6.
Mobilizing resources for EFA
Achieving the ambitious but
urgent goal of EFA will require the investment of large
amounts of new financial resources. A significant proportion
of funding must come from the individual countries themselves
through, for example, reallocation and the adoption of
cost-effective measures to reach EFA goals. However, most will
also need considerable additional outside help.
The Dakar Framework calls for
such outside assistance on a sys-tematic basis. Specifically,
it states, 'The international com-munity will [launch] a
global initiative aimed at developing the strategies and
mobilizing the resources needed to provide effective support
to national efforts (para. 11).' It also goes on to declare,
'We affirm that no countries seriously committed to education
for all will be thwarted in their achievement of this goal by
a lack of resources' (para. 10).
Given the strategic
importance of initiatives at the national level, the national
plan was considered to be the central organizing basis for the
financing of EFA at the national level. National plans are
viewed as a national commitment on behalf of the govern-ment,
NGOs and donors to the promotion of EFA. Ongoing development
programmes should be revisited to channel funds to EFA. Gaps
need to be identified within the country itself.
Some donors may find it difficult
to raise additional funds, but they could reallocate funds
within their own budgets and ori-ent their funding more
towards EFA in collaboration with the countries. On the donor
side, advocacy work has to be under-taken and political
leaders have to be convinced that EFA is important.
Trends in international
development assistance during the 1990s
The global initiative is being
launched within the context of softening donor contributions
to international development.
The decline in
assistance
Total net resource flows to aid
recipient countries, of which Official Development Assistance
(ODA) forms a part, more than doubled during 1991-96 (from
$138 to $345 billion). It then declined severely during
1996-98 because of the Asian finan-cial crisis, but recovered
somewhat in recent years (estimated at $248 billion in
1999).
Four member countries (Denmark, Netherlands,
Norway and Sweden) were joined in 2000 by Luxemburg, according
to pro-visional figures, to fulfil the UN target of allocating
0.7% or more of GNP for international development
assistance.
As percentage of GNP of member
countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC)
has fallen by more than one-fifth in constant dollar terms,
from 0.33% in 1992 to its lowest level of 0.22% in 1997, with
slight recovery to 0.24% in 1999. Real net ODA disbursements
(in constant 1998 prices) fell from $60,421 million in 1992 to
$48,324 million in 1997, then increased to $55,343 million in
1999.
The four largest economies -
France, Germany, Japan and the United States - have reduced
their assistance by the largest amounts during the 1990s. By
contrast, the non-G7 group have allocated increased shares
throughout the 1990s and new, smaller countries have joined in
this support.
Aid allocations have been on the
decline in all regions except for Europe and Central Asia and
East Asia and the Pacific dur-ing the 1990s. The trend for the
least developed countries has been downward in recent years.
Sub-Saharan Africa has wit-nessed the sharpest decline by
roughly one-third. Some of themajor aid providers are
responsible for some of the largest reductions. Moreover,
during the 1990s, non-concessional funds gained importance
over concessional disbursements.
Education as a proportion
of overall aid
It
is noteworthy that education seems to have suffered
rela-tively less within this overall declining ODA trend,
although complete disbursement figures are hard to retrieve.
Nevertheless, education continues to constitute a low
propor-tion of individual countries' development assistance.
Of total DAC bilateral allocations, education seems to have
maintained its proportional share, constituting roughly 11% in
both 1989 and 1999. Multilateral allocations increased from
4.6% to 7.6% in the same years.
The absolute value of bilateral
commitments to education was largely unchanged from 1990 to
1999 (roughly $3,980 million in 1998 prices) after having
experienced a high of $4,341 mil-lion in 1994. Official
Development Assistance for basic edu-cation 1997-98 was on
average $703 million.
Urgency of the
situation
Given the urgency of reaching the goals
of EFA, this decline in donor contributions is disturbing.
Moreover, recent tragic events relating to global terrorism
have prompted new worries about the impact of security
concerns on funding of social sec-tors in general and
education in particular.
The trends of the 1990s as well
as the new concerns about security suggest the need for
innovative thinking in resource mobilization for
EFA.
Estimates of the total costof
achieving EFA
There are ongoing efforts by the
World Bank, UNESCO and other organizations to estimate the
financial resources needed to achieve EFA. These include
attempts both at establishing a global financing goal and at
identifying specific resource gaps at the country level.
Estimates have been made to estimate the additional resources
required to achieve UPE by 2015, based on gross and net
enrolment figures.
Due to differences in
methodologies and underlying popu-lation, enrolment and
expenditure statistics, the annual addi-tional resources
needed to achieve UPS have been variously estimated to be:
OXFAM - US$8 billion
per year
UNICEF - $9 billion
World Bank - $13
billion
UNESCO/UIS - $15 billion
World Bank data suggest that 97%
of education budgets in developing countries comes from
national governments, and only 3% from the international
community. In some contexts, the contribution from the
international community funds is higher and is considered to
play a critical, catalytic and sup-portive role.
The affordability of
universal primary education
Despite the variations
between these estimates, the key mes-sage that emerges is that
UPE is affordable. It requires a mod-erate concerted effort.
Even the highest estimate, US$15 bil-lion
per year,
represents less than 0.3% of the total GNP of the developing
countries, 0.06% of the total GNP of the developed countries,
and 0.05% of the world's GNP.
As the World Bank observed in a recent paper, Educating
for Dynamic Economies: Accelerating Progress Towards Education
for All (EFA), 'Financial projections show that for almost all
of the very low-enrolment countries, once the system
stabilizes after an initial
surge in enrolments has moved
through the system (a period of about 10 years), national
resources should be able to sustain the system with rapidly
declining external financial support.'
Current challenges
The international community is
thus faced with four major challenges:
To drastically increase support
for basic education within a context of increased support for
the education sector and for overall international development
assistance.
To ensure that increased
financial flows, from the private sector as well as ODA, act
as a catalyst for national resource mobilization and
sustainable development with due atten-tion to the critical
role of basic education.
To strengthen policy coherence
and co-ordination of EFA efforts nationally and
internationally.
To hold national governments and
the international community to their commitment for EFA
through care-ful monitoring of the progress towards the goals
and tar-gets of EFA.
Summary of progress in
financialsupport for EFA
Efforts to mobilize support for
EFA among multilateral agencies and bilateral donors bore
fruit at the G-8 Summits in Okinawa in 2000 and Genoa in 2001,
which strongly endorsed the com-mitment made at Dakar 'that no
countries seriously committed to EFA will be thwarted in their
achievement of this goal by a lack of resources'.
The Dakar Framework specified six
strategies for promotion of the Global Initiative:
1. Increasing external
finance for basic education
In view of the drastic
decline in international assistance during the 1990s, member
countries of OECD, in particular those with large economies,
are urged to translate their expressed com-mitments into
practice and to provide increased and targeted assistance to
countries most in need.
A range of alternative sources
for mobilization of international resources must also be
considered. These include former aid recipient countries and
non-OECD and non-DAC countries; pri-vate investment financing,
in particular partnerships among the financial services
industry, the state and civil society to pro-mote social
development and to link private and public finance with public
education; and innovative fund-raising and funding
for EFA
on the part of NGOs, private foundations and large-scale
corporate foundations.
Special soft terms must be
applied for education aid in view of its critical role for
poverty reduction and sustainable devel-opment. External
lending must be redirected to Education for All from all major
intergovernmental and regional devel-opment banks. In the case
of the World Bank, lending must be increased both through the
soft-loan concessional com-mitments from the International
Development Association (IDA) and through non-concessional
lending from the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD).
2. Ensuring greater
predictability in the flow of external
assistance
Predictability depends both upon
political will and procedures that take their point of
departure in recipient country needs rather than in
aid-providing country interests. Predictability also depends
on the capacity of the recipient country to absorb and use
funding in accordance with nationally defined plans and goals.
There is a need to review the conditions for aid provision and
to ensure long-term commitments for Education for All from
both national governments and inter-national funding and
technical assistance agencies. There is also a need to review
bottlenecks at the country level related to human and
institutional capacity building. An important priority is to
ensure predictability in funding for the least developed
countries and for regions, for example sub-Saharan
Africa.
3. Providing debt relief
and/or cancellation for poverty reduction and basic
education
It is important to identify innovative
financial schemes that can supplement ODA financing. Debt
relief and/or cancellation is one mechanism which, together
with debt-for-development swaps, have received strong
international attention and politi-cal backing. The core
notion is that forgiven debt in specific countries would be
translated into social development activi-ties, including
financial support for EFA. These debt relief mechanisms must
be enacted with the utmost urgency. Financing should not be
done by diverting funds from already declining ODA.
There is a need to revisit
underlying terms of the debt-relief schemes and to ensure that
criteria are conditioned in terms of social and human
development goals.
Countries must be provided with the necessary technical
assistance in order for them to produce a national poverty
strategy.
4. Facilitating more
effective donor co-ordination
There is a need to
ensure consistency in goals and strategies by all actors as a
basis to promote holistic national develop-ment processes and
to ensure maximum impact of inter-national assistance.
Government leadership is essential in this effort at the
national level. National EFA Forums, along with sub-regional
and regional forums, are further mechanisms to strengthen the
movement towards the EFA goals. At the in-ternational level,
the Working Group on EFA and the high-level group are
important mechanisms to ensure consistency in focus and
understanding of the EFA movement. UNESCO's re-cent membership
in the United Nations Development Group aims at strengthening
the EFA effort across the United Nations
institutions.
5. Strengthening
sector-wide approaches
These are the best
alternatives, or supplements, to the kind of fragmented
international project support that characterized international
development co-operation in earlier decades. All partners are
expected to work within the framework of government programmes
which provides an opportunity for national authorities and
development partners to be aligned with shared priorities. It
also permits the agencies to provide longer term support
against well-defined policy objectives and to support reforms
through agreed operational commitments and devolving greater
authority to national governments con-cerning resource
decisions. Lessons and best practices in sector wide
approaches must be properly communicated and
shared among
all actors.
6. Monitoring progress
towards the goals and targets of EFA
Monitoring of
progress must be made the responsibility of all partners,
nationally, regionally and internationally. It must be an
integral part of EFA plans at all levels. It must be based on
common output and outcome indicators that cover all aspects of
the multi-faceted EFA concept, while allowing for national
adaptations. Appropriate education management and infor-mation
systems must be set up at the country level, training
programmes conducted in developing baseline and other data,
and country capacities in general evaluation and monitoring
must be strengthened.
Linking EFA
action plans with other policy frameworks
The Dakar Framework calls
for all countries to develop or strengthen existing
national plans of action by 2002 at the latest. Building
on the findings from the EFA 2000 Assessment, these
plans should be elaborated in coherence with national
strategies and development plans for alleviation of
poverty.
The elaboration of the
national EFA plan provides an opportunity for countries
to improve the internal coher-ence of sectoral and
inter-sectoral policies and strategies. Links must also
be ensured with international frame-works such as the
Common Country Assessment (CCA), the United Nations
Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), the Highly
Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) and Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP).
The successful application
of sector-wide approaches rests on a number of
pre-conditions at both country and agency levels. At the
country level, they include longer term macro-economic
planning, strong government leadership and effective
participation of civil society organizations. They,
therefore, often require provision of consolidated
technical assistance by the development partners in
order to strengthen the human and insti-tutional
resource base. The approaches also represent a
particular challenge to the EFA movement in terms of
adaptation of knowledge on, training in and learning
from successful
experiences. |
The need for efficient
spending of funds for EFA
Research
over the past decade has also found that education spending is
necessary but not sufficient for educational progress. There
is wide variance not only in countries' public spending on
education (from 2% to 9% of GDP) but in what that spending
produces as measured by average years of schooling completed
by the population. Niger and Sri Lanka, for example, both
spend slightly more than 2% of their GDP on education, but in
the one country the student population completes less than two
years of schooling, while in the other more than 11
years.
Research shows that a handful of
key factors indicate why the effectiveness of education
spending varies so much. These are:
- education effort, or level of national
resources being devoted to education;
- unit costs, which
are heavily driven by the level of teacher salaries relative
to GDP per capita, pupil/teacher ratio, and governance;
-
student flow efficiency, or repetition and
drop-out.
Successful countries are
characterized by a powerful combin-ation of relatively high
education effort (spending in primary education averaging 2-3%
of GDP), reasonable unit costs and relatively low repetition
rates. Countries likely to achieve 100% enrolment, but not 80%
primary completion, present an inter-mediate but
unsatisfactory combination of low spending, low unit costs and
low quality.
The strong implication is that
countries cannot hope to achieve universal primary access and
completion (and, implic-itly, gender equity) unless key
parameters of their education system are within reasonable
norms of efficiency and their national efforts to invest in
education are on a par with those of other
countries.