PRISHTINA, November 20, 2015 — The Minister of Finance of the Republic of Kosovo, Avdullah Hoti, and the World Bank’s Country Manager for Kosovo, Jan-Peter Olters, have signed today the Letters of Agreements for the US$11 million (about €9.8 million) credit for the Kosovo Education System Improvement Project that aims at strengthening selected systems that contribute to quality, accountability, and efficiency improvements in education in the Republic of Kosovo.
“Deepening ongoing reforms in the education sector and ensuring further improvements in the quality of teaching will help to provide the youth in Kosovo, faced with particularly high rates of unemployment, with the knowledge and skills to be successful in the labor market,” said Jan-Peter Olters, World Bank Country Manager for Kosovo. “As such, the World Bank-financed education project represents a central building block in Kosovo’s overarching objective of increasing productivity in key sectors of its economy and generating more dynamic rates of sustainable and inclusive growth.”
The Education System Improvement Project will support the Government’s education sector reform strategy and agenda. More specifically, the project aims at strengthening planning, financial management, and evaluation capacities at different levels of the education sector, including the national, the municipal and the school and university level, as well as to enhance and modernize the systems and practices of data management and analysis in the education sector. It also aims at supporting and institutionalizing the teacher career system, facilitating the use of international best practices in student assessment and evaluation, and enhancing the capacities and responsiveness of tertiary education institutions to the labor market.
As the project focuses at the system level, the project benefits everyone, across all levels, in the education system. In particular, a subcomponent of School Development Grants will support schools in poorer rural areas, covering approximately 45,000 students (around 20 percent of all primary schools). Indirect beneficiaries for this subcomponent will also include school teachers, administrators, and other staff employed in those schools. Another subcomponent envisions support for the implementation of the teacher licensing and performance assessment, which would directly affect about 25,000 teachers in pre-university education.
The project is to be implemented over a period of four years by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology of the Republic of Kosovo. It will be fully financed by a credit from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank Group.
The agreement signed today between by the Government of Kosovo needs to be ratified by the Parliament of Kosovo, as per Kosovo’s legislation, in order for the project implementation to begin.
