What is at stake at the GPE Financing Conference?

The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) 3rd replenishment conference (February 1-2) aims to confirm significant increases in commitments from partner countries and donors – old and new – in order to ensure that all children and youth are in school and learning. GPE’s goal is to reach US$2 billion a year by 2020 to deliver better learning and equity outcomes for some 870 million children and adolescents in 89 countries.

The increased pledges are demanded within a particular context of aid to education trends, the changing role of GPE, and the higher stakes with the adoption of Sustainable Development Goal 4. With 387 million children not learning the basics, most of them in countries where GPE operates, it is crucial that partners scale their commitments to education up according to the GPE targets.

Aid to education has been stagnating

The 2017/8 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report showed that aid to education in 2015 was 4% below 2010 levels. It further revealed that the education share of total aid fell for six consecutive years, from 10% in 2009 to 6.9% in 2015. Comparatively, the share of aid towards the health and population sectors increased from 11.4% to 15.9% between 2004 and 2013 (only witnessing a decline in the two years after that). Likewise, the aid share received by the transport sector caught up with education during the same time.

Yet, previous estimates by the GEM Report in 2015 had showed that low and lower middle income countries faced an annual education financing gap of US$39 billion over 2015–2030 if it were to achieve universal pre-primary, primary and secondary education. In low income countries, this is equivalent to 42% of the total cost (UNESCO, 2015). Even after factoring in ambitious domestic financing increases, aid to education in low and lower middle income countries would need to increase six times relative to the 2012 levels. This estimate was largely confirmed by the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity in 2016. Instead, donors have continued to place lower priority to education and, often have not directed their aid to those countries most in need.

Results based financing in education: is it a challenge to aid effectiveness?

On the occasion of this week’s Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Financing Conference held in Dakar, Senegal, the GEM Report has released a new policy paperon results-based financing (RBF) in education, a financing modality being promoted strongly by some donors.

Donor countries are under increasing pressure to clearly demonstrate to their citizens what aid projects their taxes are funding and whether they provide good value. In many cases donors have been re-writing the aid contract, increasingly tying to the achievement of specific measurable results.

Results-based aid is intended to strengthen accountability. It can also increase awareness among developing country partner governments of the need to pay closer attention to the results ultimately sought. It can help build a culture of monitoring and evaluating results. However, the underlying assumptions of how the approach works may not borne out in practice, which could reduce aid effectiveness. Evidence on the success of results-based aid is still scarce. This calls for more debate on the advantages and disadvantages of the approach and how to adapt it before expanding it.

An increasingly popular approach to financing education

The origins of payment by results in aid may be traced back to the 2005 Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness. Many such approaches have emerged, which vary by the level of result targeted (ranging from institutional processes to learning outcomes) and the type of reward offered (ranging from the release or not of a specific amount to disbursements proportional to the level of the result achieved).

The World Bank has been a particularly strong supporter of the idea that results-based financing helps strengthen education systems and committed at the World Education Forum in 2015 to doubling results-based education lending to US$5 billion between 2015 and 2020. Other donors have also been supportive. For example, the government of the United Kingdom says that this “new form of financing that makes payments contingent on the independent verification of results … is a cross government reform priority”. Its Department for International Development (DFID) called its 2014 payment by results strategy Sharpening Incentives to Perform and promised to make it “a major part of the way DFID works in future”. The new aid reforms announced by DFID’s former Secretary Priti Patel in October 2017 included expanding the department’s use of payment by results.

Tajikistan: Accountability on paper versus in practice

This blog is written by Kate Lapham, Deputy Director of the Open Society Foundations’ Education Support Program, and the author of a case study on accountability and education in Tajikistan commissioned for the 2017/8 GEM Report. The blog is part of a series showing that accountability in education is shaped by a country’s history and political, social, and cultural context.

Background: Tajikistan’s education system

Tajikistan inherited its education system from the Soviet Union. The result at independence was a highly centralized system of formal schooling with clear lines of accountability from the school to the district education department to the provincial education authorities to the Ministry of Education. The literacy rate in Tajikistan is estimated officially at 99.5%. However, it is difficult to chart the trajectory of learning achievement in the education system because there is little data available.

 

In Tajikistan there is pride in the accomplishments of the Soviet era. At the same time, challenges in the education sector, especially the lack of funds, are widely known. In terms of formal accountability for these shortfalls, there are detailed regulations and standards that are often impossible to implement because infrastructure has deteriorated, learning materials are not universally available, and education institutions must often make compromises to accommodate students with the resources available.

Running alongside, and sometimes in conflict with formal accountability, is informal accountability, which takes the forms of social norms of responsibility and reciprocity to one’s family and community. Informal accountability related to social networks is strongly felt in Tajikistan and has an impact on the way that actors within the education system negotiate between what is formally required, what communities want for their children, and what is possible to keep the school system functioning.

Who is accountable for ensuring schools are heated?

Standards related to health and hygiene are set by the central government. They require schools to be heated during the winter months and presuppose sufficient resources from the public budget. But, in reality, schools do not receive sufficient resources from municipal budgets for maintenance or fuel. Teachers often use small stoves to heat individual classrooms. The fire hazard this presents runs against the formal standards, but the alternative is suspending schooling or a freezing classroom. Schools often ask students’ families to contribute fuel for the stove – a contribution that is also not explicitly regulated.

Success in Dubai: Pushing ahead on SDG 4 data

By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Jordan Naidoo, Director, Education 2030 Support and Coordination at UNESCO

As we unpack our bags following last week’s meeting of the Technical Cooperation Group (TCG) in Dubai, it seems a good time to unpack our thoughts on the success of the event. Over three days, representatives of countries, technical partners, donors and civil society reviewed progress in developing the indicators and estimating the resources needed to help countries implement the global and thematic monitoring frameworks for Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4).

As noted in previous blogs, the TCG has working groups that are focused on three key areas: indicator development (i.e. methodologies), capacity building, and international reporting of data by countries. The Dubai meeting was characterised by marked progress on all three areas that are critical for the measurement and monitoring of the global education goals.

Indicator development

In the first area, the TCG approved new methodologies or refinements for six indicators. As a result, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) will be able to report on 33 SDG 4 indicators in 2018.

These include global Indicator 4.3.1, the participation rate of youth and adults in formal and non-formal education and training in the previous 12 months, by sex. A well-developed methodology was already in place and now the TCG has approved new data sources to cover more countries, such as Labour Force Surveys and national household surveys, although the education programmes covered in these data collections are not always fully aligned.

Corporations in education: Too big to hold accountable?

Large corporations are increasingly involved in the education sector, through investments in technology, private schools and higher education institutions. Pearson is the world’s largest education company, operating in over 70 countries. Its near global monopoly raises questions about who has the authority and capacity to hold it accountable. As the biggest and most powerful meet in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, it seems an opportune time to question the ability of governments to hold large corporations active in education to account.

Until recently, Pearson was known for textbook publishing. In the early 2000s, recognizing the growth industry in digital education, Pearson devised a transition strategy, acquiring several technology-related businesses. In 2015, Pearson reported sales of £4.5 billion and adjusted operating profit of £723 million.

Drafting guiding principles on state obligations concerning private schools: Lessons and strategic considerations from a rights perspective

By Tom Lowenthal, OxHRH Managing Editor and DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford

As the Oxford Human Rights Hub’s course, Learning Lessons from Litigators, helps us to understand, children will not be educated by lawsuits alone: Just as there are tactics related to litigation, there are tactics related to to standard-setting and international consensus-building too.  The Draft Guiding Principles on State Obligations Concerning Private Schools (DGPs) are a case in point. Due to be finalised in mid-2018, this is a useful time to review the lessons of the past.

There is no doubt that there has been a significant growth of privatisation and public-private partnerships in education across the world. There is evidence that it has a deleterious effect on education provision, especially amongst marginalised communities. So then, what to do? The challenge here is really one of accountability: human rights law has always been state-centric, and it has always struggled to fit businesses which violate human rights within its framework for accountability. Designing a proper framework for the protection of rights from private violation has been one of the enduring challenges of the human rights project.

The Draft Guiding Principles represent one such attempt, and a valiant one at that. They seek to set out a clear set of guidelines for how states can respond to the challenges of privatisation, and what their obligations are. In the strategic and tactic spirit of Leaning Lessons from Litigators, it is worth looking at previous attempts to design regulation for businesses within the state-centric framework of international law, to see if there are any lessons for the DGPs.

The Tanzanian President has just banned schools from taking any money from pupils

Free education? What does that really mean?

Tanzania made secondary education free in 2015. But, as we know from several editions of the GEM Report, plenty of countries provide ‘free education’ and yet the cost of going to school is still a major barrier.

President John Magufuli in Tanzania, who disclosed this week that the government pays $10.7 million per month for its free education policy, released a circular yesterday saying that pupils and students were nevertheless still being forced to pay for food, laboratory services, study tours and even desks.  “Provision of free education means pupils or students will not pay any fee or contributions that were paid by parents or guardians” he said. As from now, regional and district leaders will be risking their jobs if they allow any of these practices to continue.

The announcement was made when Magufuli met the Minister of State in the President’s Office Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG), Mr Selemani Jafo, and the Minister for Education, Science, Technology and Vocational Training, Prof Joyce Ndalichako. Both have been charged to ensure that the circular is adhered to. “I direct you (ministers) that I don’t want to hear that a pupil/student is dismissed over failure to contribute.” The regional and district commissioners have been given 48 hours to report back on schools that had been asking for contributions so further actions can be taken against the teachers responsible.

What US support to UNRWA is worth in terms of education

Yesterday, as hinted at the start of the year, the United States cut its aid to the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, better known with its acronym UNRWA.

UNRWA has been running for over six decades, having been set up in 1949 to provide humanitarian aid in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.  It was born of crisis and continues to deliver education in crisis in the five fields of operation where it works – Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.

What does this new announcement from the US mean for UNRWA’s future?

In 2015, the US contributed nearly $369 million to the agency, for a total budget of roughly USD1.2 billion in 2016. The US was the UNRWA’s largest donor, contributing over twice that of the second largest donor, the European Union, which allocated $160 million.

The total contribution the US made in 2017 was above $350 million, but the funds announced for 2018 were “dramatically below past levels” according to the UNRWA Commissioner-General, Pierre Krahenbuhl, at $125 million, of which $65 million we now hear are “frozen for future consideration”.

And what does it mean for the UNRWA’s education support?

UNRWA spends more than half of its budget on education.

As its website tells us, and as we heard from its director of education on this blog site last year, with the help of these funds, the UNRWA/UNESCO education programme operates in no fewer than 677 elementary and preparatory schools, providing free basic education for around half a million Palestinian refugee children.  Quite apart from just giving these children seats in classrooms, we showed that most children in UNRWA schools perform as well as, or better than, those in host country schools in Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank.

Costa Rica joins the ranks of the few making pre-primary education compulsory for two years

This month, for the first time, it will be mandatory for children in Costa Rica to complete two years of pre-primary education before going to primary school.

This is in line with the call in Target 4.2 of the SDG agenda for children to be “ready for primary education”.

It is also in line with one of the thematic indicators for measuring progress towards target 4.2 in the SDG agenda: 4.2.4 Number of years of (i) free and (ii) compulsory pre-primary education guaranteed in legal frameworks.

In making this move to two years of compulsory pre-primary education, Costa Rica is stepping out ahead of many other countries in the world. In total, before Costa Rica’s announcement, the latest data showed that pre-primary education was compulsory for at least two years in only 11% of countries as the below table shows.

The importance of community volunteers to increase students’ learning outcomes: the case of Educate Girls in India

By Radhika Iyengar, Gita Johar, Lucia del Pilar Haro and Sarah Montgomery

The idea of community members providing basic health services to local households has been in existence for 50 years. The health community has been effectively using Community Health Workers (CHW’s) to address the shortage of health staff in local clinics for many years. CHWs have been rolled out in large numbers in developing countries. They play a key role in preventing, diagnosing and providing recommendations of ailments from diarrhea to HIV/AIDS.  The concept is now scaled up with millions of CHWs visiting households in under-served villages today.

The education community has also been experimenting with the idea of using local volunteers for more than two decades.  Local volunteers in education have run community based libraries, taught homework classes, provided afternoon remedial classes, helped teachers in school and conducted surveys for out of school children during enrollment campaigns. These community volunteer programs are highly contextualized to address local needs but, unlike in the case of health, their scale has usually been small. However, the education needs have gown substantially.

Picture this: a familiar young face in the community is excited to change things in his village. He surveys all the hamlets in his village and jots down names of all children, especially girls who are currently out of school.  He knows all the households in the village and knows the children by name. The parents and community leaders trust him and take his recommendation to enroll their children in school and to work towards improving schools. He also helps the schoolteachers to ensure that all children are learning at least basic language and mathematics skills. Can this very localized and personalized model be scaled up?

Parents engagement before the enrollment process in Gogunda, Rajasthan

Educate Girls is a Mumbai based non-profit organization that is using community-based volunteers called Team Balikas to address girls’ absenteeism in rural Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Their mission is to leverage existing community and government resources to ensure that all girls are in school and learning well.