ROLE OF WORLD BANK IN EDUCATION IN INDIA

World Bank

 Education is a powerful driver of development and is one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. Although there has been great progress in the last decade, some 121 million children are still out of primary and lower secondary school, and 250 million children cannot read or write although many have been to school. 

Education has large, consistent returns in terms of income and counters widening inequality, but this potential is too often unrealized due to alarmingly low learning levels. Providing all children with a quality education that teaches them skills for work is critical to end poverty by 2030. 

The World Bank Group is committed to supporting countries that request financing or technical assistance to be able to reach Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 , which calls for access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.  It helped draft and is a signatory to the Education 2030 Framework for Action, which will guide countries through the implementation of SDG4. 

To make this vision a reality, the World Bank Group is mobilizing all available resources. The Education Sector Strategy 2020, “Learning for All” emphasizes that the knowledge and skills youth gain through learning help lift them out of poverty and drive development. Countries are encouraged to “invest early” because foundational skills acquired early help lifelong learning, “invest smartly” in efforts proven to improve learning, and “invest for all” children and youth.

Achieving learning for all also means moving beyond financing the inputs that education systems need, to strengthening these systems to deliver results. There is growing demand from countries for Results-Based Financing, which is a promising set of tools to help achieve better alignment of incentives and desired outcomes by making financing contingent on the achievement of pre-agreed results. This approach has shown promise and could help countries leverage the financial resources needed to achieve the SDGs.

In May 2015, at the historic World Education Forum in Incheon, Korea, the World Bank Group committed to double its Results-Based Financing support for education to $5 billion over the next five years. Over a quarter of this has already been delivered.

In April 2016, the WBG committed to investing $2.5 billion over five years in education projects that include adolescent girls (aged 12-17) as direct beneficiaries. About 75% of this investment will be in low-income countries, largely in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The World Bank Group’s support to education focuses on areas that matter to developing countries:

• Ramping up Early Child Development investments to enable a lifetime of learning and raise future productivity.
• Ensuring that children who are in school are actually learning foundational skills.
• Lowering barriers to quality education for girls and children from disadvantaged communities.
• Fixing the wide disconnect between skills development, higher education and the labor market.
• Addressing systemic issues at all levels, to increase efficiency and transparency.
• Increasing innovative Results-Based Financing in responding to country demand.

It is important for education systems to provide students at all levels with the skills necessary to promote productivity and growth.

Investing in young children (from birth to age five) before they even enter primary school—ensuring they have the right stimulation, nurturing and nutrition—is one of the smartest investments a country can make to address inequality, break the cycle of poverty, and boost productivity. The “Stepping Up Early Childhood Development” report is a practical guide for policymakers and practitioners about how to invest in young children.

Quality education can only be achieved with excellent teachers. A 2014 report, “Great Teachers: How to Raise Student Learning in Latin America and the Caribbean”, distills the latest evidence and practical experience with teacher policy reforms. “How Shanghai Does It”, a 2016 World Bank Group report, also highlights how the most impressive aspects of Shanghai’s education system is the way it grooms, supports, and manages teachers, who are central to any effort to raise the education quality in schools.

To help increase labor market productivity, the World Bank Group examines how education can play a role in addressing the skills mismatch present in many countries around the world. The Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) skills measurement survey is shedding light on skills gaps and mismatches by generating new, internationally comparable data on adult workers’ skills. The World Bank Group also produces several regional skills reports, including the Preparing the next generation in Tanzania : challenges and opportunities in education, Developing Skills for Innovative Growth in the Russian Federation, and Sub-Saharan African Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Research : A Decade of Development.

The World Bank Group’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) platform has been widely used around the world, producing 167 country reports that help assess education policies and identify actionable priorities.

The World Bank Group conducts and supports rigorous impact evaluations to generate stronger evidence about what works in education under different conditions. Also, in Africa, Service Delivery Indicator (SDI) surveys track performance and quality of service delivery in education and health across countries and over time. At a global level, the World Bank Group’s EdStats website features more than 2,500 internationally comparable education indicators on access, completion, learning outcomes, expenditures, and more.

During 2000 to 2016, the World Bank Group invested $46 billion in education. Over the period of 2000-2015, the share of education in World Bank Group lending has doubled from five percent to about 10 percent, showing the importance of education in the overall portfolio.  The World Bank Group’s lending for education for fiscal year 2016 was $3.4 billion, which is the same as the average lending for education over the past 10 years. The World Bank Group’s current active education portfolio is $14.5 billion.

 In many countries, World Bank Group funds are also helping to crowd in much larger resources from governments, as well as other development partners, resulting in harmonized education programs and lower transaction costs for governments.

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In India, from 2012 to 2015, the massive nationwide Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program for elementary education reached more than 120 million children across about 1.4 million schools, helping improve the pupil-teacher ratio from 30 students per teacher to 25. During that same period, teacher attendance improved from 75 percent to 85 percent, while the share of professionally trained teachers remained stable, thereby establishing the foundation for improved quality of education. In addition, the ratio of girls to boys enrolled in government schools improved from 1:1 in 2012 to 1:1.03 in 2015.

The World Bank Group collaborates closely with United Nations (UN) agencies and development partners and will strongly support countries as they work towards the SDGs.

The World Bank Group a co-convener of the World Education Forum (May 2015; Incheon, Korea)—the most important global event on education in a decade.

The World Bank Group was instrumental in creating the multi-donorGlobal Partnership for Education (GPE), an important partner in basic education, in 2002. Efforts to better coordinate education financing from GPE and the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, are underway.

The World Bank Group partners with bilateral donors, for example, with Norway, the United States, and Germany for the Results in Education for All Children (REACH program), which is supporting efforts to build evidence on RBF in education.

Other trust fund partners include Australia, the European Commission, Ireland, Korea, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

The World Bank Group is also working with new partners including Teach for All, the Arab World Initiative, the Early Childhood Consultative Group, the Global Reading Network, the Building Evidence in Education (BE²) Group, and the Global Compact on Learning Donor Network.