Publication: Education Finance Watch 2024: Key Findings about Education Financing
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2024-12-24
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2024-12-24
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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.
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“World Bank; UNESCO. 2024. Education Finance Watch 2024: Key Findings about Education Financing. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42582 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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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 2023(Washington DC, Paris, 2023-11-14)The Education Finance Watch (EFW) is a collaborative effort between the World Bank (WB), 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. The EFW uses various sources of education, economic, and financial data from the World Bank, UIS, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The first volume of the EFW report (EFW2021) documented continuously increased global education spending in absolute terms over the decade but indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic would interrupt this trend. EFW2022 shed light on the impact of COVID-19 on global education spending in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, and revealed that half the analyzed sample of countries reduced their annual education spending, in real terms. This year, the EFW2023 updates analyses on trends and patterns of education spending for the past 10 years, up to 2021, the second fiscal year after COVID-19. As a special theme of this year’s volume, the EFW2023 sheds light on changes in the school-age population and projects its fiscal implications for the upcoming ten years for selected countries. In 2021, low-income countries (LIC) increased year-on-year total education spending (a total of government, households, and development aid) in real terms. This increase was driven by an increase in government spending, which reached 50 percent of total education spending, while official development assistance (ODA) to LIC decreased both in absolute and relative terms.Publication Challenges in Financing Education, Health, and Social Protection Expenditures in Zimbabwe(Washington, DC, 2011-02-02)The Government of Zimbabwe (GOZ) faces difficult choices in managing the size of its civil service wage bill. The Government understands the need to watch the escalating wage bill carefully and put in place a strategy to steer it to a sustainable level as early as possible. Historical and international comparisons suggest that an overall wage bill of around 10 percent of GDP should be the medium-term target. This note illustrates that Zimbabwe could take immediate steps in 2010 and 2011 that will put it on the path of a sustainable level of wage bill in the medium-term. 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However, the introduction of measures to reduce costs and increase further the share of the budget allocated to education are likely to make the successful implementation of Education for All achievable. The note presents a range of cost-saving policies, similar to those employed by other countries to reduce costs during periods of rapid system expansion without negatively impacting learning. These include rationalized use of teachers’ housing, administrative offices, and laboratories and improved utilization of secondary school teachers. Implementing these policies, alongside the increases in education outlined in the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) would make the Education for All policy more affordable. However, our most expansive enrollment scenario would only be affordable if these cost-saving policies were coupled with further increases in education’s share of the government budget.
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