World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise

Global education initiatives can improve political incentives for action. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were ssuccessful at mobilizing international and domestic actors on development challenges. Though the global impact of the MDGs— including the education goal—is still being debated, the legitimacy that progress could confer on weak or unstable governments was often a powerful incentive for change. Many countries introduced reforms to expand access to schooling in successful efforts to meet the MDGs. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators, which will include a set of comparable learning measures, could play a similar role by motivating countries to shift their focus from schooling to learning.

By supporting improvements in learning assessment, external actors can help shine a light on low learning levels and their causes. For one thing, they can help developing countries participate in regional and global assessments, which are an important tool for opening up spaces for change and influencing policy debates. They could also help ensure that test items are linked across countries and across time, which would allow results of different assessments to be more comparable. External actors can also help by supporting national assessment efforts, so that they can provide more politically salient information on learning. The READ program, a partnership among development partners, education practitioners, and low-income country governments, has helped countries strengthen their national assessments, while also supporting their participation in international assessments.

Beyond support to measure learning, external actors can also help build global knowledge on ways to diagnose system weaknesses and improve learning. This knowledge base has expanded rapidly, but more research is needed on how to adapt promising interventions to specific contexts. External actors can fund research and encourage collaboration among practitioners, researchers, and government institutions to build capacity and locally relevant knowledge on effective ways to improve learning.

External actors can also encourage inclusive reforms through project development activities, policy discussions, and support to other system actors. Though there has been much progress on the aid effectiveness agenda first agreed on in the Paris Declaration in 2005, there is still room for improvement. A key aspect of this agenda is building inclusive reforms. But progress in this area has been slow. Across all sectors, only about half of countries were judged to have systems for meaningful dialogue with civil society organizations. Moreover, dialogue between the public and private sectors was judged to be difficult and rarely led to action. Tackling these issues is vital for the emergence of the coalitions needed to design and implement effective policies.

In education, consultative groups and civil society organizations could promote more inclusive reforms. The Civil Society Education Fund (CSEF), launched in 2009, has supported national education coalitions in more than 40 developing countries, and the number of civil society organizations involved in education planning and policy has expanded rapidly. For example, the fund has supported the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) in lobbying for more participatory education planning, policy formulation, and monitoring. GNECC members have worked together to present new findings on education issues during annual education review meetings and to advocate for change.

While the overall contribution of development assistance to country investments in education is relatively small, it is important in some low-income countries (figure 11.4). In 2015 international finance accounted for 14 percent of education spending in activities but are not aligned with career development incentives are likely to be less sustainable. External actors can support alignment by shifting the focus of systems toward learning, linking their financing to results rather than the provision of specific inputs or activities.

More development partners are using results-based financing in education. These approaches seek to align system components by linking financing to results. They shift the emphasis from inputs toward performance. Some financing is linked directly to student achievement. For example, a U.K. program that supports the education system in Ethiopia provides an agreed-on amount for net increases in the number of students who pass the examination at the end of lower secondary education. The multidonorfinanced Big Results Now in Education program in Tanzania links financing to student learning and to intermediate outputs that support improvements in education quality. The ultimate impact of these approaches on system performance is still being evaluated, since they are new. But initial findings suggest they have the potential to tackle system-level constraints and improve system performance.

There is nothing inevitable about poor learning outcomes, whatever a country’s level of development. Some countries have used well-documented reforms low-income countries. But support is much higher to escape low-learning traps, successfully reorient ing in some countries. In Mali, development assistance their systems toward learning. Others have achieved accounted for approximately 25 percent of public learning outcomes that far exceed what their developeducation spending between 2004 and 2010. Morement level would predict, indicating that they escaped over, global estimates of the investments required the trap in the past. Though there is no single recipe to raise learning as part of the SDGs imply a need for achieving broad-based learning, these cases iden- to increase development assistance, particularly to tify three entry points for getting under way. First, low-income countries.

deploy information and metrics to shine a light on the

But external actors must provide financing in hidden exclusion of low learning. Second, build coalia way that aligns systems with learning. Projects tions that can better align incentives toward learning, aimed at narrow aspects of reform or on specific especially the learning of the most disadvantaged.

interventions, run the risk of exacerbating existing

Third, commit to innovation and agility, using feedmisalignments, if weaknesses in other parts of the back loops for continuous improvement. None of this system are not tackled at the same time. For examis easy, but history shows that achieving education’s ple, projects that support professional development promise will depend on taking up the challenge.