008 Location: Kyiv, Ukraine

The world is undergoing dramatic and unprecedented changes in this age of increasing globalization. The knowledge and information technology revolution, as well as many growing social and economic trends, have changed how we live, how organizations do their business, and how well countries perform in the global economy.  Today, a country’s competitiveness and development potential depend on several factors, including availability of knowledge resources such as human capital, an incentive system to provide economic policies and institutions that permit efficient mobilization and allocation of resources, innovation in utilizing global knowledge, and a modern and adequate information technology infrastructure.  Key among such factors is the creation of a high-skilled workforce with the ability to access, adapt, apply, and create new knowledge and technologies.  Education at all levels thus plays a major role in increasing a country’s development and competitiveness.

Countries of the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region have been reforming their education system to respond to the challenges of market economies, competitiveness and open societies. Much progress has been achieved in the last 15 years but the challenge is still quite significant. The WB has been supporting several of these reforms initiatives and has gathered valuable experience in the process. As the first generation of education reforms is fully underway in most ECA countries they are now faced with the need to deepen these reforms in order to make their education system more responsive to the challenges of more dynamic labor markets driven by constant innovations in the work place and the need to make their economies more competitive.

The joint course of the World Bank Institute (WBI) and the World Bank ECA region, analyzed these regional experiences and provided a framework for the analysis of different components and characteristics of the educational systems. Largely based on the WBI core course “Strategic Choices for Education Reform”, the program was customized to the context of ECA countries and was a response to the demand for the region.