Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

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  • Publication
    Education Finance Watch 2024
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-29) World Bank; UNESCO
    To achieve their national and international education goals, many countries need to invest more and better in their education systems. During the last decade, total education spending by governments, households, and donors globally has increased steadily, but this has not led to significant increases in allocations per child, especially in poorer countries with their growing populations. Total education spending per child has either decreased or stagnated globally. Additionally, the combination of the financial repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic plus escalating global debt is likely to be limiting the ability of countries to augment their investments in education. Moreover, the strain on public education budgets in recent years has coincided with a 4 to 8 percentage point decline in minimum reading and math proficiency among 15-year-olds compared to 2018 pre-COVID levels in middle-income countries (OECD, 2023). In low-income countries (LICs), where data on educational outcomes are scarce, simulations suggest that the incidence of learning poverty, which was already high before 2020, is likely to have risen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (World Bank et al., 2023). The current challenge in education finance is the need to mobilize more resources while at the same time increasing the adequacy, efficiency, and equity of funding in the face of tight fiscal space and competing priorities. Tackling the spending inefficiencies and inequalities that are common to many education systems will be vital to enable countries to make better use of their resources and strengthen the link between spending and education outcomes.
  • Publication
    Education Finance Watch 2024: Key Findings about Education Financing
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-24) World Bank; UNESCO
    The Education Finance Watch (EFW) is a collaborative effort between the World Bank, the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). The EFW aims to provide an analysis of trends, patterns, and issues in education financing around the world.
  • Publication
    100 Student Voices on AI and Education
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Cobo, C,; Munoz-Najar, A.; Bertrand, M.
    The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting the landscape of higher education (HE), presenting both opportunities and challenges. This paper discusses the results of focus group discussions conducted in 10 countries (Cameroon, Colombia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Indonesia, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, and Rwanda), examining students’ perspectives, experiences, and concerns regarding AI’s impact on education.
  • Publication
    AI Revolution in Education: What You Need to Know
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-01) Molina, E.; Cobo, C.; Pineda, J.; Rovner, H.
    The AI revolution is transforming education at an unprecedented pace, offering opportunities to personalize learning experiences, support teachers, and optimize education management. This brief explores nine key AI-driven innovations in Latin America and the Caribbean, divided into solutions for teachers, students, and administration. For teachers, AI-powered mentors and feedback systems are improving teacher recruitment, retention, and professional development. AI-assisted lesson planning and automated administrative tasks are empowering educators to focus on teaching and mentoring students. Students benefit from AI-powered tutoring systems that adapt to their individual needs. The brief also examines the use of generative AI for assignments and the need to foster responsible AI use. In education administration, AI streamlines processes, identifies at-risk students, and optimizes resource allocation, such as matching teachers to vacancies and students to schools. Navigating the promise and challenges of AI requires addressing key issues like digital divide, ethical governance, and limited evidence on effectiveness at scale. AI should enhance human expertise, not replace it. Policymakers must proactively shape the responsible development of AI to create an inclusive, innovative future of learning for all.
  • Publication
    Missing School - The Effect of Crises on Students and Teachers in Pakistan
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-03) Isa, Sana; D'Angelo, Sophia; BarĂłn, Juan D.
    Pakistani children have faced nationwide and severe disruptions to their schooling over the past several years, first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then the 2022 floods. Given the country’s vulnerability to climate change, these disruptions are likely to increase. This note explores the government’s response to COVID-19 and school closures in Pakistan; it shows how data disaggregated by gender, household location, and other variables can inform a more effective and inclusive education response and build the education system’s resilience to future emergencies.
  • Publication
    Delivering Education in the Midst of Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV)
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-22) World Bank
    Ensuring a safe environment for children to learn is more than a mission for the WorldBank. It is an urgent imperative. In large part, the success of our FCV Strategy is predicated on education. There are few spheres of development with so much potential to contribute to violence prevention and peace building. Schooling, therefore, has a critical role in developing the social cohesion for stability, as well as the skill base needed for our client countries to advance in their development and achieve economic prosperity.
  • Publication
    Count me in!: World Bank Education Global Practice - Impr oving Education Outcomes for Girls and Young Women
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-11) World Bank
    Ensuring that all girls and young women receive a quality education is their human right, a global development imperative, and a strategic priority for the World Bank. Achieving gender equality is central to the World Bank Group twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity on a livable planet. As the largest development partner in education globally, the World Bank ensures that all of its education projects are gender-sensitive, and works to overcome barriers that are preventing girls and boys from equally benefiting from countries’ investments in education.
  • Publication
    What Do You Want to Be?: Education and Work Aspirations Among the Ugandan Youth
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-01) Atamanov, Aziz; Cochinard, Frédéric; Ilukor, John; Kemigisha, Audrey; Mupere, Andrew ; Ponzini, Giulia
    This brief discusses results from the survey of the youth population in Uganda using results from the Uganda High-Frequency Phone Survey (UHFPS). UHFPS has been collected by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) in collaboration with the World Bank since June 2020. The fourteenth round conducted in August-September 2023 included questions to capture education and career aspirations of the youth population aged 15-25.
  • Publication
    Ensuring the Adequacy of Education Finance through Domestic Resource Mobilization: The Case of Sierra Leone
    (Washington, DC, 2023-11-20) World Bank
    Historically, education expenditure in Sierra Leone has been insufficient to provide quality education to all school-age children. Although real government expenditure on education increased on average by 11 percent per year between 2008 and 2014, this increase was barely adequate to keep up with rapidly expanding enrollment figures, with the total number of students enrolled in primary and secondary education rising from 709,875 to 1,809,563 between 2001 and 2015 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), 2023a; UIS, 2023b). In 2012, per-student expenditure on primary education was 5.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, compared to an average of 11.1 percent in sub-Saharan Africa (UIS, 2023c). The education system in Sierra Leone is divided into pre-primary education (three years, starting at age three), primary education (six years, starting at age six), junior secondary education (three years, starting at age 12), senior secondary education, and higher education. Primary and junior secondary education together comprise basic education, which is compulsory for all children. Transitioning from one level to another is typically based on performance in national level examinations. Starting at the secondary level, students can follow either a general academic program or opt for one of the technical and vocational education and training programs. There are three categories of schools: (a) government schools that are funded and managed by the government; (b) government-assisted schools that receive financial assistance from the government but are owned by non-government organizations such as missions or a community; and (c) private schools that are privately owned, funded, and managed without financial assistance from the government.
  • Publication
    Ensuring Equitable Financing of Schools in FCV Contexts: The Case of Democratic Republic of Congo
    (Washington, DC, 2023-11-20) World Bank
    Free education policies have vastly increased access to schooling but, if improperly financed, can reduce quality, and exacerbate inequities in education systems. To support free education, countries in sub-Saharan Africa have introduced new alternative models of school funding. Abolition of tuition fees has been the key component of free education policies implemented in sub-Saharan African countries since the 1990s (Bashir, Lockheed, Ninan and Tan, 2018). However, abolishing fees, without replacing revenue for use by schools, leads to financing shortages that can severely impair education quality. These shortages impact the equity of education systems. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods may be better able to cope with financing shortages through informal voluntary contributions from communities and revenue mobilization from NGOs and other supporters. In poorer areas, these informal means of revenue mobilization are likely to be more difficult, leading to large disparities in per-student finance between schools. To address this, sub-Saharan African countries have introduced school grant schemes, providing discretionary finance to schools for operating costs, the purchase of materials, and improvements to learning environments. School grants provide control to schools and their communities over day-to-day expenditure, typically while maintaining control of larger cost items—such as teachers and classrooms, at district or national level. However, the effective implementation of school grant schemes entails challenges: ensuring the appropriate use of grant finance requires functional school management systems, mechanisms to keep schools committed to national goals, and oversight and audit systems to ensure the proper use of finance. These tasks could be particularly difficult for underdeveloped education systems with preexisting school funding gaps and low capacity at the school level, such as those found in sub-Saharan Africa.