THE EDUCATION MDG: IS MORE BETTER?

This blog post is a shortened  version of a Brief prepared for the IBP by Ruth Carlitz

Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have come under fire for being overly ambitious or unfair, they have mobilized resources and helped to build political will to improve the education sector in countries around the world. Now, more than halfway to the MDGs’ target end date, concerns are being voiced that progress toward achieving the goals is off track, particularly in Africa. This has led to calls for increased foreign aid and greater local investment in education and other development priorities.

However, despite spending more on the education sector as a whole, governments inevitably have to make choices about what to prioritize within the sector. Unfortunately, it appears that in some cases additional spending to achieve the education MDG has been channeled disproportionately toward quantity (dramatically increasing enrollment), possibly at the expense of quality. It could be argued that this was caused by the education MDG’s emphasis on quantity over quality.

What happened in Tanzania

Tanzania is widely considered to be an MDG “success story.” For instance, at a media briefing on a recent meeting of the UN’s MDG Africa Steering Group, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon cited Tanzania as an example of progress on primary education. The World Bank has also highlighted Tanzania’s “impressive results” in boosting primary school enrollment.

However, Tanzania’s success masks some pernicious consequences of hasty efforts to boost enrollment and calls into question the longer-term impact of these reforms. An immediate consequence of increased enrollment has been overcrowded classrooms. While the government’s plans to address this problem include building classrooms and recruiting new teachers, pupil-teacher ratios remain high—an average of 54-1 in primary schools, and 37-1 in secondary schools. These averages, as high as they are, mask glaring disparities—particularly between schools in urban areas and those in more remote, rural places where teachers are often unwilling to be posted or fail to report for duty.

The impact of quickly expanding enrollment has been particularly hard on the secondary school system. With net enrollment jumping from 6 percent to 26 percent in just four years (2004 to 2008), there has been a scramble to accommodate the new primary school graduates, resulting in the recruitment of vast numbers of poorly qualified teachers. Barely out of secondary school themselves, and sometimes given just weeks of training, these teachers are providing instruction of questionable quality and, some argue, bringing down the prestige of the teaching profession.

What should Donors do?

Revising international goals for education could be an important step in creating incentives for quality. Donors might consider an alternative to the education MDG that has been proposed by the Center for Global Development. The CGD researchers suggest judging progress in terms of outcomes of the educational system, or the capabilities of all children in a given cohort. Assessing progress toward such a Millennium Learning Goal (MLG) would create incentives for improving quality in education, not just quantity.

In addition, this framework would address legitimate concerns that have been raised about a possible trade-off between quality and equity—in other words, increasing the quality, and consequently the cost, of education might lead to restricting enrollment. An MLG that is constructed to measure capabilities of children both in and out of school would create an incentive to draw more children into the formal schooling system, since such an action would presumably raise cohort learning achievement.

Donors might further contemplate the “cash on delivery” strategy, which has also been proposed by CGD. Under this approach, additional aid would be linked to evidence of progress already achieved on the ground, measured by independent assessment. Unlike traditional donor “conditionality,” aid would not be tied directly to the implementation of any specific policies or reforms. Rather, the means of achieving progress would be left to the discretion of the individual government.  “Cash on delivery” could be integrated into the MLG framework, with a given learning goal linked to aid payments for education.

What should governments do?

Planning and budgeting for increasing quality in education will require a fundamental shift from thinking about inputs to focusing on learning outcomes (what an “educated” person is able to do). Once they have identified their desired educational outcomes, governments should then work to determine the inputs needed to achieve these outcomes. Starting from inputs (simply directing more money to the education sector) will not guarantee improved outcomes. In particular, just increasing spending on physical infrastructure and other inputs has not been shown to lead to substantial increases in children’s competencies and learning achievement.

One input that flows more logically from a focus on learning outcomes is investment in teacher quality— one of the only school-related factors that consistently has been shown to influence student achievement. Many countries lag behind target teacher-to-pupil ratios and also suffer from chronic underinvestment in teacher training and professional development. Spending more on teachers implies a longer term view, as the benefits of such additional spending would not be realized immediately.  However, it could help to ensure that the newly constructed classrooms are not empty shells but, instead, fulfill their promise of expanding access to quality education.

Governments could also strengthen “value-for-money” auditing of the education sector to ensure that additional investment is having an impact.  Facilitating public expenditure tracking studies would also help to ensure that money spent on education is spent well.

And Civil Society?

In a few countries, civil society has started playing an important role in monitoring and measuring the impact of spending on education.

For instance, the Uganda Debt Network (UDN) has supported community monitoring groups to track the impact of spending under the country’s Universal Primary Education Programs.  The UDN organized citizens, empowering them to gather relevant budget information and monitor the quality of expenditure and new services. The groups then held public hearings to raise concerns about poor quality school construction and other misspending.

In Malawi, the Civil Society Coalition for Quality Basic Education has implemented public expenditure tracking surveys to monitor education spending at the district and school level.  The coalition’s efforts spurred the government to launch its own expenditure tracking survey and address issues raised by the coalition, such as the late or incomplete disbursement of teacher salaries. In Tanzania, HakiElimu has engaged in similar efforts through the development of a PEDP Monitoring Tool—a questionnaire that community volunteers implement at the school and local government level.

CSOs also can help to measure the extent to which children are learning and building cognitive skills. For example, the CSO Pratham in India produces an Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) that uses data collected by a huge corps of citizen volunteers that  is dispatched across India’s rural districts, where they administer simple tests to school-age children in basic reading, simple comprehension, basic math, and English. The volunteers also visit schools to gather information on enrollment and infrastructure and record other general observations.

 

How to drive Public Finance Management reforms in poor countries

The PFM Blog recently posted a fascinating Q&A with the IMF’s Richard Allen Apart from a serious faux pas where he refers to the IMF as an ‘honest broker’ that can provide ‘genuinely impartial advice… and its implementation’, he shares some stunning insights that reflect his years of experience in the field

First he argues (admits?) that there is no ‘consensus mode’ for sequencing Public Finance Management (PFM) reform. In plain English: there is no recipe for where to start or how to string together such reforms. After a comment by Sanjay Vani, Allen does however agree that ‘a solid accounting and reporting is as a precondition to any other reform. In Vani’s words:  “If the Ministry of Finance cannot accurately tell how much money has been spent and for what purposes, no other PFM reform has any chance of success.”

According to Allen, this is not just a gap in our knowledge about how reform works; he also argues that the political, administrative and financial incentives for rapid PFM reform do not exist in most developing countries. He goes even further by arguing that “there are much more prevalent incentives against reform. Budgetary institutions are particularly difficult to reform because they are a primary source of rent seeking’.”

This may look like pessimism about the possibility of any PFM reform at all, but Allen actually argues for a more cautious and modest approach to such reforms: “Even developed countries normally tackle only one major reform a time, compared with the dozens of items typically found in a platform approach document.” But “unfortunately, such scaled-down approaches to PFM reform are not very appealing to some governments and donors.”

After this Allen takes some delicious sideswipes at donors, recipient governments and technical assistance (TA) providers:

“They (donors) are reluctant to say ‘no’ to ministers who ask for the ‘wrong’ types of reform, such as MTEFs and performance budgeting, that are way beyond the capacity of most countries to implement, and contravene the principle of getting the basics right first―Allen Schick’s famous motto ‘look before you leapfrog’.”

“World Bank teams and other donors have pushed IFMIS (Integrated Financial Management Information System) and similar high-tech projects on countries as a way of disbursing loans, and with too little thought to the real needs of the country.”

“Many TA providers have a vested interest in maintaining existing approaches and instruments. TA providers are not sufficiently held to account for the imperfections of the models they use, and the advice they offer.”

Is this fair criticism? In my experience many donors, government officials and TA providers are as perplexed as Allen about what to do next in countries that have seen wave upon wave of reform. So what to do?

If we have learnt anything over the last 30 years, it is that PFM reforms cannot be approached as a series of technocratic projects. For this reason the ‘political turn’ in the thinking of donors is an encouraging development (see DFID’s Drivers of Change studies, for example ). It seems obvious that an understanding of why things are the way that they are, is a necessary first step to any reform. Introducing reforms without changing the political balance of power will doom these reforms to failure or the permanent reform limbo that so many developing countries are stuck in.

With this insight in mind, more and more donors have started working with audit institutions and legislatures. More and more donors also understand that citizens and civil society organisations can provide the political impetus to support technical reforms. See for example DFID, SIDA, DANIDA’s large investments in civil society policy advocacy.

Of course there is no standard recipe for such politically streetwise reforms either. The liberal assumption that the rebalancing of power will emanate from the countervailing forces of the legislature, judiciary, media and civil society is not always true. Those trying to support change cannot avoid have to search for people that have the wider public interest at heart. Sometimes the people driving change are in the Executive. In a few recent cases we have even seen expatriates play this role through the electronic media.

We should also stretch Vani’s point wider. Few of the political processes supporting PFM reforms will get traction if the information produced by ’solid accounting and reporting’ is not made publicly available. The people and institutions that may change the balance of power will need to know what government is doing with public resources before they can change anything about it.

 

Are we spending too much money on AIDS?

Roger England argues in a recent BMJ article that we spend more money on HIV/AIDS programs than the contribution of AIDS to the global burden of disease can justify. Predictably there have been some vehement and high profile responses to his article.

In short England argues that too much is spent on HIV relative to other needs and that this is damaging health systems. Although HIV causes 3.7% of global mortality, he argues, it receives 25% of international health care aid and a big chunk of domestic expenditure.

England argues further that Aids does not correlate with poverty as closely as expected. If this is true, it would mean that more people with AIDS can contribute to their own health care needs than we think.

Some of the key responses to England have been:

Underfunding of other diseases is the result of global underspending on Health, not the result of prioritizing AIDS

AIDS has its most devastating effects in poor communities that lack access to health services

In regions like Southern Africa, the burden of disease associated with AIDS does justify what is spent on it

The spread of AIDS is silent and the long incubation period means the virus has infected many people before illnesses manifest and the threat is apparent. As a result we don’t know at what level incidence will peak.

Donor conditionalities do not allow poor countries to prioritize health spending based on their own burden of disease.

This debate raises some key points. It seems clear that:

• This question should not just be asked of ‘global health spending’, but also of the health spending in each country
• Most poor countries do not spend enough money on health
• Donor conditionalities sometimes do distort health spending in recipient countries
• We have no way of knowing what the potential contribution of HIV/AIDS to the global burden of disease is.

You must have an opinion on this issue! Let us know what you think by clicking on ‘comments’ below.

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African Parliaments becoming a force?

The UK’s Africa All Party Parliamentary Group (AAPPG), has just released its report on Strengthening Parliaments in Africa: Improving Support.

The report explores the factors that hold African parliaments back and how international donors can better support them. The report will be on their website later this week. We list some of the findings below.

WHAT SHOULD DONORS DO?

• Until recently donors have focussed on working with the Executive and often ignored parliaments. Sometimes they even undermined them. There are signs, however, that this neglect of parliaments has been recognised and is changing.  See, for example, the UNDP’s recent work in this regard: http://sdnhq.undp.org/governance/parls/

• Donors must approach parliaments in their political context and base work on a thorough understanding of the pressures, interests and actors that shape parliamentary power.

• Parliamentary strengthening will only succeed if it is pulled by a range of local actors, not just pushed by donors. Initiatives must build on local efforts to strengthen parliaments.

• Development partners must ensure that their work does not marginalise or undermine parliaments and that the parliaments of recipient countries are encouraged to play a full part in development relationships.

What has your experience been of donors’ work with legislares?

Other  findings of the report are:

• African parliaments are exerting growing influence on how their countries are governed.

• Despite this growth, insufficient constitutional and other provisions continue to constrain the role of parliaments. Even if they enjoy robust powers on paper, the political realities inside and outside parliament mean that parliaments often fail to exercise effective scrutiny over executives. Problems of institutional capacity also continue to loom large.

• African citizens and their political leaders are the most important groups for strengthening their parliaments. Development partners can, however, also play a role.

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