Reaching the marginalized: EFA global monitoring report, 2010; 2010

010CHAPTER 12Education for All Global Monitoring ReportShort-termcoping strategiescan havedamaginglong-termconsequencesfor individualsand societies1. The Education Sectorin UNESCO has startedto put in place some ofthe elements of such anapproach. In March 2009,it launched a ‘QuickSurvey’ to collect budgetinformation on publicexpenditure in education.UNESCO professionalstaff were invited to fill ina questionnaire capturingtheir assessment ofnational budget plans.Unfortunately, themethodology was notconducive to accuratereporting of budgetinformation, spendingplans or impacts of thefinancial crisis. UNESCOhas acknowledged theneed for more rigorousand timely collection ofcurrent-year budget data(UNESCO, 2009b).The challenge facing policy-makers today is to avoidrepeating the experience of past crises. As theeffects of the economic downturn are transmittedto more households, those lacking the resourcesto cope with the shock risk being pushed into adownward spiral. Short-term coping strategiessuch as cutting spending on health, nutritionand education can have damaging long-termconsequences for individuals and societies.Governments and the international communitycan contain the damage by investing in socialprotection. But a consistent lesson from previouscrises is that early, up-front investment in crisisprevention through social protection is moreeffective than treatment after the event.Budget monitoring mattersMany governments in low-income countriesare reassessing public spending plans in theface of mounting fiscal pressure. Their room formanoeuvre depends on a range of factors, includingthe pre-crisis fiscal balance, recovery prospects,and domestic and international financing options.The impact of budget adjustments on publicspending plans for education will vary accordingto circumstance and policy choice. Options includecutting spending in real terms, scaling downplanned increases or maintaining current spendingplans through revenue raising and redistributionwithin the budget. Decisions made over the nextyear in these areas will have profoundconsequences for education financing. Publicspending cuts, or caps that are set below plannedlevels, will ultimately translate into fewerclassrooms built, fewer teachers recruitedand trained, and more children out of school.Current monitoring exercises do not adequatelytrack budget decision-making processes.International data provide comprehensivecross-country coverage of public spending, butwith a significant delay. For example, this year’sReport documents expenditure for 2007. Whilevital for monitoring broad post-Dakar trends, suchinformation reveals nothing about the direction ofthe public spending plans that will define the future.This information gap is difficult to defend. Data forthe current and previous budget years are availablein most countries, as are budget revision andreview documents. The problem is that the dataare not assembled and made publicly available byinternational or regional organizations. In the wordsof an analysis of education budgets in sub-SaharanAfrica carried out for this Report: ‘It is rathershocking in view of the strong emphasis givento monitoring progress … that there is not amore current database for analysing educationspending’ (Martin and Kyrili, 2009, p.14). Thecurrent crisis has added to the urgency of fillingthis information gap.One central conclusion is that UNESCO should befar more effective in monitoring current-year publicspending on education and reviewing revisions tofuture spending plans. 1 Through UNESCO regionaloffices and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, aregional network of education ministries’ planningand budget directors could be established. Tofurther strengthen the monitoring process, nationalpoverty reduction strategy coordinators could beincluded, along with finance ministry officialsoverseeing medium-term expenditure strategies.To assess the threat to Education for All financing,the Global Monitoring Report team commissionedDevelopment Finance International to review the 2009budgets of all thirty-seven low-income countries insub-Saharan Africa (Martin and Kyrili, 2009). Thisshould be viewed as both a partial and preliminaryexercise. It is partial because detailed andconsistent information on education expenditurefrom the 2009 budget was available for only twelvecountries, and it is preliminary because the budgetdocuments consulted reflect pre-crisis conditions.Broad budgetary patterns for the countries coveredcan be summarized under four headings:Plans to increase expenditure on education inrelation to GDP and the overall budget. Five ofthe twelve countries are in this category: BurkinaFaso, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone andZambia. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Zambiaenvisaged a significant reallocation to educationwithin a growing budget. In Mozambique,education spending was projected to growsignificantly as a share of GDP but onlymarginally as a share of the budget, reflectinga planned rise in non-social sector spending.It should be stressed that governments in severalof these countries have raised concerns overtheir capacity to finance planned educationspending. A May 2009 report on Mozambique,for example, projects that revenue will be 1.3%below the level indicated in the approved budget,which could adversely affect spending plans.Plans to maintain education spending at currentlevels in relation to GDP and total budget26