Education

Education is a human right, a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. It delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income, and is the most important factor to ensure equality of opportunities.

For individuals, education promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. Globally, there is a 9% increase in hourly earnings for every extra year of schooling. For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.

Developing countries have made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom and more children worldwide are now in school. But learning is not guaranteed, as the 2018 World Development Report (WDR) stressed.

Making smart and effective investments in people’s education is critical for developing the human capital that will end extreme poverty. At the core of this strategy is the need to tackle the learning crisis, put an end to Learning Poverty, and help youth acquire the skills they need to succeed in today’s world.

Education systems across the developing world are now experiencing the worst crisis in the last century.  With the spread of COVID-19, more than 160 countries at the end of March 2020 mandated some form of school closures, impacting at least 1.5 billion children and youth. Education systems around the world continue to grapple with the complex decisions of when and how to reopen.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, this global learning crisis was stark. The learning poverty indicator, created by the World Bank and UNESCO Institute of Statistics and launched in 2019, gives a simple but sobering measure of the magnitude of this learning crisis: the proportion of 10-year-old children that are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text. In 2019, before COVID hit, an alarming 53% of children worldwide failed to reach this basic bar of proficiency in reading and comprehension, putting the Sustainable Development Goal 4 targets in jeopardy. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the figure reached up to 90% in many countries. 

COVID has made this dark situation even more grim. COVID-related school closures are forcing countries even further off-track to achieving their learning goals.  As seen from previous health emergencies, the impact on education is likely to be most devastating in countries with already low learning outcomes, high dropout rates, and low resilience to shocks. Education systems face a triple funding shock, with COVID-19 expected to put significant strains on household and donor funding that will only add to its effects on government funding. Due to learning losses and increases in dropout rates, this generation of students stand to lose an estimated $10 trillion in earnings, or almost 10% of global GDP, and countries will be driven even further off-track to achieving their Learning Poverty goals – potentially increasing Learning Poverty levels to 63%.

Education Finance

Compounding this situation, despite additional funding needs, two-thirds of low- and lower-middle-income countries have cut their public education budgets since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the joint World Bank – UNESCO Education Finance Watch (EFW). 

In comparison, only one-third of upper-middle and high-income countries have reduced their budgets.  These budget cuts have been relatively small thus far, but there is a danger that future cuts will be larger, as the pandemic continues to take its economic toll, and fiscal positions worsen.  These differing trends imply a significant widening of the already large spending disparities seen between low- and high-income countries.

According to EFW, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2018-19, high-income countries were spending annually the equivalent of US$8,501 for every child or youth’s education compared to US$48 in low-income countries. COVID-19 is only widening this huge per-capita education spending gap between rich and poor countries.

EFW stresses that the education finance challenge is not only about mobilizing resources, but also about improving the effectiveness of funding. Unfortunately, recent increases in public education spending have been associated with relatively small improvements in education outcomes. 

Countries and the international development community must invest more and invest better in education systems and strengthen the link between spending and learning and other human capital outcomes.

Last Updated: Oct 22, 2021

The World Bank’s global education strategy is focused on ensuring learning happens – for everyone, everywhere. 

Our vision is to ensure that everyone can achieve her or his full potential with access to a quality education and lifelong learning. We envision a world in which all countries prepare all their children and youth to succeed as citizens and have the tools to participate in their country’s development.

To help achieve our vision, we have set a target to reduce Learning Poverty by half by 2030. This means cutting by at least 50%, the number of children who cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10. Our efforts support achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

The World Bank works directly with governments, providing technical assistance, loans, and grants. We help countries share and apply innovative solutions to education challenges, focusing on systemic reform throughout the education cycle – from early childhood through tertiary education and lifelong learning. We do this by generating and disseminating evidence, ensuring alignment with policymaking processes, and bridging the gap between research and practice.

Strategic Approach to Education

Our vision for the future is that learning should happen with joy, purpose, and rigor for everyone, everywhere. This vision should guide today’s investments and policy reforms so that countries can lay the foundations for effective, equitable, and resilient education systems.

To guide our policy advisory and operational support to countries, we focus on policy actions that are needed to accelerate learning and that characterize the way many successful systems operate. These are presented within five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system that underpin the World Bank’s strategic education policy approach: learners, teachers, learning resources, schools, and system management:

1. Learners are prepared and motivated to learn;
2. Teachers at all levels are effective and valued;
3. Classrooms are equipped for learning;
4. Schools are safe and inclusive spaces; and
5. Education systems are well managed.

Our Principles

1. We pursue Systemic Reform Supported by Political Commitment to Learning for All Children. We take an integrated approach to the education system to ensure learning throughout the life cycle. Education services from preschool to primary, secondary education, and beyond to university and other tertiary education, need to be aligned and consistent.

2. We focus on Equity and Inclusion through a progressive path toward achieving universal access to quality education. Realizing true universal access requires equality of opportunity. We must meet the educational needs of children and young adults in fragile or conflict affected areas, those in marginalized and rural communities, girls and women, displaced populations, students with disabilities, and other vulnerable groups. Our approach is inclusive and focused. We understand the needs of governments and work with them to ensure that education works for everyone.

3. Focus on Results and Use Evidence to keep improving policy. We use metrics to guide improvements. Metrics are critical to identifying regions and schools that are achieving results, recognizing good practices, and learning what works. We invest in developing global public goods such as the Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) to measure the key drivers of learning outcomes in basic education in a cost-effective manner, building on SABER, SDI and TEACH, and work with countries on their data systems.  

4. We want to ensure Financial Commitment commensurate with what is needed to provide basic services to all. As in the case of all other public resources, money allocated to education must be adequate and spent efficiently. We want to strengthen financing tied to results. Funds need to be appropriately directed and spent smartly across regions and schools, using data and evidence of how processes are being followed and the impact of interventions to guide improvements. Nearly 40% of our operations use some results-based financing schemes.

5. Invest Wisely in Technology. Education systems must embrace and learn to harness technology to support their learning objectives. The use of EdTech should be guided by five principles: a  clear purpose and focus on educational objectives; reach all learners; empower teachers; engage an ecosystem of partners; and rigorously and routinely use data to learn what strategies, policies, and programs are effective to maximize student learning.   

Tackling the Global Learning Crisis and the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on the lives of young children, students, and youth.  The disruption of societies and economies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is aggravating the already existing global education crisis and impacting education in unprecedented ways.  

For its part, the World Bank responded to the pandemic immediately, ramping up its support to countries through a variety of different channels and on different priority interventions.  

Our support to countries covers the entire learning cycle, to help shape resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone, including during COVID-19. The World Bank is the largest external financier of education in the developing world. Over the last two decades, the World Bank has committed more than US$66 billion to supporting education projects, covering 160 countries and 25 regional states. The Education Global Practice (GP) provides implementation support to 180 projects for a total current portfolio of $23.3 billion. This is 8% of total World Bank lending. In fiscal year 2021 (FY21), the World Bank committed about $6.3 billion for education programs, technical assistance, and other projects designed to improve learning and provide everyone with the opportunity to get the education they need to succeed. 

This latest fiscal year, the World Bank also continued to be the largest implementing agency of Global Partnership for Education (GPE) grants to low-income countries. The World Bank currently manages 54% of GPE’s total grant portfolio ($1.95  billion of $3.62 billion in active grants), of which $194.5 million consists of COVID-19 Accelerated Funding Window grants.

World Bank-supported projects in education are currently reaching at least 432 million students and 18 million teachers — one-third of the student population and nearly a quarter of the teacher workforce in current client countries. 

We are also providing just-in-time policy advisory support in 65 countries and are leveraging partnerships (with UNICEF, FCDO, University of Harvard, University of Oxford, John Hopkins University, OECD, UNESCO, and others) to continue developing policy knowledge and global public goods to support country responses to the pandemic. 

Our operational and policy support is not just responding to the crisis, but is building back better so that systems do not replicate the problems that led to a learning crisis before COVID-19 but use this window of opportunity to  shape more resilient systems that are  better prepared to cope with future shocks, as well as more equitable systems that assure opportunities for all.

For example, to help measure the ongoing global response, Johns Hopkins University, the World Bank, and UNICEF have partnered to create a COVID-19 – Global Education Recovery Tracker.

To aid in reopening schools and stemming learning losses, UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Bank, the World Food Programme, and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) published a joint framework for reopening schools that provides high-level guidance around safe operations, stemming learning loss, ensuring the wellbeing of students and teachers, and reaching the most marginalized children.

In support of this framework, the World Bank’s Education Global Practice has (i) created short School Reopening Policy Action Notes to curate evidence and examples and provide links to materials that countries have used to support various stakeholders (students, teachers, parents, school management) during both remote and in-person instruction, (ii) developed excel-based costing tools to identify the resources required for delivering remote instruction, including social-emotional learning, and for implementing the activities implied by the joint framework, and (iii) invested in randomized control trials around the world to test different approaches that employ digital technologies to support learning at home or to assist educators in the classroom.

Last Updated: Oct 22, 2021

Support to Countries Throughout the Education Cycle

Our support to countries covers the entire learning cycle, to help shape resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone, including during COVID-19.  Some examples include:

The $500 million Supporting Egypt Education Reform Project supports a major government effort to improve teaching and learning conditions in public schools in Egypt. It focuses on: (i) improving kindergarten education; (ii) enhancing the capacity of teachers and educational leaders; (iii) the intensive use of digital resources for teaching and learning; and (iv) the introduction of a new, computer-based school exit examination regulating access to universities. The Ministry of Education and Technical Education has developed and administered new computer-based tests for grades 10 and 11 students nationwide; and has trained staff to create an item bank, manage administration and marking of the tests, and make scores available electronically in a timely manner. Initial training in 2018-2019 covered 1,400 staff, and is constantly expanding to train more staff and teachers as the tablet-based testing expands to grade 12.

In Lao PDR, in 2011-12, only 6% of 3-5 year-olds from the poorest quintile were on track in literacy and numeracy. The IDA-funded Early Childhood Education (ECE) Project (2014-2020), covering 32,000 3-5 year-olds in 22 target districts in Lao PDR, is changing this. As a result of the project, nearly 70% of children have benefitted from access to ECE programs in target villages, and nearly 82% teachers have benefited from training and feedback based upon classroom observations. Evaluations suggest significant gains in student enrollment, nutritional outcomes and learning levels due to project interventions.

The Higher Education Quality Improvement Project in Peru supported the government’s National Education Project 2021, which adopted a strategy to increase the quality and relevance of tertiary education by creating a higher education quality assurance system (HEQAS) providing an assurance framework across basic and higher education levels. The project provided support to 135 higher education institutions, of which 20 were from among the country’s 50 universities and 115 were from among the country’s 370 public institutes.

In 2013, just 5% of the poorest households in Uzbekistan had children enrolled in preschools. Thanks to the Improving Pre-Primary and General Secondary Education Project, by July 2019, around 100,000 children will have benefitted from the half-day program in 2,420 rural kindergartens, comprising around 49% of all preschool educational institutions, or over 90% of rural kindergartens in the country.

The Punjab Skills Development Project in Pakistan supports the ambitious agenda of training the youth in Punjab. The aim is to address high youth unemployment in the province, which stems from their limited skills and insufficient industry and market experience in key economic sectors. Increased access in market relevant trades offered by public and private sector training providers, resulted in enrollment of 52,000 students. Some 80 public and private institutes offered courses in priority sectors and trained 16,000 graduates.

In Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) project is aimed at enhancing women and adolescent girls’ empowerment; increasing access to quality reproductive, child and maternal health services, and improving regional knowledge sharing globally. Investing in girls’ education and keeping girls in school is a critical first step in opening opportunities for women in the Sahel.  More than more than 40,000 girls across project countries have benefited from schooling-related interventions; 400 health and midwifery training institutions have been evaluated and equipped across the region; and 3 centers of excellence in Niger, Cote d’Ivoire and Mali have been launched, offering for the first time in the Sahel, a master’s program on Nursing and Obstetrics. Simultaneously, thousands of young boys and men have contributed to discussions about reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health; and about gender, power, and healthy couple dynamics as brothers, husbands and fathers.  The SWEDD2 project is scaling up activities underway, and also expanding to two new countries – Cameroon and Guinea. SWEDD 2 will serve as an instrument for empowering girls and building human capital, initially concentrating on three regions, namely the Far North, North, and Adamaoua, where about 700,000 girls 10-19 years of age are vulnerable to these risks.

Since 2014, the Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence (ACE) Program has become synonymous with delivering quality and relevant post-graduate education that meets the demand for skills in priority fields. Between 2014 and 2020, the International Development Association (IDA) has invested over $580 million to support more than 70 centers in 20 countries in West, Central, East, and Southern Africa. This supported over 14,000 Masters and PhD students in agriculture, health, and other sciences. The program continues to expand across Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on improving teaching and learning, expanding access, and ensuring sustainability.

Last Updated: Oct 22, 2021

The Power of Partnerships

In addition to working closely with governments in our client countries, the World Bank also works at the global, regional, and local levels with a range of technical partners, including foundations, non-profit organizations, bi-laterals, and other multilateral organizations. These collaborations are funded by other strategic partners such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and UNESCO. Some examples of our most recent global partnerships include:

UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank have joined forces to close the learning data gaps that still exist and that preclude many countries to monitor of the quality of their education systems and assess if their students are learning. The three organizations have agreed to a Learning Data Compact, a commitment to ensure that all countries, especially low-income countries, have at least one quality measure of learning by 2025, supporting coordinated efforts to strengthen national assessment systems.

The Compact is in line with the Mission: Recovering Education 2021 by which the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF are partnering to support countries as they take all actions possible to plan, prioritize, and ensure that all learners are back in school; that schools take all measures to reopen safely; that students receive effective remedial learning and comprehensive services to help recover learning losses and improve overall welfare; and their teachers are prepared and supported to meet their learning needs. 

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS):

Ambition: Measuring and urging attention to foundational literacy as a prerequisite to achieve SDG4

This partnership was launched in 2019 to help countries strengthen their learning assessment systems, better monitor what students are learning in internationally comparable ways, and improve the breadth and quality of global data on education. Together, UIS and the World Bank launched the Learning Poverty indicator.

FCDO and Gates Foundation: EdTech Hub 

Ambition: Increase just in time support on technology to governments

Supported by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), in partnership with the Gates Foundation, the EdTech Hub is aimed at improving the quality of ed-tech investments. The Hub launched a rapid response Helpdesk service to provide just-in-time advisory support to 70 low- and middle-income countries planning education technology and remote learning initiatives.

UNICEF, UNESCO, & GPE: Continuous and Accelerated Learning in Response to COVID-19

Through a consortium with UNICEF and UNESCO, supported by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the World Bank is providing greater support to teachers for accelerated instruction; using EdTech to support continuity of learning; and getting reading, learning, and play materials into homes. 

UNICEF: Reimagine Education

Reimagine Education aims to leverage Digital Technologies as an “accelerator” and equalizer for learning. UNICEF and the World Bank are coming together to unlock the potential of education technology to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, to tackle the learning crisis, and to build back a better, more responsive and resilient education system.

John Hopkins University & UNICEF: Monitoring the countries’ education response to COVID-19

A COVID-19 Global Education Recovery Tracker was developed as a joint effort of the World Bank, UNICEF, and Johns Hopkins University to monitor information across four key areas defining the global learning recovery.

Bringing together global funding to maximize results

The World Bank has launched two Trust Funds to streamline partner investments that support operations and amplify impact. The two funds will be complementary – covering lifelong learning. Beyond these two trust funds, the World Bank receives support through partner-specific trust funds such as the Russia Education Aid for Development (READ) Trust Fund.

The Foundational Learning Compact (FLC):

A new umbrella trust fund designed to align partnerships, financing, and technical support around a few specific and measurable education outcome indicators, increasing Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS) (a metric which combines quantity and quality of schooling), and decreasing Learning Poverty. The FLC’s scope covers Early Childhood (including the Early Learning Partnership), Primary Education, and Secondary Education. It is designed around three pillars (measurement, policy, and knowledge and implementation capacity-building) with an emphasis on cross-cutting themes (financing; fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV); gender; inclusion; and technology).

Tertiary Education & Skills Training (TEST):

A new umbrella trust fund that aims to strengthen the policy framework and increase system-wide and institutional capacity, to enable access to relevant, quality, and equitable higher education, formal Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), and youth and adult learning, which are aligned to labor market, economic, and societal needs. TEST will help to align support for development of global public goods and co-financing of implementation grants around tertiary education and skills training of the current or imminent workforce.

Global Initiatives

At the global level, the World Bank promotes cross-regional and cross-sectoral knowledge; fosters in-depth technical knowledge and teams of experts through Global Solutions Groups and Thematic Groups; and incubates ideas, programs, and partnerships – including with multilateral, bilateral, foundations and with civil society organizations (CSOs) – in strategic areas of knowledge, advisory, and operational support.

Accelerating Improvements:

Supporting countries in establishing time-bound learning targets and a focused education investment plan, outlining actions and investments geared to achieve these goals.

Launched in 2020, the Accelerator Program works with a set of ‘Accelerator’ countries to channel investments in education and to learn from each other. The program coordinates efforts across partners to ensure that the countries in the program show improvements in foundational skills at scale over the next three to five years. These investment plans build on the collective work of multiple partners, and leverage the latest evidence on what works, and how best to plan for implementation.

Universalizing Foundational Literacy:

Readying children for the future by supporting acquisition of foundational skills—the most fundamental of which is literacy—which are the gateway to other skills and subjects.

The Literacy Policy Package (LPP) includes near-term interventions of the education approach that successful countries have followed to help all children in classrooms become literate today. These include assuring political and technical commitment to making all children literate; ensuring effective literacy instruction by supporting teachers; providing quality, age-appropriate books; teaching children first in the language they speak and understand best; and fostering children’s oral language abilities and love of books and reading.

Strengthening Measurement Systems:

Enabling countries to gather and evaluate information on learning and its drivers more efficiently and effectively.

The World Bank supports initiatives to help countries effectively build and strengthen their measurement systems to facilitate evidence-based decision-making. Examples of this work include:

• The Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD): an innovative initiative that measures the key drivers of learning outcomes in basic education in a cost-effective manner. In doing so, the dashboard highlights gaps between current practice and what the evidence suggests would be most effective in promoting learning, and it gives governments a way to set priorities and track progress as they work to close those gaps. Operationalizing the World Development Report (WDR) 2018 framework, the GEPD provides a snapshot of how the education system is working in terms of Practices, Policies, and Politics.
• Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP): a one-stop shop for knowledge, capacity-building tools, support for policy dialogue, and technical staff expertise to aid those working toward better assessment for better learning. LeAP is currently supported by the Russia Education Aid for Development (READ) Trust Fund program.

Building & Synthesizing Evidence:

Filling gaps on what works to improve learning and drawing out lessons to inform policy and implementation.

The new Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), co-convened with FCDO, brings together a diverse group of leading researchers and practitioners to provide much-needed guidance for busy policymakers, focused on the most cost-effective policies to improve education access and accelerate foundational learning in low- and middle-income countries.

Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund: In the past 5 years, the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund, a multi-donor trust fund focused on building evidence in the human development sectors, has supported 45 randomized control trials (with total funding of nearly $20 million) that test out different approaches for improving education outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. To ensure the findings make a difference, SIEF has also invested in disseminating this evidence and building capacity of government staff, local researchers, and local journalists to help them critically appraise education evidence.

Supporting Successful Teachers:

Helping systems develop the right selection, incentives, and support to the professional development of teachers.

The Global Platform for Successful Teachers has two main instruments: global public goods that support the implementation of the key principles, and operations that accompany governments in implementing successful teacher policies. Currently, the World Bank Education GP has over 100 active projects supporting over 18 million teachers worldwide, about a third of the teacher population in low- and middle-income countries. In 12 countries alone, these projects cover 16 million teachers, including all primary school teachers in Ethiopia and Turkey, and over 80% in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam. Two examples of Global Public Goods created as part of the Platform are: 

• Teach: A World Bank-developed classroom observation tool designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries. Since Teach launched in 2019, it has been applied 35 times in 20 countries and is in the process of being applied in another 16 countries.
• Coach: The World Bank’s program focused on accelerating student learning by improving in-service teacher professional development (TPD) around the world. While Teach helps identify teachers’ professional development needs, Coach leverages these insights to support teachers to improve their teaching.

Supporting Education Finance Systems:

Strengthening of country financing systems to mobilize more resources and improve the equity and efficiency of sector spending.

The Global Education Finance Platform (GEFP) aims to support the strengthening of country financing systems to mobilize more resources and improve the equity and efficiency of education spending, by  bringing together various partners to work on the development of sustainable financing strategies, better public financial management and stronger data and monitoring systems for education financing.

Last Updated: Oct 22, 2021