[Preface] [Educating Children in Poor Countries ]
[Educational attainment in poor countries]
[Supply and demand shortfalls] [Pros and cons of user payments]
[Conclusions] [Author Information]
Children are entitled to a free, quality basic education. Recognizing this entitlement, world leaders made the achievement of universal primary education by the year 2015 one of the Millennium Development Goals. In 2004, this goal appears to be out of reach for many poor countries. School attendance, especially for girls, is far from universal, and many children drop out of school before completing their primary education. Many children who do attend school receive an inadequate education because of poorly trained, underpaid teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and a lack of basic teaching tools suchas textbooks, blackboards, and pens and paper.
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Economic Issue No. 33 examines this critical issue. Michael Treadway prepared the text based on "User Payments for Basic Education in Low-Income Countries" (IMF Working Paper 02/182, November 2002), by Arye L. Hillman and Eva Jenkner, which is available free of charge at www.imf.org/pubs. The working paper provides statistics on schooling trends, the theory underlying the equity-efficiency problem, case studies, and a full bibliography. Public Finance and Public Policy: Responsibilities and Limitations of Government (Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, September 2003), a textbook by Professor Hillman, provides a broader examination of education and other public policy choices.
Despite considerable progress over the past two decades, however, school attendance in the world's poorest countries is by no means universal. According to the United Nations Development Program, about 113 million children worldwide were not enrolled in school at the end of 2003.
Because basic education is a recognized entitlement and society benefits when children are educated, the state should bear the cost, especially for poor children. In many poor countries, however, the state does not fulfill this obligation. The government may not have the resources to provide a free education for all, either because there is a large, untaxed shadow economy and the tax base is small, or because tax administration and collection are ineffective. And, in many countries (often the same ones), the state does a poor job with the resources it has. Funds are badly managed, and inefficiency or outright corruption may prevent resources from reaching schools. The political will to provide universal education may also be absent in undemocratic societies, if ruling elites fear that an educated population will be better equipped to challenge them. Although correcting these deficiencies is clearly a priority, it will take time. What can be done in the meantime to ensure that poor children in poor countries get an education?
A recent World Bank study found that payments by parents for basic education were widespread in 77 out of the 79 countries surveyed. User payments can take different forms. School fees may cover teachers' and administrators' salaries, materials such as pencils and textbooks, and school maintenance. Or parents may make payments in kind, for example, providing food for the teachers, assisting in the classroom, or contributing their labor for school construction or maintenance. It is important to examine the effect of such user payments on education in poor countries before deciding whether they should be continued, reformed, or prohibited.
Educational attainment in poor countries The bulk of the world's poor live in East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. School enrollment in these regions mirrors their economic performance. In fast-growing East Asia, primary school enrollment was virtually universal (99 percent) by 1997, up from 86 percent in 1980, according to World Bank data. (These are net enrollment figures, defined as the percentage of children in the appropriate age group who are in school; gross enrollment rates include children who are older than is customary for their grade level and may thus exceed 100 percent.) South Asia lags far behind, with only 77 percent of children enrolled in 1997, but this represents a huge improvement from 1980, when net enrollment was only 64 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa is a different story. Although data for 1997 are not available, we know that the gross enrollment rate fell slightly between 1980, when it was estimated at 54 percent, and 1996. It is probably about 50 percent today.
But completion of primary school is no guarantee that children have acquired basic academic skills. Surveys in a number of low-income countries document that many adults who have received some schooling (fivesix years or less) are functionally illiterate and innumerate.
Equally disheartening are the disparities in educational attainment between different groups within countries and regions. Sadly, but not surprisingly, in most low-income countries, children from poor families are much less likely to be in school than children from more affluent families, except in countries like Uzbekistan that have a strong legacy of universal education. In Pakistan, in the early 1990s, 86 percent of rich children aged 614 were in school, compared with 37 percent of poor children, making for a rich-poor gap of 49 percentage points; the gap was 52 percentage points in Senegal, and 63 percentage points in Morocco. The gap is narrower but still wide in countries like Bangladesh, Ghana, and Indonesia.
The disparity between sexes is even more dramatic. Girls figure disproportionately among the children who do not attend school in all low-income countries. The bias against girls is especially marked in South Asia and Africa; in many other countries, boys and girls attend school in roughly equal numbers, and, in some, the male-female ratio slightly favors girls.
Children with disabilities are particularly disadvantaged. It is estimated that only 5 percent of learning-disabled African children who need special education go to school, whereas 70 percent of them could attend if the schools had the right facilities. Even with better facilities, however, parents may send disabled children out to beg rather than enroll them in school.
Demand for education may not be present because of the opportunity costs of educating children: parents may prefer that their children work to supplement household income, do household chores, or care for sick family members. In African countries afflicted by AIDS, children may stay out of school to care for sick parents or orphaned siblings. Opportunity costs make even free schooling unaffordable for some families.
Corruption is another reason poor children in poor countries may not have access to quality government-financed schools: government officials may shun spending on schools in favor of big-ticket items such as defense or road construction, for example, since funding for them is easier to divert and such projects are likelier to involve kickbacks.
Pros and cons of user payments It is important to distinguish between the factors influencing the demand for and supply of education. User payments are less likely to increase school attendance when low enrollment is due to a failure of demand than when it is due to a failure of supply. Obviously, when the problem is a failure of supply because a government lacks the means or will to build or staff schools for children from poor families, user payments are one way parents can provide an education for their children. Of course, demand-side influences make user payments ineffective. If parents are unwilling or unable to put their children in school when education is free, they will not send their children to school when they are obliged to pay for it outof their own pockets. There is, however, one qualification: user payments may increase the quality of education, motivating parents who were previously unwilling to pay for their children's education to do so. Studies have confirmed that user payments increase demand for schooling if they lead to academic and other improvements. For example, at first, school attendance declined in rural Mali when school fees were raised, but this decline was more than offset by the rise in attendance that followed the construction of new schools closer to rural communities and the realization by parents that the quality of the schools had improved.
However, Chad has a long history of parental involvement in both financing and managing basic education. Community-managed schools were already in place during the colonial period. After independence, parents' associations responded to the country's political and economic instability and to the government's failure to provide even the most basic education for many rural children by taking full responsibility for managing rural schools. These associations not only took over schools that the government had abandoned but also built and operated new ones. Twenty percent of all primary school pupils in Chad are enrolled in community-run schools.
Parents also contribute to the government-run schools. The average annual cash contribution is only about $2, but parents also bear the costo of books and other supplies and contribute time as volunteers. Attendance is voluntary, but informal insurance mechanisms prevent children from being excluded even if their parents cannot pay the modest fee.
Parent-teacher associations hire and supervise more than half of Chad's primary school teachers, who teach in their own villages (centrally trained teachers are seldom willing to relocate to remote regions) after receiving minimal training. The government, with help from the World Bank, pays 80 percent of their salaries (which are only about one-third of what government-employed teachers receive), and the community covers the rest.
The case of Chad demonstrates the value that even desperately poor parents may attach to their children's education. Yet, despite their sacrifices and their cooperation, educational outcomes in Chad are poor: fewer than half of adults with six or more years of schooling can read with fluency. One can only do so much with scant resources and poorly trained teachers. The government has promised to increase its spending on education with resources freed up under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative of the World Bank and the IMF and from anticipated future oil revenues. In the meantime, user payments remain the only realistic means of making educational ends meet. Without them, the children of Chad would be far worse off. 152ee80cbc
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