From
the outset, the thinking behind NETF has been that a combination
of low political commitment to primary education, poor
policies, and weak institutions has been more important
than a shortage of resources in explaining limited progress
toward UPE in most SSA countries since the early 1980s.
As a consequence, NETF has focused on helping countries
build the foundation for future education growth by supporting
activities that would strengthen governments’:
Political will to give adequate budgetary
priority to primary education and ensure greater focus
of public education spending on poverty to promote access
to underserved groups with little political voice, for
example, girls, rural poor, and children orphaned by
HIV/AIDS or civil strife.
Technical capacity to develop education
reforms indispensable to establishing an education system
capable of sustainable provision of adequate quality
universal primary education.
Institutional capacity to implement
these policies and programs effectively in close cooperation
with key education stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents,
communities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
These
overall objectives are operationalized by helping countries
prepare education sector development programs, or targeted
subsector interventions, through the following three
interrelated sets of country-specific and regional and
activities:
· Technical and analytical support for national
teams to prepare high-quality sector development programs
to address the supply and demand issues that during
the past two decades have constrained education development,
especially at the primary level.
· Regional studies and strategies, including
synthesizing and disseminating cross-country knowledge
on what works and what works less well in key areas
covered by sector programs, to ensure that these programs
benefit from worldwide good practices.
· Promoting activities for knowledge sharing,
and capacity and consensus building at the national,
subregional, and regional levels. Most of these are
workshops, conferences, or study tours and serve three
interrelated purposes: (a) sharing of knowledge among
countries and different education stakeholders, including
dissemination of the type of cross-country knowledge
referred to above, (b) facilitating national consensus
building among key education stakeholders on the often
difficult reforms needed to ensure that sector programs
both adequately address cost-effectiveness, quality,
and equity issues and are financially sustainable and
capable of being implemented in the national social
context, and (c) enhancing closer cooperation and synergy
among the interventions of external agencies supporting
education development in Africa.
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