Child Poverty in Mozambique. A Situation and Trend ... - Unicef

Figure 4.21: Indicative per student provincial education expenditure, 2005
100
US$ per Student (EP and ES)
80
60
40
20
0
Niassa
Cabo
Delgado
Nampula Zambézia Tete Manica Sofala Inhambane Gaza Maputo C. Maputo
Allocated
Executed
Source: CGE 2005, Mapa II-7-1 and IV-5-1 and INE Anuário Estatístico 2005
B. Challenges for sector finance
The structure of financing within the sector has evolved in response to the imperative
to rapidly expand primary schooling. The Education for All (EFA) initiative and the
achievement of the MDGs remain the top priorities for many sector stakeholders.
However, there are growing concerns regarding the need to invest in the post-primary
school system (i.e. secondary and technical schools) so as to catch-up with demand
for places (for example, there were 70,000 more graduates from the primary system
than there were places in ESG1 in 2005) and produce sufficient numbers of qualified
teachers to staff primary schools. The quality of education at all levels of the system
is also a glaring issue: staffing primary education with teachers meeting the recently
agreed “10+1” training level would require a budget share for education of more than
40 per cent, a learner: teacher ratio of over 100 or an undesirable reduction in the
primary enrolment ratio (Verspoor, 2006).
These challenges in turn demand changes in the financing of the sector, both in terms
of the overall resource envelope and in terms of the allocation and type of funding.
Various trade-offs are faced inside and outside the sector that need to be considered.
Prominent among these is the need to build a stable and sustainable current budget
allocation for the sector to support sector recruitment and training needs. The
current budget is financed predominantly from Government revenues, which are
constrained by the size of the tax base and the need to avoid placing too great a
burden on the formal sector. Moreover, the need to maintain macroeconomic stability
precludes substantial increases in recurrent expenditure, and especially salaries: the
IMF programme in Mozambique includes an implicit cap on total government salary
expenditure at under 8 per cent of GDP (Arndt, Jones and Tarp, 2006).
The Ministry of Education’s request for 11,500 new teachers in the 2006 State Budget
was met with sufficient funds for only 4,715 teachers (GoM and PAP, 2006). This was
not purely a question of rigid application of fiscal limits. The Ministry of Education and
Culture’s bargaining position was undermined by a lack of accurate teacher needs
projections and the related problems of having no unified teacher training strategy
(which was subsequently adopted in November 2005) and contradictory figures
regarding the existing numbers of teachers within the public education system.
CHILDHOOD POVERTY IN MOZAMBIQUE: A SITUATION AND TRENDS ANALYSIS
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