essay on education is important in development of country

Why education is the key to development

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Education is a human right. And, like other human rights, it cannot be taken for granted. Across the world, 59 million children and 65 million adolescents are out of school . More than 120 million children do not complete primary education.

Behind these figures there are children and youth being denied not only a right, but opportunities: a fair chance to get a decent job, to escape poverty, to support their families, and to develop their communities. This year, decision-makers will set the priorities for global development for the next 15 years. They should make sure to place education high on the list.

The deadline for the Millennium Development Goals is fast approaching. We have a responsibility to make sure we fulfill the promise we made at the beginning of the millennium: to ensure that boys and girls everywhere complete a full course of primary schooling.

The challenge is daunting. Many of those who remain out of school are the hardest to reach, as they live in countries that are held back by conflict, disaster, and epidemics. And the last push is unlikely to be accompanied by the double-digit economic growth in some developing economies that makes it easier to expand opportunities.

Nevertheless, we can succeed. Over the last 15 years, governments and their partners have shown that political will and concerted efforts can deliver tremendous results – including halving the number of children and adolescents who are out of school. Moreover, most countries are closing in on gender parity at the primary level. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to finish what we started.

But we must not stop with primary education. In today’s knowledge-driven economies, access to quality education and the chances for development are two sides of the same coin. That is why we must also set targets for secondary education, while improving quality and learning outcomes at all levels. That is what the Sustainable Development Goal on education, which world leaders will adopt this year, aims to do.

Addressing the fact that an estimated 250 million children worldwide are not learning the basic skills they need to enter the labor market is more than a moral obligation. It amounts to an investment in sustainable growth and prosperity. For both countries and individuals, there is a direct and indisputable link between access to quality education and economic and social development.

Likewise, ensuring that girls are not kept at home when they reach puberty, but are allowed to complete education on the same footing as their male counterparts, is not just altruism; it is sound economics. Communities and countries that succeed in achieving gender parity in education will reap substantial benefits relating to health, equality, and job creation.

All countries, regardless of their national wealth, stand to gain from more and better education. According to a recent OECD report , providing every child with access to education and the skills needed to participate fully in society would boost GDP by an average 28% per year in lower-income countries and 16% per year in high-income countries for the next 80 years.

Today’s students need “twenty-first-century skills,” like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and digital literacy. Learners of all ages need to become familiar with new technologies and cope with rapidly changing workplaces.

According to the International Labour Organization, an additional 280 million jobs will be needed by 2019. It is vital for policymakers to ensure that the right frameworks and incentives are established so that those jobs can be created and filled. Robust education systems – underpinned by qualified, professionally trained, motivated, and well-supported teachers – will be the cornerstone of this effort.

Governments should work with parent and teacher associations, as well as the private sector and civil-society organizations, to find the best and most constructive ways to improve the quality of education. Innovation has to be harnessed, and new partnerships must be forged.

Of course, this will cost money. According to UNESCO, in order to meet our basic education targets by 2030, we must close an external annual financing gap of about $22 billion. But we have the resources necessary to deliver. What is lacking is the political will to make the needed investments.

This is the challenge that inspired Norway to invite world leaders to Oslo for a Summit on Education for Development , where we can develop strategies for mobilizing political support for increasing financing for education. For the first time in history, we are in the unique position to provide education opportunities for all, if only we pull together. We cannot miss this critical opportunity.

To be sure, the responsibility for providing citizens with a quality education rests, first and foremost, with national governments. Aid cannot replace domestic-resource mobilization. But donor countries also have an important role to play, especially in supporting least-developed countries. We must reverse the recent downward trend in development assistance for education, and leverage our assistance to attract investments from various other sources. For our part, we are in the process of doubling Norway’s financial contribution to education for development in the period 2013-2017.

Together, we need to intensify efforts to bring the poorest and hardest to reach children into the education system. Education is a right for everyone. It is a right for girls, just as it is for boys. It is a right for disabled children, just as it is for everyone else. It is a right for the 37 million out-of-school children and youth in countries affected by crises and conflicts. Education is a right regardless of where you are born and where you grow up. It is time to ensure that the right is upheld.

This article is published in collaboration with Project Syndicate . Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter .

Author: Erna Solberg is Prime Minister of Norway. Børge Brende is Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Image: Students attend a class at the Oxford International College in Changzhou. REUTERS/Aly Song.

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Introduction

This paper addresses the topic of education and its importance in the development of a country. The topic will be explored and the argument considered in the following manner. First, there will be a definition of the words education and development . Second, will briefly consider a country where the education system has yielded positive results; the country that will be considered is Germany. Third, the paper will examine what happens when a country does not invest in the education of its citizens; the country considered will be Afghanistan. The thesis presented in this paper is the following: It is not possible for a country to be classified as a developed nation unless the educational system is an important part of the country’s domestic policy.

This topic was researched by reading peer-reviewed journals and grey literature about education , sociology , and, political science . The search terms used were the following search terms: ‘education development’ ; ‘education success’ ; ‘Germany education’ ; ‘Ireland education’ ; ‘Canada education’ ; ‘social impact education’ ; and, ‘economic impact education’ .

Definitions

While lengthy, the following definitions are worth considering in answering the thesis of this paper. There are various definitions of the word education , but pertinent to this paper is that used when looking at the focus of education. Cohen (2006) note that simply focusing on linguistics plus mathematical literacy is not enough, but “…that research-based social, emotional, ethical, and academic educational guidelines can predictably pro- mote the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that provide the foundation for the capacity to love, work, and be an active community member” (Cohen 202). In other words, education is not a mechanical, rote learning academic process, but is a system that is holistic and inclusive of other disciplines, thereby producing a student, at the end of the process, who is well placed to take his/her position as a responsible member of society.

When we consider the meaning of the word development, the words of Alkire (2010) perhaps best illustrates the relationship between education and development: “People are the real wealth of a nation. The basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to live long, healthy and creative lives” (Alkire 2). In other words, the ability to enable an environment that lets individuals live their lives that are beneficial. When these lived lives become mutually beneficial, a nation is born. Carayannis, Pirzadeh and Popescu (2012) in looking at how best to define the nation-state, references Guehenno who states that “…[a nation] … bind[s] together the citizens of a nation … [and] is the product of a unique combination of historical factors, and can never be reduced to a single dimension, whether social, religious, or racial …[what] bring people together …[is] the memory of what they have been” (Carayannis, Pirzadeh and Popescu 8). Essentially, the latter point binds the argument that communities are driven by relationships that are bound by shared history and experiences. Communities need education to be the binding force that supports and creates a nation of people driven by common aspirations and goals. Without an education, it is not possible for a nation to hold itself together successfully.

Successful Education Practices

One particular nation comes to mind as an example of how education is used to build the success that allows a nation to develop economically. Germany has an education system that is bound tightly to the economic needs of the country’s success. From childhood, students are accessed and steered into courses and programs for which they have the skills, and these skills are directed into the industrial and economic need of the country. The result is that Germany is one of the most envied educational systems and one of the most envied economies. In reference to development, the German government notes that the country’s “development cooperation takes its lead from the concept of lifelong learning. Education does not stop after the first graduation certificate … People of every age must be given the opportunity to learn and develop. Education never ends” (BMZ 4). This concept of education as an element of social, cultural and, ultimately, nation building, is not uniquely Germany, but Germany has created a system that is responsive to its economic needs. Kotthoff (2011) describes the challenges in the German education system as tensions between selectivity vs. comprehensiveness; equity vs. excellence; and, academic subject knowledge vs. the didactic teaching skills of the educational professionals (Kotthoff 30; 38; 46; 55). In other words, there are constant priorities that need to be balanced in order to maintain an educational system that is responsive to the needs of the country. German evidence of success is found in the manner in which the vocational arm of the educational system, ensures work for students. Upon completing vocational schools and then completing training contracts, there is usually a job. German industries “pro-actively select the work on offer .. ensuring the system’s popularity for decades and [it] underpinned the rise and rise of the German manufacturing sector” (Hirst).

When Education is Not a Priority

A country where education is not a priority is Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the political unrest of 30-40 years ago produced a social and political system that resulted in almost 30 years of war. During this time, education was not a priority, particularly for women. Women were either not educated or given minimal education. The result was the primary caregiver in the household raising children, but being unable to even help these children learn the basic elements of literacy. While not the sole cause, this practice of limited education enabled a political and religious fundamentalism that threw the country back to almost medieval standards. Since the American led Allied intervention of Afghanistan, in spite of many ongoing difficulties, schools are being built, some girls are able to acquire an education, and the country is slowly emerging for the medieval warfare that has plagued it for many decades (Human Rights Watch).

To conclude, the above arguments support the thesis of this paper. The thesis is that it is not possible for a country to be classified as a developed nation unless the educational system is an important part of the country’s domestic policy. The examples of the impact of education on two countries with histories of devastating wars, Germany and Afghanistan, support this argument. Where a nation has proactively engaged its educational policy in support of the country’s economic development, there is success. Germany, in spite of the terrible history of wars in the twentieth century, reinvented itself through education. Whether or not Afghanistan can do the same thing remains to be seen. The evidence in Afghanistan suggests that the changes in that country have been significant since the American led intervention. Non-governmental organizations and national governments around the world have poured money and resources into the country, since that time, in an effort to stem the political and social regression of that nation. There have been changes, some of them small, but provision of education for the girls of Afghanistan is one of the positive outcomes of the intervention. This may put Afghanistan back on the road to independent nationhood one day. Germany was able to recover from the ravages of the Second World War. It is possible that through education Afghanistan will be able do so as well.

Works Cited

Alkire, S. “Human Development: Definitions, Critiques, and Related Concepts.” 2010.

Bundesministerium fur wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung. Vocational educataion and training in German development policy, BMZ Strategy Paper 8 . BMZ, Division Education. Berlin: Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperationa nd Development, 2012.

Carayannis, E., A. Pirzadeh and D. Popescu. Institutional Learning and Knowledge Transfer Across Epistemic Communities . Vol. 13. Springer, 2012.

Cohen, J. “Social, Emotional, Ethical, and Academic Education: Creating a Climate for Learning, Participation in Democracy, and Well-Being.” harvard educational Review 76.2 (2006).

Hirst, T. What is the secret of Germany’s success? 11 July 2014. 24 October 2017. <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/07/germany-economic-success-world-cup/>.

Human Rights Watch. “I won’t be a Doctor, and one day you’ll be sick”: Girl’s Access to Education in Afghanistan . 17 October 2017. 24 October 2017. <https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/10/17/i-wont-be-doctor-and-one-day-youll-be-sick/girls-access-education-afghanistan>.

Kotthoff, H. “Between Excellence and Equity: The Case of the German Education System.” Revista Española de Educación Comparada 18 (2011): 27-60.

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Why education matters for economic development

Harry a. patrinos.

Senior Adviser, Education

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The World Bank Group is the largest financier of education in the developing world, working in 94 countries and committed to helping them reach SDG4: access to inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

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 equity and inclusion.

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. Education is further a powerful catalyst to climate action through widespread behavior change and skilling for green transitions.

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 advanced cognitive, socioemotional, technical and digital skills they need to succeed in today’s world.

In low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in Learning Poverty (that is, the proportion of 10-year-old children that are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) increased from 57% before the pandemic to an estimated 70% in 2022.

However, learning is in crisis. More than 70 million more people were pushed into poverty during the COVID pandemic, a billion children lost a year of school , and three years later the learning losses suffered have not been recouped . If a child cannot read with comprehension by age 10, they are unlikely to become fluent readers. They will fail to thrive later in school and will be unable to power their careers and economies once they leave school.

The effects of the pandemic are expected to be long-lasting. Analysis has already revealed deep losses, with international reading scores declining from 2016 to 2021 by more than a year of schooling. These losses may translate to a 0.68 percentage point in global GDP growth. The staggering effects of school closures reach beyond learning. This generation of children could lose a combined total of US$21 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value or the equivalent of 17% of today’s global GDP – a sharp rise from the 2021 estimate of a US$17 trillion loss.

Action is urgently needed now – business as usual will not suffice to heal the scars of the pandemic and will not accelerate progress enough to meet the ambitions of SDG 4. We are urging governments to implement ambitious and aggressive Learning Acceleration Programs to get children back to school, recover lost learning, and advance progress by building better, more equitable and resilient education systems.

Last Updated: Mar 25, 2024

The World Bank’s global education strategy is centered 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. To reach this, we are helping countries build foundational skills like literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills – the building blocks for all other learning. From early childhood to tertiary education and beyond – we help children and youth acquire the skills they need to thrive in school, the labor market and throughout their lives.

Investing in the world’s most precious resource – people – is paramount to ending poverty on a livable planet. Our experience across more than 100 countries bears out this robust connection between human capital, quality of life, and economic growth: when countries strategically invest in people and the systems designed to protect and build human capital at scale, they unlock the wealth of nations and the potential of everyone.

Building on this, the World Bank supports resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. We do this by generating and disseminating evidence, ensuring alignment with policymaking processes, and bridging the gap between research and practice.

The World Bank is the largest source of external financing for education in developing countries, with a portfolio of about $26 billion in 94 countries including IBRD, IDA and Recipient-Executed Trust Funds. IDA operations comprise 62% of the education portfolio.

The investment in FCV settings has increased dramatically and now accounts for 26% of our portfolio.

World Bank projects reach at least 425 million students -one-third of students in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Bank’s Approach to Education

Five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system underpin the World Bank’s education policy approach:

Learners are prepared and motivated to learn;
Teachers are prepared, skilled, and motivated to facilitate learning and skills acquisition;
Learning resources (including education technology) are available, relevant, and used to improve teaching and learning;
Schools are safe and inclusive; and
Education Systems are well-managed, with good implementation capacity and adequate financing.

The Bank is already helping governments design and implement cost-effective programs and tools to build these pillars.

Our Principles:

We pursue systemic reform supported by political commitment to learning for all children.
We focus on equity and inclusion through a progressive path toward achieving universal access to quality education, including 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.
We focus on results and use evidence to keep improving policy by using metrics to guide improvements.
We want to ensure financial commitment commensurate with what is needed to provide basic services to all.
We invest wisely in technology so that education systems embrace and learn to harness technology to support their learning objectives.

Laying the groundwork for the future

Country challenges vary, but there is a menu of options to build forward better, more resilient, and equitable education systems.

Countries are facing an education crisis that requires a two-pronged approach: first, supporting actions to recover lost time through remedial and accelerated learning; and, second, building on these investments for a more equitable, resilient, and effective system.

Recovering from the learning crisis must be a political priority, backed with adequate financing and the resolve to implement needed reforms. Domestic financing for education over the last two years has not kept pace with the need to recover and accelerate learning. Across low- and lower-middle-income countries, the average share of education in government budgets fell during the pandemic , and in 2022 it remained below 2019 levels.

The best chance for a better future is to invest in education and make sure each dollar is put toward improving learning. In a time of fiscal pressure, protecting spending that yields long-run gains – like spending on education – will maximize impact. We still need more and better funding for education. Closing the learning gap will require increasing the level, efficiency, and equity of education spending—spending smarter is an imperative.

Education technology can be a powerful tool to implement these actions by supporting teachers, children, principals, and parents; expanding accessible digital learning platforms, including radio/ TV / Online learning resources; and using data to identify and help at-risk children, personalize learning, and improve service delivery.

Looking ahead

We must seize this opportunity to reimagine education in bold ways. Together, we can build forward better more equitable, effective, and resilient education systems for the world’s children and youth.

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 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. Countries such as Brazil (the state of Ceará) and Kenya have achieved dramatic reductions in learning poverty over the past decade at scale, providing useful lessons, even as they seek to build on their successes and address remaining and new challenges.

Universalizing Foundational Literacy

Readying children for the future by supporting acquisition of foundational skills – which are the gateway to other skills and subjects.

The Literacy Policy Package (LPP) consists of interventions focused specifically on promoting acquisition of reading proficiency in primary school. 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.

Advancing skills through TVET and Tertiary

Ensuring that individuals have access to quality education and training opportunities and supporting links to employment.

Tertiary education and skills systems are a driver of major development agendas, including human capital, climate change, youth and women’s empowerment, and jobs and economic transformation. A comprehensive skill set to succeed in the 21st century labor market consists of foundational and higher order skills, socio-emotional skills, specialized skills, and digital skills. Yet most countries continue to struggle in delivering on the promise of skills development.

The World Bank is supporting countries through efforts that address key challenges including improving access and completion, adaptability, quality, relevance, and efficiency of skills development programs. Our approach is via multiple channels including projects, global goods, as well as the Tertiary Education and Skills Program . Our recent reports including Building Better Formal TVET Systems and STEERing Tertiary Education provide a way forward for how to improve these critical systems.

Addressing Climate Change

Mainstreaming climate education and investing in green skills, research and innovation, and green infrastructure to spur climate action and foster better preparedness and resilience to climate shocks.

Our approach recognizes that education is critical for achieving effective, sustained climate action. At the same time, climate change is adversely impacting education outcomes. Investments in education can play a huge role in building climate resilience and advancing climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate change education gives young people greater awareness of climate risks and more access to tools and solutions for addressing these risks and managing related shocks. Technical and vocational education and training can also accelerate a green economic transformation by fostering green skills and innovation. Greening education infrastructure can help mitigate the impact of heat, pollution, and extreme weather on learning, while helping address climate change.

Examples of this work are projects in Nigeria (life skills training for adolescent girls), Vietnam (fostering relevant scientific research) , and Bangladesh (constructing and retrofitting schools to serve as cyclone shelters).

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:

(1) The Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) : This tool offers a strong basis for identifying priorities for investment and policy reforms that are suited to each country context by focusing on the three dimensions of practices, policies, and politics.

Highlights gaps between what the evidence suggests is effective in promoting learning and what is happening in practice in each system; and
Allows governments to track progress as they act to close the gaps.

The GEPD has been implemented in 13 education systems already – Peru, Rwanda, Jordan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Islamabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sierra Leone, Niger, Gabon, Jordan and Chad – with more expected by the end of 2024.

(2) Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) : LeAP is a one-stop shop for knowledge, capacity-building tools, support for policy dialogue, and technical staff expertise to support student achievement measurement and national assessments for better learning.

Supporting Successful Teachers

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

Currently, the World Bank Education Global Practice has over 160 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.

A World Bank-developed classroom observation tool, Teach, was designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries. It is now 3.6 million students.

While Teach helps identify patterns in teacher performance, Coach leverages these insights to support teachers to improve their teaching practice through hands-on in-service teacher professional development (TPD).

Our recent report on Making Teacher Policy Work proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability.

Supporting Education Finance Systems

Strengthening country financing systems to mobilize resources for education and make better use of their investments in education.

Our approach is to bring together multi-sectoral expertise to engage with ministries of education and finance and other stakeholders to develop and implement effective and efficient public financial management systems; build capacity to monitor and evaluate education spending, identify financing bottlenecks, and develop interventions to strengthen financing systems; build the evidence base on global spending patterns and the magnitude and causes of spending inefficiencies; and develop diagnostic tools as public goods to support country efforts.

Working in Fragile, Conflict, and Violent (FCV) Contexts

The massive and growing global challenge of having so many children living in conflict and violent situations requires a response at the same scale and scope. Our education engagement in the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) context, which stands at US$5.35 billion, has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting the ever-increasing importance of the FCV agenda in education. Indeed, these projects now account for more than 25% of the World Bank education portfolio.

Education is crucial to minimizing the effects of fragility and displacement on the welfare of youth and children in the short-term and preventing the emergence of violent conflict in the long-term.

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.

The ongoing Supporting Egypt Education Reform project , 2018-2025, supports transformational reforms of the Egyptian education system, by improving teaching and learning conditions in public schools. The World Bank has invested $500 million in the project focused on increasing access to quality kindergarten, enhancing the capacity of teachers and education leaders, developing a reliable student assessment system, and introducing the use of modern technology for teaching and learning. Specifically, the share of Egyptian 10-year-old students, who could read and comprehend at the global minimum proficiency level, increased to 45 percent in 2021.

In Nigeria , the $75 million Edo Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation (EdoBESST) project, running from 2020-2024, is focused on improving teaching and learning in basic education. Under the project, which covers 97 percent of schools in the state, there is a strong focus on incorporating digital technologies for teachers. They were equipped with handheld tablets with structured lesson plans for their classes. Their coaches use classroom observation tools to provide individualized feedback. Teacher absence has reduced drastically because of the initiative. Over 16,000 teachers were trained through the project, and the introduction of technology has also benefited students.

Through the $235 million School Sector Development Program in Nepal (2017-2022), the number of children staying in school until Grade 12 nearly tripled, and the number of out-of-school children fell by almost seven percent. During the pandemic, innovative approaches were needed to continue education. Mobile phone penetration is high in the country. More than four in five households in Nepal have mobile phones. The project supported an educational service that made it possible for children with phones to connect to local radio that broadcast learning programs.

From 2017-2023, the $50 million Strengthening of State Universities in Chile project has made strides to improve quality and equity at state universities. The project helped reduce dropout: the third-year dropout rate fell by almost 10 percent from 2018-2022, keeping more students in school.

The World Bank’s first Program-for-Results financing in education was through a $202 million project in Tanzania , that ran from 2013-2021. The project linked funding to results and aimed to improve education quality. It helped build capacity, and enhanced effectiveness and efficiency in the education sector. Through the project, learning outcomes significantly improved alongside an unprecedented expansion of access to education for children in Tanzania. From 2013-2019, an additional 1.8 million students enrolled in primary schools. In 2019, the average reading speed for Grade 2 students rose to 22.3 words per minute, up from 17.3 in 2017. The project laid the foundation for the ongoing $500 million BOOST project , which supports over 12 million children to enroll early, develop strong foundational skills, and complete a quality education.

The $40 million Cambodia Secondary Education Improvement project , which ran from 2017-2022, focused on strengthening school-based management, upgrading teacher qualifications, and building classrooms in Cambodia, to improve learning outcomes, and reduce student dropout at the secondary school level. The project has directly benefited almost 70,000 students in 100 target schools, and approximately 2,000 teachers and 600 school administrators received training.

The World Bank is co-financing the $152.80 million Yemen Restoring Education and Learning Emergency project , running from 2020-2024, which is implemented through UNICEF, WFP, and Save the Children. It is helping to maintain access to basic education for many students, improve learning conditions in schools, and is working to strengthen overall education sector capacity. In the time of crisis, the project is supporting teacher payments and teacher training, school meals, school infrastructure development, and the distribution of learning materials and school supplies. To date, almost 600,000 students have benefited from these interventions.

The $87 million Providing an Education of Quality in Haiti project supported approximately 380 schools in the Southern region of Haiti from 2016-2023. Despite a highly challenging context of political instability and recurrent natural disasters, the project successfully supported access to education for students. The project provided textbooks, fresh meals, and teacher training support to 70,000 students, 3,000 teachers, and 300 school directors. It gave tuition waivers to 35,000 students in 118 non-public schools. The project also repaired 19 national schools damaged by the 2021 earthquake, which gave 5,500 students safe access to their schools again.

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.

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, bilaterals, and other multilateral organizations. Some examples of our most recent global partnerships include:

UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Coalition for Foundational Learning

The World Bank is working closely with UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the Coalition for Foundational Learning to advocate and provide technical support to ensure foundational learning. The World Bank works with these partners to promote and endorse the Commitment to Action on Foundational Learning , a global network of countries committed to halving the global share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 by 2030.

Australian Aid, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Echida Giving, FCDO, German Cooperation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Conrad Hilton Foundation, LEGO Foundation, Porticus, USAID: Early Learning Partnership

The Early Learning Partnership (ELP) is a multi-donor trust fund, housed at the World Bank. ELP leverages World Bank strengths—a global presence, access to policymakers and strong technical analysis—to improve early learning opportunities and outcomes for young children around the world.

We help World Bank teams and countries get the information they need to make the case to invest in Early Childhood Development (ECD), design effective policies and deliver impactful programs. At the country level, ELP grants provide teams with resources for early seed investments that can generate large financial commitments through World Bank finance and government resources. At the global level, ELP research and special initiatives work to fill knowledge gaps, build capacity and generate public goods.

UNESCO, UNICEF: Learning Data Compact

UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank have joined forces to close the learning data gaps that still exist and that preclude many countries from monitoring the quality of their education systems and assessing 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.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS): Learning Poverty Indicator

Aimed at 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.

FCDO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: EdTech Hub

Supported by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), in partnership with the Bill & Melinda 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.

MasterCard Foundation

Our Tertiary Education and Skills global program, launched with support from the Mastercard Foundation, aims to prepare youth and adults for the future of work and society by improving access to relevant, quality, equitable reskilling and post-secondary education opportunities. It is designed to reframe, reform, and rebuild tertiary education and skills systems for the digital and green transformation.

Bridging the AI divide: Breaking down barriers to ensure women’s leadership and participation in the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Common challenges and tailored solutions: How policymakers are strengthening early learning systems across the world

Compulsory education boosts learning outcomes and climate action

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The Role of Education in Development

First Online: 30 August 2019

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Tristan McCowan 6

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education ((PSGHE))

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Understanding the role of education in development is highly complex, on account of the slippery nature of both concepts, and the multifaceted relationship between them. This chapter provides a conceptual exploration of these relationships, laying the groundwork for the rest of the book. First, it assesses the role of education as a driver of development, including aspects of economic growth, basic needs and political participation. Second, it looks at the constitutive perspective, involving education as national status, human right and human development. Finally, it assesses the ‘other face’ of education and its negative impacts, as well as the specificities of higher education in relation to other levels.

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McCowan, T. (2019). The Role of Education in Development. In: Higher Education for and beyond the Sustainable Development Goals. Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19597-7_2

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Transforming lives through education

Transforming education to change our world

UNESCO provides global and regional leadership on all aspects of education from pre-school to higher education and throughout life. It works through its Member States and brings together governments, the private sector and civil society to strengthen education systems worldwide in order to deliver quality education for all. As a thought leader it publishes landmark reports and data for policy-makers, implements programmes on the ground from teacher training to emergency responses and establishes and monitors norms and standards for all to guide educational developments.

Right to education in a ruined world

Southern Italy, 1950. Three children are huddled around a makeshift desk made out of reclaimed wood, scribbling in their notebooks. The classroom has an earthen floor and roughly clad walls. The children’s clothes are ragged. They are wearing home-made slippers because shoes and the money to buy them are rare commodities in the war-ravaged south.

Although World War II ended five years earlier, the scars of conflict are still visible in this black and white photo from a report commissioned by UNESCO from legendary photojournalist David Seymour.

At the time when the photograph was taken, less than half of Italy’s population could read and write and just a third completed primary school. 70 years later, these children’s grandchildren enjoy an over 99% literacy rate. In the wake of the war, UNESCO led a major education campaign in Europe to respond to the education crisis, to rebuild links between people and to strengthen democracy and cultural identities after years of conflict. The emphasis then was on the fundamental learning skill of literacy.

Immediately after World War two UNESCO led a major education campaign in Europe to respond to the education crisis, fix and rebuild links between people and strengthen cultural identities after years of conflict. David Seymour’s images show the extent of the fight against illiteracy led by the post-war Italian government and non-governmental organisations backed by UNESCO.

Looking back at the deprived surroundings Seymour captured in his photo essay, one can see the extent of success. Seventy-one years later, those children’s grandchildren enjoy a 99.16 per cent literacy rate.

Similar programmes were held across the globe, for instance in devastated Korea where UNESCO led a major education textbook production programme in the 1950s. Several decades after, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations and Korean citizen Ban Ki-Moon expressed the importance of such a programme for the country's development:

The flowering of literacy

In a Korea devastated by war and where UNESCO led a major education textbook production programme in the 1950s, one student, Ban Ki-Moon, now Former Secretary-General of the United Nations, saw the world open up to him through the pages of a UNESCO textbook. Several decades after, he expressed the importance of such a programme for his country's development on the world stage.

Reaching the remote villages perched atop the Andes in Peru during the early 1960s wasn’t without its challenges for UNESCO’s technical assistance programme to bring literacy to disadvantaged communities. While Peru’s economy was experiencing a prolonged period of expansion, not all Peruvians were able to benefit from this growth which was limited to the industrialised coast. Instead, Andes communities were grappling with poverty, illiteracy and depopulation.

Today, the number of non-literate youths and adults around the world has decreased dramatically, while the global literacy rate for young people aged 15-24 years has reached 92 %. These astonishing successes reflect improved access to schooling for younger generations.

Photojournalist Paul Almasy has left us the poignant image of a barefoot older man while he’s deciphering a newspaper thanks to his newfound literacy skills.

The classroom at the UNESCO mission in Chinchera, in the Andean highlands of Peru, had allowed the old man to discover the world beyond his tiny village.

However, there are still huge obstacles to overcome. Data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics shows that 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 it is still the case that globally more than 450 million children - six out of 10 - have failed to gain basic literacy skills by the age of 10. And beyond literacy programmes, massive investments in skills for work and life, teacher training, and education policies are needed in a world that is changing ever faster.

Global priorities

Africa, home to the world’s youngest population, is not on track to achieve the targets of SDG 4. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is expected to account for 25% of the school-age population by 2030, up from 12% in 1990, yet it remains the region with the highest out-of-school rates. Girls are more likely to be permanently excluded from education than boys. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated inequalities, with 89% of learners not having access to computers and 82% lacking internet access to benefit from distance learning. The lack of trained teachers further jeopardizes progress towards SDG4: pre-pandemic only 64% of whom were trained at the primary level and 58% at the lower secondary level.

As part of its Priority Africa Flagship 2022 – 2029 , UNESCO has launched Campus Africa: Reinforcing Higher Education in Africa with the objective to build integrated, inclusive, and quality tertiary education systems and institutions, for the development of inclusive and equitable societies on the continent.

Gender

There are immense gender gaps when it comes to access, learning achievement and education, most often at the expense of girls and women. It is estimated that some 127 million girls are out of school around the world. For many girls and women around the world, the classroom remains an elusive, often forbidden space. UNESCO monitors the educational rights of girls and women around the world and shares information on the legal progress toward securing the right to education for women in all countries. Despite important progress in recent decades, the right to education is still far from being a reality for many girls and women. Discriminatory practices stand in the way of girls and women fully exercising their right to participate in, complete, and benefit from education. And while girls have difficulty with access, boys face increasing challenges, and particularly disengagement , from education at later stages. Globally only 88 men are enrolled in tertiary education for every 100 women. In 73 countries, fewer boys than girls are enrolled in upper-secondary education.

UNESCO's Her Atlas analyzes the legal frameworks of nearly 200 states to track which laws are enabling---or inhibiting---the right to education for girls and women. This interactive world map uses a color-coded scoring system to monitor 12 indicators of legal progress towards gender equality in the right to education.

Monitoring the right to education for girls and women

What makes me proud is that soon I will finish building a new house. I have already been able to buy a cow and I will soon be able to have another pond

Madagascar’s coastal Atsinanana region is known for its lush rainforests and fish breeding.

The country has a young population, but only one out of three children can complete primary education. Among those who are able to finish primary school, only 17% have minimum reading skills, while just a fifth of them have basic maths competencies. Once they leave school, children face a precarious labour market and unstable jobs, just like their parents.

Natacha Obienne is only 21 years old, but she is already in charge of a small fish farm, a career that is usually pursued by men. As one of the many out-of-school women in her area, she was able to set up her own business after vocational training taught her the basics of financial management and entrepreneurship, as well as the practicalities of breeding fish.

She understood that fish feeding depends on the temperature of the water. If it’s well managed, a higher number of fish is produced. ‘I immediately applied everything I learnt’ she says.

The classroom she attended changed the course of her life and she hopes other young people will follow in her footsteps.

I no longer depend on my parents and I am financially independent

She’s not alone. Around 3,000 youths in Madagascar have been trained since the start of the UNESCO-backed programme, some of whom have set up their own business and achieved financial independence. Education was the best way to ease people's emancipation.

Like Emma Claudia, 25, who after her vocational training started a restaurant with just a baking tray and a saucepan.

What does my family think? They are surprised and amazed by my evolution because I haven’t been able to complete my studies. I don’t have any school diplomas.

While Natacha and Emma Claudia have been able to transform their world through education, millions of children out of school around the world are still denied that dream.

Discrimination against girls remains widespread and nearly one billion adults, mostly women, are illiterate. The lack of qualified teachers and learning materials continues to be the reality in too many schools.

Challenging these obstacles is getting harder as the world grapples with the acceleration of climate change, the emergence of digitization and artificial intelligence, and the increasing exclusion and uncertainty brought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

We resumed school a while ago and it’s been stressful. We are trying to retrieve what we lost during quarantine, the worst thing about not being in school is the number of things you miss. Learning behind a screen and learning in person are incomparable.

Aicha is lucky to be able to continue her education. Her country has the highest rate of out-of-school children in the world – 10.5 million – and nearly two-thirds are women. To compound the problem, Nigeria’s northern states suffer from the violence that targets education.

In Russia, too, Alexander and his school friends had to cope with virtual learning and the lack of interactions.

All Russian students were moved to online studying. Needless to say, it was a rough year for all of us, several friends were struggling with depressive moods. They were missing their friends and teachers. So did I.

To protect their right to education during this unprecedented disruption and beyond, UNESCO has launched the Global Education Coalition , a platform for collaboration and exchange that brings together more than 175 countries from the UN family, civil society, academia and the private sector to ensure that learning never stops.

Building skills where they are most needed

Crouched over a pedal-powered sewing machine, Harikala Buda looks younger than her 30 years. Her slim fingers fold a cut of turquoise brocade before deftly pushing it under the needle mechanism.

Harikala lives in rural Nepal, where many villagers, particularly women, don’t have access to basic education. Women like Harikala rely on local community UNESCO-supported learning centres to receive literacy and tailoring skills. In a country where 32% of people over 15 are illiterate, particularly women and those living in rural areas, education is the only route to becoming self-reliant.

I have saved a small amount. My husband’s income goes towards running the house, mine is saved. We must save today to secure our children’s future

Having access to a classroom is the first step to creating a better world for the student, the student’s children and the student’s community. This is a lesson that matters a lot to

Kalasha Khadka Khatri, a 30-year-old Nepali mother. She grew up in a family of 21, with no option to go to school. Two of her children didn’t survive infancy because she was unable to pay for medical treatment. After acquiring sewing skills at her local community learning centre, Kalasha can now provide for her family.

Harikala and Kalasha were able to learn their skills through the support of the UNESCO’s Capacity Development for Education Programme (CapED), an initiative that operates in some 26 least-developed and fragile countries.

Reimagining the future of education

As the world slowly recovers after the COVID-19 crisis, 244 million children and youth worldwide are still out of school. And a 2022 survey by UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank and OECD finds that one quarter of countries have yet to collect information on children who have and have not returned to school since the pandemic started.

Rebuilding how and where we learn requires policy advice, stronger education legislation, funds mobilisation, advocacy, targeted programme implementation based on sound analysis, statistics and global information sharing. Quality education also calls for the teaching of skills far beyond literacy and maths, including critical thinking against fake news in the digital era, living in harmony with nature and the ethics of artificial intelligence, to name a few of the critical skills needed in the 21st century.

UNESCO captured the debate around the futures of education in its landmark report from 2022 entitled Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education.

The Transformative Education Summit , that took place during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022, as well as the Pre-Summit hosted by UNESCO to forge new approaches to education after the COVID-19 crisis, address the toughest bottlenecks to achieving SDG 4 and inspire young people to lead a global movement for education. World leaders committed to put education at the top of the political agenda. UNESCO has been mobilizing and consulting all stakeholders and partners to galvanize the transformation of every aspect of learning. UNESCO launched a number of key initiatives such as expanding public digital learning, making education responsive to the climate and environmental emergency, and improving access for crisis-affected children and youth.

The two children sitting at their makeshift desk in Italy in 1950 could not have imagined what a modern learning space might look like or how a modern curriculum or the tools and teacher training to deliver it might have been thought out and shaped to offer them the most from education. They could not have imagined the global drive to ensure that everyone was given a chance to learn throughout life. The only thing that has not changed since the photo was taken is the fact that education remains a fundamental and universal human right that can change the course of a life. To the millions still living in conditions of poverty, exclusion displacement and violence it opens a door to a better future.

Explore all the work and expertise of UNESCO in education

1 The Problem of Education Quality in Developing Countries

Published: March 2019
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The universalization of basic education was set to be one of the great policy successes of the twentieth century, yet millions are still unenrolled, and many of those who attended school learned little. The ‘learning crisis’ now dominates the global education policy agenda, yet little is understood of why education quality reforms have had so little success compared to earlier expansionary reforms. This chapter sets out the rationale for this book, which is to explore how the nature of the political settlement or distribution of power between contending social groups in a given country shapes efforts to get learning reforms on the policy agenda, how they are implemented, and what difference they make to what children learn. It discusses debates about the sources and determinants of the learning crisis, examining its extent and nature and providing a rationale for the key themes the book takes up in subsequent theoretical, empirical, and comparative chapters.

Introduction

Universal basic education was set to be one of the great development successes of the twentieth century, as countries all around the world enthusiastically expanded provision, enrolling ever more of their young in primary and secondary schools. Yet by the early 2000s, it was already evident that not only were millions still out of school, but that a majority dropped out early, attended sporadically, or learned little while there (UNESCO 2014 ). As one observer summarized it, ‘schooling ain’t learning’ (Pritchett 2013 ): there is more to learning than placing children in schools. The ‘learning crisis’ is acknowledged in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 to ‘ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning’, 1 an emphasis on quality and equality in contrast to the focus on access in Millennium Development Goal 2. This learning crisis is widely yet unevenly spread, varying between countries, classes, genders, and social groups (World Bank 2017 ). But whereas expanding primary schooling was a comparatively popular and measurably successful policy goal, addressing poor quality teaching and low levels of learning has so far proven less so (Bruns and Schneider 2016 ). A few countries have managed to expand their education systems while enhancing learning. But it is easier to build schools, abolish fees, recruit more teachers, and instruct parents to send their children, than it is to ensure that schools, teachers, and students are equipped and motivated for teaching and learning once there.

This book contributes to making sense of this global learning crisis, by exploring the conditions under which reforms likely to shift education provisioning onto a higher-quality pathway are undertaken and enacted. It takes as its starting point the view that politics is likely to matter in explaining why this is the case. As a recent review put it, education reform is:

a highly charged and politicized process; what gets implemented—and its impact—depends as much or more on the politics of the reform process as the technical design of the reform. (Bruns and Schneider 2016 , 5)

There are good reasons to believe that variations in how countries adopt and implement reforms necessary to promote learning relate to differences in their political economies. These differences may play out in the design of reforms that are attempted and adopted, and in what gets implemented—including that it is more politically popular and less taxing of often weak state capacities to expand school provision than to improve learning outcomes. Yet, barring some notable exceptions (e.g. Grindle 2004 ), there has been little political analysis of education in general (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011 ; Gift and Wibbels 2014 ), and still less on the political economy of education quality in developing countries—a gap that has been noted and bemoaned in several recent reviews (Kingdon et al. 2014 ; Nicolai et al. 2014 ; Wales, Magee, and Nicolai 2016 ; Bruns and Schneider 2016 ). As a contribution to filling this critical gap, this book sets out and tests hypotheses about how different types of political context interact with the education policy domain in ways that shape the uptake and implementation of reforms designed to improve learning outcomes.

The book features comparative analysis of the politics of education quality reforms across six low- to middle-income countries—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda—all of which were relatively successful at rapidly expanding access to primary schooling, but which have all found it much harder to improve learning outcomes, in part (we suggest) because of the variable levels of political commitment that exist in each context for reforms aimed at improving the quality of education. In this volume, we understand political commitment to reflect the incentives and ideas that predominate amongst political elites, and which are shaped by the underlying character of politics and power in specific contexts. The concept we use to describe ‘the balance or distribution of power between contending social groups and social classes, on which any state is based’ (di John and Putzel 2009, 4) is a ‘political settlement’, and we have chosen our cases to represent different types of these settlements.

The comparison explores how different distributions of power shaped incentives and ideas around education quality reforms and the institutions and processes of implementation, tracing the politics of reform from the political centre down through different levels of governance to the school, taking into account the impact of the external environment (for example, aid) and the policy legacies and challenges in each context. What we want to examine here is less the broad question of ‘how politics shapes educational outcomes’ per se, than the ways in which politics shapes the commitment and capacity of elites and governments in developing countries to promote reforms that are aimed at improving learning outcomes. In particular, and following several systematic reviews of what works to improve learning outcomes in developing countries (e.g. Glewwe et al. 2011 ; Tikly and Barrett 2013 ), we focus on efforts to improve the level and management of resourcing accorded to schools, and the quality and presence of teachers through training, incentives, and oversight mechanisms.

What we know about quality reforms is that they are inherently more difficult to design and to ‘sell’ to the public: there is less certainty about ‘what works’ and results are harder to measure (Nelson 2007 ). It is easier to design and implement top-down command-and-control responses to build more schools and recruit more teachers and children than to devise workable solutions to the ‘craft’ challenge of the interpersonal, transactional nature of effective teaching and learning (Pritchett 2013 ). Strengthening local accountability is difficult. Teachers, the group whose interests are most likely to suffer from reforms to enhance their performance accountability, tend to be well-organized, influential, and equipped to resist them (Corrales 1999 , 2006 ; Moe and Wiborg 2017 ; Kingdon et al. 2014 ; Béteille, Kingdon, and Muzammil 2016 ). Parents and communities, particularly in developing countries, are often less well-equipped and informed to articulate demand for quality improvements from their political leaders or frontline providers (Dunne et al. 2007 ; Mani and Mukand 2007 ). This means that for parents and communities, both the ‘long route’ (via the process of political representation) and the ‘short route’ (via relationships with frontline providers, teachers, and schools) to accountability for the delivery of high quality education, may be obstructed or subverted (World Bank 2003 ). A recent review concluded that three features of the politics of education are particularly relevant in analysing the prospects for reform: (i) the strength of teacher unions compared with other education stakeholders or labour unions; (ii) the ‘opacity of the classroom’—the need for reforms to shape teacher behaviour in the classroom, over which direct control is impossible; and (iii) the slow or lagged nature of the results of quality reforms (compared, for example, with the abolition of fees, learning reforms will yield no instant or obvious political return) (Bruns and Schneider 2016 ).

The World Bank identifies children’s unreadiness to learn, along with teacher and school management skills, and inadequate school inputs, as the proximate determinants of the learning crisis (World Bank 2017 ). It argues that the intractability of education quality reforms is not inherently a matter of inadequate resources, although many failing systems are also under-resourced (UNESCO 2014 ; World Bank 2017 ). Instead, it is a problem of ‘misalignment’ between learning goals, policies, and practices, in which the dominant role of teacher unions and other forms of ‘unhealthy politics’ plays an important and persistent role (World Bank 2017 ). It concludes that ‘healthier’ forms of politics—in particular the use of information to increase ‘the political incentives for learning’ and broad-based pro-reform coalitions—are critical to align goals, policies, and practices around improved learning. While highlighting the significance of the politics of teacher and school management on the frontline of the learning crisis, the emphasis on ‘alignment’ sidelines the significance of contention in education reform, and fails to address the questions to which it gives rise: under what conditions do broad-based, pro-reform coalitions come about? In which political contexts does information about education performance become embedded in functioning mechanisms of accountability? Why do some states visibly devote more capacity to learning and more political resources to quality reforms than others?

This book seeks to pick up the analysis at the point where the World Development Report (WDR) 2018 leaves off, pursuing a political explanation of the misalignments and contentions that shape the uptake of learning reforms. The analysis seeks to test assumptions that political settlements where elites have shorter time-horizons (competitive and clientelistic settlements, such as those in Ghana and Bangladesh) are less likely to take up the politically intractable task of redistributing power in the education system than those (the dominant settlements of Cambodia and Rwanda) where elites are better insulated, can adopt longer-term horizons and might be more likely to take up developmentally important projects. It also seeks to explore how different political settlements interact with systems of governance within the domain of education, ranged from traditional hierarchically organized bureaucracies to multi-stakeholder models, to create a range of different outcomes in ‘the many layers within a specific sector in between the top levels of policymaking and the service provision frontline’ (Levy and Walton 2013 , 4).

Following this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 sets out the intellectual rationale for a political settlement-based approach to the analysis of education quality reforms, and establishes the theoretical framework and methodological approach used to research the politics in the cases presented here. Chapters 3 through 8 comprise the set of six country cases, each of which gives an account of the quality of basic education and its development in that country; of the political settlement and its influences on education policy and the reform agenda; and of the implementation of policies aimed at improving learning from the national level downwards through sub-national levels of governance and, in most cases, through to schools themselves. Chapter 9 draws together the theoretical, methodological, and empirical findings from the comparative analysis, and points towards areas for further conceptual development and empirical research. The book concludes with two commentaries from leading authorities in the field on the arguments and cases presented in the book.

The Global Learning Crisis

From an access point of view, progress towards universal primary education in low-income countries accelerated markedly in the past two decades (see Figure 1.1 ). Globally, 93 per cent of children now attend primary school at the appropriate age, up from 84 per cent in 1999. By 2015, 20 million more developing country children had completed primary school than would have done so had the rate of school expansion before 2000 continued. In seventeen countries, age-correct enrolment rates increased by more than 20 per cent between 1999 and 2012, implying a remarkably rapid expansion. And gains were concentrated in the poorest world regions of Sub-Saharan Africa (where the net enrolment ratio [NER] rose from 59 per cent in 1999 to 79 per cent in 2012) and South and West Asia (where it went from 78 to 94 per cent over the same period). Between 2000 and 2010, NER increased from 27 to almost 64 per cent in Niger, from 42 to 76 per cent in Guinea, and in Burundi, from less than 41 to 94 per cent in 2010. The proportion of children who had never attended school dropped in Ethiopia from 67 per cent in 2000 to 28 per cent in 2011, and in Tanzania from 47 per cent in 1999 to 12 per cent in 2010. Globally, gender parity in enrolment was achieved at primary level and almost achieved at secondary level over the period, in part due to the push on girls’ education from MDG3 on gender equality; of countries with data, 69 per cent were set to achieve gender parity at primary level, but only less than half at secondary level by 2015. 2

Primary enrolment rates worldwide, 1970–2015

However, the idea that mass education was ‘one of the successes of the MDGs’ has been tempered by ‘more sobering trends’ (Unterhalter 2014 , 181). Large numbers of children remain excluded from school, with 58 million children aged six to eleven unenrolled in 2012, many in conflict-affected regions. At least one-fifth of all children were likely to drop out before completing primary in 32 countries, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNESCO 2015 ). And rural–urban location, socio-economic class, and marginalization and social exclusion continued to determine which children enrolled and stayed on in school. Despite gains in gender parity on literacy in many places, progress towards adult literacy has been slow; in fact, almost all gains have been due to the transition of schooled youth into adulthood, rather than programmes of learning for adults. About half a billion women still lacked basic literacy in 2015 (UNESCO 2015 ). And while most children in most countries can now attend school, in a great many, a minority learn as much as their governments expect them to. By their own standards, a large number of developing country school systems are failing to endow their students with even minimum competencies of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Globally, some 125 million children do not attain functional literacy or numeracy even after four years of school, while the majority—in some cases the vast majority—of primary school students in many education systems do not attain even the basic competencies in reading or arithmetic needed to continue their learning (World Bank 2017 ).

The poor quality of the education received by the majority in developing countries is of particular concern because of the potential role of good quality education in reversing—or reinforcing—economic and related inequalities. The quality of education is increasingly understood to be a more powerful driver of economic growth than the size of an education system, and higher-quality basic education is associated with more inclusive and equitable forms of growth (Hanushek 2009 ; Hanushek and Woessmann 2007 ). However, the learning crisis aggravates, and is aggravated by, social and economic inequalities of all kinds. Differences in learning attainments between lower- and higher-income regions and countries are substantial, as a comparison of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test scores shows: the average student in a low-income country performs worse than 95 per cent of students in OECD countries—that is, would require remedial lessons in any developed country school system. Differences within a region can also be significant: Colombian students attain basic literacy six years earlier than their Bolivian counterparts, while only 19 per cent of young Nigerian primary school completers can read, compared with 80 per cent in Tanzania (World Bank 2017 ). Girls, rural students, and children from minority or other socially marginalized groups generally learn less, compared with boys, city children, and other advantaged groups (World Bank 2017 ). This reflects how gender and class disadvantage, remote geography, and membership of marginalized social groups amplify unequal learning outcomes; these then accumulate as children transition through the education system and on into the labour market (UNESCO 2012 , 2014 ). Nonetheless, some countries outperform others on learning indicators: Vietnam, for instance, performs much better than predicted by its per capita income; students in Latvia and Albania similarly learn more than expected from their other social and economic indicators (World Bank 2017 ). This again reinforces the sense that the drivers of educational quality are not simply related to economic or cultural factors, and that political factors are likely to play a significant role here.

Roots of the Learning Crisis: Lessons from Efforts at Reform

Why is the learning crisis so pervasive and apparently stubborn, when policies of educational expansion were so rapidly and enthusiastically adopted across the developing world? Improving quality is recognized to be more expensive and more difficult than increasing school places, and there is a perceived trade-off between keeping unit costs low and maximizing learning achievement (Nicolai et al. 2014 , 2). Enabling high quality learning is particularly challenging amongst low-income populations because of: institutional or personal biases against children from poor or marginalized groups (UNESCO 2010 ); challenges in the home environment (Smith and Barrett 2011 ); the adverse cognitive effects of early and chronic malnourishment (Crookston et al. 2010 , 2013 ; World Bank 2017 ); and dropout, poor attendance, child labour, and other characteristic features of childhoods lived in extreme poverty (Rose and Dyer 2008 ). School meals tend to raise participation and attendance rates, for instance, but evidence that school meals improve learning outcomes is more mixed (Adelman, Gilligan, and Lehrer 2008 ; Snilstveit et al. 2015 ). Poverty and inequality may be the biggest obstacles to education quality (Tikly and Barrett 2013 ), but while good quality education may be the surest pathway out of poverty and towards more equitable societies, there are few simple solutions to raising education standards in such settings. There is, in any case, limited consensus about what works to improve learning, as a recent ‘review of reviews’ found (Evans and Popova 2016 ).

Under-resourced and poorly managed systems lead to persistently poor quality basic education, but more finance is not necessarily the answer. Low- and middle-income countries typically spend too little on education: only 41 of 150 countries for which data is available spend the recommended 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education, and 25 countries spend less than half that. Globally, the average proportion of public spending on education was only 15 per cent (against a recommended 20 per cent), a proportion that has barely changed since 1999; in some low- and middle-income countries, the share of education in public spending dropped below 5 per cent of GDP during the MDG period (UNESCO 2014 ). Under-resourcing does not explain all of the problems of education quality, but it helps to explain why fewer than 5 per cent of Tanzanian students have their own reading textbook, why 130 Malawian students cram into the average first-year classroom, and why only one in four Chad schools has a toilet (UNESCO 2014 ).

Yet the extent to which resources shape education quality is known to be highly variable, depending on how they are governed and managed at the different levels of education systems. The resources that do reach schools are often poorly deployed, usually because of over-centralized control, so that the meagre resources are inefficiently and ineffectively used, and the evidence on how more resources contribute to better learning via lower pupil–teacher ratios and more qualified teachers is mixed and context-specific (Glewwe et al. 2011 ). In their review of seventy-nine studies in developing countries, Glewwe et al. (2011, 41) concluded that a reasonably functional physical classroom tended to matter, but so did teachers with more subject knowledge, longer school days, and the provision of tuition; by contrast, teacher absence had a ‘clear negative effect’. Many teachers freelance as private tutors or find other ways to supplement their income (Bray 2006 ). Leakage is common, particularly through loss of public sector employee time (Chaudhury et al. 2004 ).

Where teachers do show up, they are often themselves too poorly educated to impart high quality learning: most new teachers in The Gambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Chad, Togo, Guinea-Bissau, and Cameroon did not even meet secondary school minimum qualifications for teachers in the 1990s (UNESCO 2004). And, despite massive investments in teacher training in the 2000s, in one-third of countries less than 75 per cent of teachers are trained even up to (often quite low) national standards (UNESCO 2014 ). Tikly and Barrett ( 2013 , 4) found that while low reading and mathematics attainments were closely linked to poverty and inequality, ‘schools can make a difference’, even more so in lower-income countries than in richer countries, particularly through effective school leadership and teacher management. As the World Bank ( 2017 ) summarized it, the four determinants of the learning crisis are: (i) children do not arrive ready to learn; (ii) teachers often lack the needed skills and motivation; (iii) school management skills are low; and (iv) school inputs have failed to keep pace with expansion. A critical lesson is that learning crises are systemic, not merely errors at the margin: entire education systems generally fail to deliver adequate levels of learning. This reflects the ‘misalignment’ of the goals and practices of the education system with the learning outcomes it needs to generate, notably on matters such as setting learning objectives and responsibilities, monitoring learning, financing, and the motivations and incentives of key actors within the system (World Bank 2017 ).

What causes these misalignments? The World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People , undertook a political analysis of service delivery failures, linking them to weak or dysfunctional relationships of accountability between citizens and service-users (with respect to education, parents, and students) and service providers (teachers, officials, politicians) (World Bank 2003 ). Four dimensions of accountability most needed strengthening in relation to education performance: (i) voice, or how well citizens could hold the state—politicians and policymakers—accountable for performance in discharging its responsibility for education; (ii) compacts, or how well and how clearly the responsibilities and objectives of public engagement were communicated to the public, and to private organizations that provide services (Ministries of Education, school districts); (iii) management, or the actions that created effective frontline providers (teachers, administrators) within organizations; and (iv) client power, or how well citizen-clients could increase the accountability of schools and school systems (World Bank 2003 , 113). Central insights included that accountability for public service provision could be exercised via the ‘long route to accountability’, whereby citizens and civil society mandate political actors to provide education services, politicians then direct state actors to design such services, and the central state then tasks local governments and frontline service to deliver the services (and they are potentially punished electorally for failures at education service delivery); or via the ‘short route’, through which service-users hold frontline providers directly to account, through the use of their powers as consumers or rights-bearing citizens to demand services and sanction failures (World Bank 2003 ).

Recognizing the central importance of accountability, efforts to strengthen the ‘short route’ to accountable education provision took the form of interventions and experiments to promote community participation in school-based management; induce community monitoring of school quality indicators, such as enrolment, attendance, and performance; introduce vouchers and other ‘school choice’ initiatives; and efforts to monitor teacher performance, amongst others. It seems clear that teachers perform best when motivated and monitored to do so (Bruns, Filmer, and Patrinos 2011 ; Bruns and Luque 2014 ), yet efforts to enhance learning by strengthening ‘client power’ have yielded mixed results (Bruns et al. 2011 ; Carr-Hill et al. 2015 ; Snilstveit et al. 2015 ; World Bank 2017 ). Carr-Hill et al. (2015) found that community participation in school management yielded positive and large effects in middle-income countries, but smaller and more uneven results in poorer countries, where, amongst other things, community members lacked the capacities or incentives to engage with school performance (see also Dunne et al. 2007 ).

Some of these interventions, particularly the quasi-experimental efforts at information and monitoring, were introduced with limited reference to the political contexts within which they needed to operate, something which recent reviews of social accountability have found to be critical (Devarajan, Khemani, and Walton 2011 ; Hickey and King 2016 ). These ‘widgets’—pared-down tools for project intervention that failed to engage with the deeper and wider politics of school provision—had little prospect of strengthening accountability for public service delivery (Joshi and Houtzager 2012 ). Citizen power involves a transformation of political relationships, not merely the ‘teeth’ or consumer power to make choices at the frontline, but the ‘voice’ to mandate public action, and to demand accountability (Fox 2015 ). In the terms of the WDR 2004, the short route to accountability needs the ‘voice’ of political claims- and policymaking for it to be effective, while at the local level, education service delivery only has ‘teeth’—the ability to punish failures—when citizens and service-users have the capacities to demand, and receive, improved performance on the frontline (see also Westhorp et al. 2014 ).

These bottom-up pressures also need to be backed up by top-down pressure from within the political and bureaucratic system (Booth 2012 ), often through combined forms of diagonal accountability that join up oversight mechanisms in pursuit of more responsive and effective performance (Goetz and Jenkins 2005; Joshi and Houtzager 2012 ). The nature of the ‘craft’ in the interpersonal activity of teaching and learning means that effective school systems need to be organized like starfish—independently functional and responsive to differences in environment, yet connected to the whole—rather than, as most are, like spiders, directly controlled from the centre (Pritchett 2013 ). Yet central control remains an important political objective in many school systems, whether under democratic or authoritarian rule, and whether state capacity can be judged strong or weak.

These lessons have renewed attention to the politics of the ‘long route’ to accountability in education provision. In the first World Development Report on education (World Bank 2017 ) the roots of the learning crisis are framed as both technical and political. In one important example, national learning assessments are seen as vital to create ‘measures for learning [to] guide action’ as well as ‘measures of learning [to] spur action’, by increasing public participation and awareness of school performance; providing parents with evidence needed to make better choices; and raising voice via ‘the long route of accountability, where learning metrics may help citizens use the political process to hold politicians accountable for learning’ (World Bank 2017 , 94). Yet, while ‘political impetus’ has been critical to the adoption and implementation of learning reforms, powerful political incentives, including ‘unhealthy’ relationships between teacher unions and political and bureaucratic interests, can also ensure the goals and practices of the system remain misaligned with those of children’s learning (World Bank 2017 ).

Understanding the Political Economy of Education Quality Reforms

It may be true that ‘education systems are what they are, and indeed, the schools are what they are—everywhere in the world, regardless of the nation—because politics makes them that way’ (Moe and Wiborg 2017 ). Yet political science has paid little attention to education, for reasons that include lack of data and the specific disciplinary challenge (for political science) of accessing household dynamics and decision-making processes at multiple levels (Gift and Wibbels 2014 ; Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011 ; Ansell 2010 ). There has been some interest in the comparative politics of education, including in developing countries (for instance, Baum and Lake 2003 ; Brown and Hunter 2004 ), but it remains a new thematic area for the discipline, and one in which theorizing is in its infancy. The next section briefly discusses existing political science theories of education provision in light of the distinct challenges and concerns of developing countries, before moving on to the literature on the politics of education quality in developing country settings. This includes a discussion of the need to maintain a distinction between the politics of education in advanced, industrialized societies with long-established systems of mass education, and the politics of education in societies whose population includes many first-generation learners, where mass education is still a novelty and where transnational influences may be stronger.

Gift and Wibbels ( 2014 ) argue that the basis for a political science theory of education is as a function of the interaction between demand and supply: how much education a society receives is a function of: (a) the demand for skills emanating from the labour market and the economy; and (b) how, and the extent to which, those skills are supplied through the education system. Parents are assumed to ‘naturally prefer’ schools that are good for their children, and, to a greater or lesser extent, to mandate politicians to deliver them. How successfully they organize to assert their demands will determine what states provide. Ansell ( 2010 ) similarly notes that a political theory of education must rest on insights (a) that education is essentially redistributive and, depending on how resources are spent, can be progressive or otherwise; and (b) that ‘public education policy is heavily affected by the nature of the global market for educated labor’ (Ansell 2010 , 3).

Not all the assumptions made by Gift and Wibbels ( 2014 ) hold in contexts where mass formal schooling is still new. Gift and Wibbels view the outcome as a matter of magnitude, with the dependent variable being public spending on education. But if the heart of the problem is that schools and teachers are unaccountable to the parents and pupils they are supposed to serve, this implies a change in the relative political power of these groups, and not—or not only—more resources. In fact, more resources may exacerbate the problem, entrenching public sector interests in the existing system, making teacher unions stronger, expanding poorly managed services to an even wider population. Parents may know neither what to expect nor what to demand (for instance, Martínez 2012 ; Dunne et al. 2007 ; Mani and Mukand 2007 ). The capacity of citizens to demand and achieve improved levels of service provision is in general closely shaped by issues of poverty, exclusion, and inequality (Hickey and King 2016 ).

In developing countries with limited state capacity, the strongest demand for an educated population may come from the state itself. Many developing countries lack the human resources to staff the state; as we have already seen, many low-income countries cannot recruit enough educated teachers. Education provision may thus be insulated against state weaknesses and/or the problems of personalized as opposed to programmatic policy regimes, but with limited implications for quality: ‘in an environment of weak state capacity, democracy may prompt governments to increase education access, but not education inputs’ (Harding and Stasavage 2014 , 230). The likely absence of programmatic education agendas in developing countries may also be related to the general absence of programmatic class-based parties; the political history of education in developed countries indicates that parties and coalitions on the left and centre are more likely to promote wider access to education, and are associated with higher public spending on education (Busemeyer 2014 ).

Demand for educated labour from employers may be weak in low-income developing countries with large ‘reserve army’ populations, or because low-capital enterprises generally need little skilled labour. It seems clear that the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach to understanding differences in education policy on the basis of ‘a functional complementarity between skill formation and welfare state policies’ (Busemeyer 2014 , 35) offers limited insights into situations where the relationship between labour, capital, and the state is informal, paternalistic, and unorganized. Corrales argues that it is possible that ‘more exposure to capitalism prompts governments and constituents to protect education expenditures’, but that how domestic politics interacts with opportunities and constraints in the global economy shapes the politics of investment in education (Corrales 2006 , 240). Doner and Schneider (2016, 635) note that informality, inequality, and a reliance on foreign direct investment can fragment business and labour, and ‘undercut the potential demand for upgrading institutions’.

Of the available scholarship that does focus on the political economy of education in developing countries, 3 it is possible to differentiate between those studies which focus on how national-level politics shapes educational policies in broad terms (e.g. Stasavage 2005 ; Kosack 2009 ; Kosack 2012 ) and those that look more specifically at how politics (e.g. Grindle 2004 ) and governance arrangements (Pritchett 2013 ) play out within education systems. Within each of these literatures, there is a further distinction between a focus on formal institutional arrangements (e.g. Ansell 2008 and Stasavage 2005 on democracy; Pritchett 2013 on education sector governance; World Bank 2003 on formal accountability structures) and those that focus on informal power and politics (e.g. Kosack 2012 on political coalitions; Grindle 2004 on policy coalitions; also, Wales et al. 2016 ).

Analysis of the relationship between democracy and education tends to find that democracy exerts a positive influence on governments’ financial commitments to education (Stasavage 2005 ; Ansell 2008 ). But this may not advance understanding of reforms aimed at learning, as opposed to access. Nelson ( 2007 ) argues that competitive elections may create pressures to increase but not to improve or reallocate provision, because the political incentives to do so are so weak and non-urgent. Kosack ( 2012 ) also goes beyond regime-type explanations in search of a less formal and institutional analysis, arguing that none of the three most common political–economic explanations (relating to regime type, education cultures, and governmental commitment to economic performance) predict the realities of education policies. In his analysis of Taiwan, Ghana, and Brazil, Kosack concludes that answers to two questions can explain patterns of education investment: whose support does a government need to stay in power? What sort of education do those citizens want? Kosack identifies situations in which political entrepreneurs help disorganized groups to organize around common interests on education, as through the formation of coalitions between populist leaders and rural constituencies (Kosack 2012 ; also Corrales 1999 ). By extension of the same logic regarding the role of coalitions in shaping policy preferences, it may well be that developing countries lack the kinds of organized groups that might constitute a coalition in favour of a better trained citizenry and labour force (e.g. middle-class parents, organized capitalists).

This focus on informal forms of politics seems to characterize the most insightful comparative work to date on education politics. Merilee Grindle’s (2004) seminal work on education sector reform in Latin America notes that whereas access reforms were ‘“easy” from a political economy perspective’ (Grindle 2004 , 6), reforms aimed at improving quality in the 1990s:

involved the potential for lost jobs, and lost control over budgets, people, and decisions. They exposed students, teachers, and supervisors to new pressures and expectations. Teachers’ unions charged that they destroyed long existing rights and career tracks. (Grindle 2004 , 6)

The wider literature supports the presumption that teachers are typically the best organized and most vocal group empowered to influence education policy and reforms, and that influence is not always benign (Moe and Wiborg 2017 ; Bruns and Schneider 2016 ; Kingdon et al. 2014 ; Rosser and Fahmi 2018 ; Béteille et al. 2016 ). Nevertheless, Grindle’s cases of education quality reforms in Latin America show that reforms could succeed, depending on how they were introduced, designed, approved, and implemented. Reform-oriented coalitions within the education sector were particularly important in her cases. Corrales ( 1999 ) similarly suggests that policy entrepreneurs tend to emerge in response to high-level government commitment to reforms. But a recent review of the politics of education quality in developing countries found that the visibility and ‘political returns’ of educational investments, information asymmetries, particularly around performance assessment, and patterns of demand and accountability, including capacities for collective action, tended to limit commitment to quality reforms (Nicolai et al. 2014 , 5).

In terms of studies on the significance of formal governance arrangements within the education sector, there has been a focus on both the national- and local-level systems, and within each of these on the appropriate balance between top-down and bottom-up forms of accountability mechanisms. Pritchett ( 2013 ) argues that school systems are often highly centralized, which can work well to deliver expanded provision quickly, but which may exclude local parents and teachers from influence, and so deliver schooling without learning. A similar point is made by Tikly and Barrett ( 2013 , 20), who conclude that ‘weighting accountability towards top-down control … can constrain the space for teacher autonomy, reducing responsive inclusion and curricula relevance at the classroom level’.

However, formal governance arrangements rarely play out according to design in developing countries (Andrews 2013 ). Kingdon et al. (2014, 2) note that the supposed benefits of decentralization ‘do not accrue in practice because in poor rural areas the local elite closes up the spaces for wider community representation and participation in school affairs’. They suggest the effects of decentralization are ‘especially problematic when accountability systems are weak, and there is little parental information or awareness of how to hold schools responsible’ (Kingdon et al. 2014 , 28). A good deal of work has been undertaken at the level of schools themselves, particularly in terms of the type of oversight and accountability measures associated with improved levels of performance. Westhorp et al.’s (2014) systematic review of the circumstances under which decentralization, school-based management, accountability initiatives, and community schools influence education outcomes, particularly for the poor, found that a wide range of approaches had achieved some degree of success. These include the introduction of rewards in conjunction with sanctions; performance monitoring by the community members, including traditional authorities and politicians; and the introduction of direct accountability relationships, including the power to hire and fire between school management committees and staff. However, school-level interventions are rarely enough on their own: to work, they depend on a supportive political context, an adequately-resourced education sector with a strong national system for assessment, and high-capacity local actors, including school management committees, head teachers, and local community actors.

Some research into the politics of education in developing countries has focused more on the ideas (rather than only the incentives) that shape elite behaviour. A good deal of work on elite perceptions and commitment has identified education as being an area that attracts a high level of consensus from ruling elites, as compared with other aspects of social policy (e.g. Hossain 2005 ; Hossain and Moore 2002 ). Contemporary developing countries are part of a world system in which mass education is, or is becoming, the norm, so that integration into that world system depends on the provision of mass education, and provision of mass education legitimates state authority (Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer 1985 ; Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992 ; see also Corrales 2006 ; Tikly 2001 ). Policy and political elites may ‘demand’ education as part of a developmentalist agenda of nation building or economic development, or as an instrument for achieving other social policy goals (e.g. fertility control: Colclough 2012 ; Ansell 2010 ).

Finally, international actors have played a significant role in driving up the levels of investment in education in developing countries, and in ensuring that a significant effort is made to target this provision at poorer groups. This is in part through the transnational advocacy coalition that comprised the Global Campaign for Education (Gaventa and Mayo 2009 ), as well as the strong pressures that international aid agencies have often exerted over education policy within countries that rely on overseas development finance. The Millennium Development Goals helped to provide further impetus here. However, the influence of aid agencies within the global South is declining, and there is little evidence to date that donors or international agencies have succeeded in promoting reforms targeted at improving the quality of education, despite efforts in this direction (Wales et al. 2016 ), including through the Sustainable Development Goals.

Overall, then, there have been some important studies of the politics of educational quality in developing countries, even if these are few in nature. Of these, the ones that most closely address our concern with the politics of promoting difficult reforms aimed at tackling the learning crisis have tended to emphasize the role of informal as well as formal institutional processes, ideas as well as incentives, and actors operating at multiple scales, from the global through to the local, and often in the form of coalitions. Given that none have presented a conceptual framework that can help capture these multiple factors, we try to address this failing in the next chapter, where we set out an approach that helped guide the studies reported on here and which we hope can be of some use in guiding further work in the field.

Conclusion: Understanding Education Quality Reform Demands a Political Approach

The global learning crisis manifests itself in low learning attainments in each of the six countries studied here. Their experiences are reflected across the struggles faced by low- and middle-income countries to grow their education systems in an increasingly competitive global economy dependent on skills. This book helps to make sense of the global learning crisis by exploring the proposition that politics matters, centrally, in explaining why some countries are doing better at raising the quality of education than others. But how might politics matter? Political analysis of education is limited, both empirically and theoretically, and both in developed and in developing countries. While there are good reasons to believe that the difference in the uptake of quality reforms and their implementation relates to differences of a political nature, there is little conceptual work with which to build a theoretical framework for analysing how that works, or evidence to test it. This book contributes both evidence of how politics influences reforms in developing countries, and to the construction of theory about how this comes about. It does this by setting out and testing hypotheses about how the political settlement and its relationship to the domain of education have shaped the uptake, success, or failure of recent efforts to bring about education quality reform.

Education quality reforms tend to be less politically tractable than programmes of expansion. The nature and distribution of power over the vital resource involved in education quality—teaching—are necessarily at the centre of this analysis. Quality reforms are difficult to design and difficult to deliver: less is known about ‘what works’ and achievement is hard to measure. Weak state capacity has not prevented children from attending school, but it is very likely to shape what happens once they get there. Yet strong state capacity in relation to education may not necessarily or only mean centralized power; effective education systems must be responsive and adaptive to local needs, granting enough autonomy for schools to be accountable to the local communities they seek to educate. The governance and institutional reforms needed to build effective schools are intensely political and involve struggles over power, whether in terms of the authority to define the content and direction of nation building, the power to deploy the vast national teaching force, or the resources to spend on school buildings and teachers’ pay.

The following chapters look at how politics is shaping the level of capacity and commitment of elites to improving the quality of public education and its governance in developing countries. These chapters explore variations in the extent to which countries have adopted and implemented reforms aimed at improving learning outcomes, and in how those reforms have played out in terms of improved learning. Next, Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework for understanding the politics of education in developing countries within which such analysis can be conducted.

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World Bank. 2017 . ‘ World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promis e’. Washington, DC: World Bank.

http://un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/ (accessed 12 June 2017).

All figures here are from UNESCO’s 2015 Global Monitoring Report , which took stock of all progress towards the EFA goals over the period (UNESCO 2015 ).

We are grateful to Sophie King for producing an excellent annotated bibliography on the politics of education in developing countries, on which this section is based.

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Education in Developing Countries Essay

Diverse socio-economic environments in schools, current difficulties, recommendations for further negotiations, reference list.

Political independence brought young countries harsh difficulties including the problems with education;
Children in such countries do not have access to high-quality education due to the poor technological, social, and economic development.

Significantly fewer children meet basic levels of proficiency in math and reading in developing regions

After gaining political independence, young countries faced severe financial difficulties caused by long colonial robbery and continued economic dependence on the imperialist powers. Nowadays, the problem of socio-cultural transformations, including a fundamental restructuring of the education system and adapting it to the needs of socio-economic recovery is of paramount importance (Burnett, 2014). The improvement of the educational system should be conducted per the requirements of modern science and technology.

To provide children and young generation with adequate education;
The education should meet the demands of the national development;
To make education accessible to all representatives of society regardless of the social status.

Why do these challenges matter?

Governments are responsible for the reformation of education to provide their nations with learning opportunities;
The economic independence cannot be achieved in the country where people are illiterate;
The development of education is directly connected to the socio-economic improvement of the country.

In is necessary to give the young generation education that meets the needs of national development and involves in the educational process a significant amount of population. The prominent role in the solution of these challenges belongs to the governments. The improvement of education in countries is based on the state plan of socio-economic development of the country. The reformation of education and training is one of the important tasks of the struggle for economic independence, a constituent part of a complex of measures aimed at overcoming underdevelopment (Guthrie, 2011). Without solving this task, the consolidation of political independence and gaining economic independence is impossible.

Almost two hundred million people who are no more than thirty years old have never visited a primary school (Marshall, Kinuthia, & Taylor, 2009);

One of eight young people is unemployed and over a quarter is busy at work

The colonial education system has left one more heritage: higher education is disproportionately developed in comparison with primary and secondary school. As a result, there is the educated elite, some of which cannot find a job after college or university. It is well-known that information technology is one of the main factors of economic growth. Developing countries are doing their best to approach the level of developed countries of the assessment of electronic devices in the field of education. However, whereas the smartphone has become the part of everyday life in some countries, some still do not even have access to television, and, consequently, to the source of information and knowledge.

As far as the United Nations Development Programme is ready to contribute significantly to the development of the educational system, it is of great importance to present guidelines. These directions predetermine the further development and should serve as the proof for UN exemplifying the intention to reform education. The prescribed guidelines are as follows:

To supply schools with computers;
To establish a system of distant learning;
To promote the development of learning through video lectures;
To assist the government in educational reforms;
To monitor the implementations of the educational reforms.

It would be a new direction for the UNDP to establish a well-structured system of the distance learning in the DCs. Video-lectures represent one of the cheapest ways to increase the educational level in the developing countries. This practice has already started by the non-commercial organizations consisting of volunteers from all over the world (Kennepohl & Shaw, 2010). Video-lectures based on the curriculum will contribute not only to education but also stimulate local teachers to broaden their knowledge of the subject and share the experience of foreign colleagues.

Burnett, N. (2014). International education policies, issues, and challenges. In G. Carbonnier, M. Carton & K. King (Eds.), Education, learning, training: Critical issues for development (pp. 27-36). Boston, USA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Guthrie, G. (2011). The progressive education fallacy in developing countries . Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

Kennepohl, D., & Shaw, L. (2010). Accessible elements . Edmonton, United Kingdom: AU Press.

Marshall, S., Kinuthia, W., & Taylor, W. (2009). Bridging the knowledge divide . Charlotte, USA: Information Age Publishing.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Importance of Education — The Importance of Education in the Development of a Country

The Importance of Education in The Development of a Country

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Essay on Importance of Education for Students

500 words essay on importance of education.

To say Education is important is an understatement. Education is a weapon to improve one’s life. It is probably the most important tool to change one’s life. Education for a child begins at home. It is a lifelong process that ends with death. Education certainly determines the quality of an individual’s life. Education improves one’s knowledge, skills and develops the personality and attitude. Most noteworthy, Education affects the chances of employment for people. A highly educated individual is probably very likely to get a good job. In this essay on importance of education, we will tell you about the value of education in life and society.

Importance of Education in Life

First of all, Education teaches the ability to read and write. Reading and writing is the first step in Education. Most information is done by writing. Hence, the lack of writing skill means missing out on a lot of information. Consequently, Education makes people literate.

Above all, Education is extremely important for employment. It certainly is a great opportunity to make a decent living. This is due to the skills of a high paying job that Education provides. Uneducated people are probably at a huge disadvantage when it comes to jobs. It seems like many poor people improve their lives with the help of Education.

Better Communication is yet another role in Education. Education improves and refines the speech of a person. Furthermore, individuals also improve other means of communication with Education.

Education makes an individual a better user of technology. Education certainly provides the technical skills necessary for using technology . Hence, without Education, it would probably be difficult to handle modern machines.

People become more mature with the help of Education. Sophistication enters the life of educated people. Above all, Education teaches the value of discipline to individuals. Educated people also realize the value of time much more. To educated people, time is equal to money.

Finally, Educations enables individuals to express their views efficiently. Educated individuals can explain their opinions in a clear manner. Hence, educated people are quite likely to convince people to their point of view.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Importance of Education in Society

First of all, Education helps in spreading knowledge in society. This is perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Education. There is a quick propagation of knowledge in an educated society. Furthermore, there is a transfer of knowledge from generation to another by Education.

Education helps in the development and innovation of technology. Most noteworthy, the more the education, the more technology will spread. Important developments in war equipment, medicine , computers, take place due to Education.

Education is a ray of light in the darkness. It certainly is a hope for a good life. Education is a basic right of every Human on this Planet. To deny this right is evil. Uneducated youth is the worst thing for Humanity. Above all, the governments of all countries must ensure to spread Education.

FAQs on Essay on Importance of Education

Q.1 How Education helps in Employment?

A.1 Education helps in Employment by providing necessary skills. These skills are important for doing a high paying job.

Q.2 Mention one way in Education helps a society?

A.2 Education helps society by spreading knowledge. This certainly is one excellent contribution to Education.

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Importance Of Education In a Country’s Progress

by Sophie Samuel | Mar 13, 2013 | Articles

Human beings today need to have a specific set of skills to survive in this competitive world as well as progress and this article shows the importance of education in a country’s progress.

This set of skills can be referred to as Education.

Education is very important for a country to grow.

Whether it is economically or socially, or emotionally, education plays a vital role in a country’s progress.

Here are 9 Ways in Which Education Helps in a Country’s Progress

1. education helps people become better citizens.

Whether it is a simple thing like using water sparingly or taking a bus to work instead of using the bike or car in order to save fuel, the educated mass knows how to contribute towards the country’s well-being.

One of the reasons for their awareness is because they have been taught these values in school, colleges and work places.

People who aren’t educated don’t have clues about these facts as they haven’t been in a learning environment.

2. Education Shows The Importance Of Voting

It helps to decide whom to vote for in order to make a difference in the economy of a country positively.

Being educated helps in deciding why to vote for a particular party over the other.

Uneducated people are unaware of the importance of choosing the right people to vote for. Hence, being educated shows us the importance of voting.

3. Education Helps in Getting Jobs

College graduates are paid much more than those without a college degree and continue to support the economy well by paying more taxes and purchasing more goods.

Unemployment is a serious obstacle in the development and progress in a country’s economic status, thus posing a hindrance to the growth of the nation.

The economic status of so many countries in the world is very sad, due to the lack of uneducated people who do not possess adequate skills and thus are unemployed.

Yet when more education is offered, either online or in traditional schools, the country benefits immeasurably.

As an example, here’s a course that shows students how to learn anything faster, double their reading speed and remember everything. When students know ‘how to learn’, which is something that most schools do not teach, they have a huge competitive advantage in school.

4. Education Helps Single Mothers

Being educated can help a single mom find a better job as well as make her aware of various types of help such as child support benefits and other agencies that can help her children.

This can help single moms bring up their children and help them become responsible citizens of the country.

5. Education Helps Reduce Poverty

Often, they do not even have basic reading and writing skills . But speed reading courses, once people are reading, can give the a competitive edge in learning and remembering new information more quickly, thus increasing wages.

Education is the cure for extreme poverty and the higher the level of education the more a country can progress.

6. Education Equalizes Inequality

If a country wants to ensure that there are equal opportunities for everyone regardless of race, gender or social class, equal access to education is necessary.

Education provides more access to better jobs as well as improves options for girls and women who may be underserved in some countries.

7. Education Helps Economic Growth

However, countries which are still developing, usually have very high illiteracy rates.

Even in the United States, more than 60% of students, according to the NAEP, still do not read at grade level.

These students benefit from methods to find out why they struggle to read and how to help them , which in turn means it helps the country’s progress.

8. Education Reduces Gender Based Violence

When girls live in fear, it deters them from going to school, so education of the population helps change people’s mindset, which will discourage violence.

9. Education Reduces Maternal Death Rates

Mothers then can live longer, attend school and help raise themselves and their children out of poverty, thus increasing a country’s progress.

She loves kids and therefore loves to write articles related to children. As a single mother, she took up writing as her profession to meet the educational expenses of her kids and the family.

[ Updated – October 22, 2020 ]

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Essay on Development Of A Country

Students are often asked to write an essay on Development Of A Country in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Development Of A Country

Understanding development.

Development means progress. It’s about a country growing stronger in different areas. These areas can be economy, education, health, and more. It’s like a student studying hard to get better grades.

Economic Growth

A country’s development is often measured by its economy. This means how much money it makes from goods and services. It’s like a shopkeeper selling more items and earning more. Countries with strong economies can provide better lives for their people.

Education and Development

Education is a key part of development. It helps people learn new skills and ideas. A country with good education can have more skilled workers. It’s like a student learning more to do better in exams.

Health and Development

Health is also important for development. Healthy people can work better and contribute more to their country. It’s like a sportsperson eating healthy to perform better in games.

Development and Environment

Development should not harm the environment. A country should take care of its nature and wildlife. It’s like a gardener taking care of his plants. This is called sustainable development.

In conclusion, development is about improving a country in many ways. It’s like a team working together to win a match. Every country should aim for development.

250 Words Essay on Development Of A Country

What is development.

Development is a process that allows a country to improve the lives of its people. It includes growth in areas like economy, technology, health, and education. A country is considered developed when it can provide a good quality of life to its people.

Economic growth is a key part of development. It means the country is making more money. This can happen by selling more goods to other countries, or by people starting businesses. When the economy grows, people can have better jobs and earn more money. This can help them live better lives.

Technological Advancements

Technology also plays an important role in the development of a country. With better technology, people can do their work more easily and quickly. For example, farmers can use machines to help them grow more crops. Also, people can use the internet to learn new things and connect with others around the world.

Health and Education

Health and education are also very important for a country’s development. When people are healthy, they can work and contribute to the economy. Good education helps people gain skills and knowledge. This can help them find better jobs and improve their lives.

In conclusion, the development of a country involves many things. It is not just about making more money, but also about improving the lives of the people. Every country needs to focus on all these areas to truly develop.

500 Words Essay on Development Of A Country

Introduction.

When we talk about the development of a country, we are referring to the progress and growth in various areas. These areas can include the economy, education, health, and social well-being of its citizens. The development of a country is a complex process and involves many factors.

One of the most common ways to measure a country’s development is through its economic growth. This is often calculated by looking at the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the total value of all goods and services produced in a country in a year. A higher GDP means that the country is producing more, which can lead to more jobs and higher incomes for its citizens.

Education and Health

Another important aspect of a country’s development is the level of education and health of its citizens. A country with a well-educated population is more likely to have a strong economy because educated people can contribute more to society. They can create new ideas, start businesses, and fill important jobs.

In terms of health, a country with a healthy population is also more likely to be developed. This is because healthy people can work and contribute to the economy. They are also less likely to need social assistance, which can save the country money.

Social Well-being

The social well-being of a country’s citizens is another important factor in development. This can include things like the level of happiness, the amount of crime, and the quality of the environment. A country with high levels of happiness, low crime, and a clean environment is often seen as more developed.

In conclusion, the development of a country is a complex process that involves many factors. It includes economic growth, education and health levels, and the social well-being of its citizens. By focusing on these areas, a country can work towards becoming more developed and improving the lives of its citizens.

Word Count: 300.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Determinants Of Health
Essay on Destruction Of Nature
Essay on Deserted Village

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Essay On Why Is Education Important

Table of Contents

Short Essay on Education Important

Education is a crucial aspect of personal and societal development, and plays a vital role in shaping the future of individuals and nations. It provides individuals with the skills, knowledge, and values needed to lead fulfilling and productive lives, and helps to promote social and economic progress.

Education equips individuals with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in their chosen careers, and helps them to understand and appreciate the complexities of the world around them. It teaches critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills, and provides individuals with the ability to adapt to change and pursue new opportunities.

Education also helps to promote equality and justice, as it provides individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds with the tools and opportunities needed to succeed. It helps to break the cycle of poverty and improve economic outcomes, and is a key factor in promoting social mobility and reducing inequality.

Moreover, education is also essential for promoting civic engagement and building strong and cohesive societies. It helps individuals to understand their rights and responsibilities as citizens, and to participate effectively in the democratic process. It also fosters a sense of community and shared values, and helps to promote social and cultural cohesion.

In conclusion, education is an important investment in personal and societal development, and plays a crucial role in shaping the future of individuals and nations. It provides individuals with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed, promotes equality and justice, and helps to build strong and cohesive societies.

long Essay On Why Is Education Important

Education is an essential part of any person’s life and it is even more so in the current day and age. It is not only important for its own sake, but also for the various opportunities it provides to individuals. So why exactly is education so important? Read on to find out!

Introduction

There are many reasons why education is important. It helps us develop our skills and knowledge so that we can be successful in our careers. It also helps us to understand the world around us and make informed decisions.

Education is essential for social and economic development. It equips us with the tools we need to participate in the workforce and contribute to society. It also helps to reduce poverty and inequality, and promote social cohesion.

A good education can help us lead healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives. It can also help us prevent or manage diseases better. And, it can give us the skills we need to start our own businesses or pursue other entrepreneurial ventures.

In short, education is important for just about everything – from our personal development to the health of our economy and society as a whole.

Definition of Education

Education is defined as the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. It is a social process that helps individuals learn and prepare them for the future. Importance of Education Essay 1 (100 words) We all know that education is very important for our life. It is the key to success in our life. It helps us to get better jobs and earn more money. Education also helps us to be better citizens of our country.

It makes us responsible and disciplined in our life. We should always remember that educated people are respected everywhere whether in office or in society. A good education gives us a lot of knowledge and teaches us the right way to live in society. It also develops our personality and makes us confident in front of others. Nowadays, many students are facing financial problem so they cannot continue their higher studies after 12th standard but we should never lose hope and work hard towards our goals and dreams.

Education helps us to think in logical and analytical way. It opens the door of opportunities and brings success in our life. We should never underestimate the power of education as it is the only way to get success in modern world.

Reasons Why Education is Important

There are many reasons why education is important. Here are a few of the most important:

1. Education helps you become more informed and knowledgeable. 2. Education teaches you how to think critically and solve problems. 3. Education gives you the skills and knowledge you need to get a good job and be successful in life. 4. Education helps you understand and appreciate other cultures and ways of life. 5. Education can help you make friends, meet new people, and network for future opportunities.

How Education Helps in Career Advancement

A good education is important because it helps you to develop the skills and knowledge that you need to be successful in your career. When you have a strong educational foundation, you will be able to advance in your career more easily and reach your goals.

Educated employees are more likely to be promoted than those without a good education. employers often look for candidates who have the ability to think critically and solve problems. A good education helps you develop these skills so that you can stand out from other candidates.

In addition, a good education can help you earn a higher salary. Studies have shown that workers with a college degree earn significantly more than those without one. If you want to achieve financial security and reach your career goals, investing in your education is essential.

A good education is also important for success in life outside of work. Those with a college degree are more likely to vote, volunteer, and participate in civic activities than those without one. They are also more likely to live healthier lifestyles and have stable marriages. Investing in your education is an investment in your future success.

How Education Benefits Society and the Economy

It is often said that education is the key to success. In today’s competitive world, a good education is essential to get ahead in life. It opens up doors of opportunity and allows us to have choices in our lives.

A well-educated population is necessary for the economic development of a country. A country with a high literacy rate is likely to have a better standard of living and be more economically prosperous than one with a low literacy rate. Educated citizens are able to contribute more to the economy and participate more fully in society. They are also less likely to rely on government assistance or be involved in crime.

Education also has many other benefits for individuals and society as a whole. It helps people develop important life skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and communication. It can also foster creativity, self-confidence, and a lifelong love of learning. People who are educated are more likely to make responsible decisions about their health, finances, and relationships. They are also better equipped to contribute to the community in which they live and work.

The Role of Technology in Education

Technology has had a profound impact on education. With the advent of the internet and mobile devices, students can now access a wealth of information and resources. This has led to a more individualized and customized approach to learning. In addition, technology has also made it possible for educators to create more engaging and interactive lesson plans. As a result, students are more engaged in their learning and are better able to retain information.

In conclusion, education is paramount to the success of any individual. It enables us to gain knowledge and skills needed for life, contributes towards our personal development and allows us to develop a sense of social responsibility. Education is also important in order to be able to make sound decisions and take part in meaningful conversations that shape the future of our world. Investing in education not only provides numerous benefits but can also prove beneficial for generations to come.

Manisha Dubey Jha is a skilled educational content writer with 5 years of experience. Specializing in essays and paragraphs, she’s dedicated to crafting engaging and informative content that enriches learning experiences.

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IELTS Writing Task 2: Benefits of Education Essay

Updated On Feb 23, 2023

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IELTS Writing Task 2: Benefits of Education Essay

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IELTS is one of the English language evaluation exams that millions of candidates take in order to migrate to an English-speaking country. This reflects the importance of the language on a global scale. As a result, the benefits of education essay for IELTS, which is an opinion essay and a part of the Writing Task 2 of the IELTS, is discussed here with an outline and vocabulary that will help you to prepare. So, check out given below.

For more education topic for IELTS essay, check out this link .

You should spend no more than 40 minutes on this task.

Some people say that the education system is the only critical factor to development of a country. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?

You should write at least 250 words.

Opinion Essay

Introduction

Introduce the given topic
I disagree that education is the only critical factor necessary for development.

Paragraph 1: Economic stability and employment opportunities are equally important.

Paragraph 2: Healthcare facilities also play an important role.

Conclusion

Clearly restate points covered in the essay.

Sample Answer

Considering the current global scenario, some people opine that enlightening the masses is the sole developing factor for a nation. However, even though education can be regarded as one of the essential aspects of a country’s progress, other factors, like economic stability and healthcare facilities, play a crucial role. Therefore, this view will be further elaborated in the upcoming paragraphs of this essay.

Literacy is the most fundamental right of an individual, and it not only furthers the advancement of the person but the society and country as a whole. But, unfortunately, only being educated is not enough, as one needs capital to procure necessities. For example, many people in India are highly qualified, but due to the lack of jobs, they are moving to countries that grant professional opportunities. Consequently, employment and monetary growth are also vital for a country, without which it cannot upgrade its infrastructure.

Moreover, another decisive factor in a country’s evolution is its health sector. When the citizens of a country are not physically and mentally robust , no education will facilitate the burgeoning of a country. The recent outburst of the coronavirus not only addressed the medical paucity at large but also brought many influential economies to their knees . Consequently, it was an eye-opener for all to be prepared for unknown perils in the unforeseeable future.

Nevertheless, education is the prime factor for improvement. As practical and theoretical knowledge is the foundation of every occupation that helps a country’s welfare, it is definitely one of the paramount influences for prosperity.

To conclude, although education is a dominant element in the nation’s development, it is also accompanied by other factors, as mentioned above.

1. enlightening (verb)

Meaning: providing or tending to provide knowledge, understanding, or insight

E.g.: The speech was enlightening for the public on the health benefits of yoga

2. literacy (noun)

Meaning: the ability to read and write

E.g.: Our institution aims to provide literacy to all.

3. procure (verb)

Meaning: to obtain something, especially after an effort

E.g.: The army believed he would be able to procure the essential materials.

4. decisive (adjective)

Meaning: able to make decisions quickly and confidently, or showing this quality

E.g.: Her condition was one of the decisive factors in the jury’s verdict.

5. robust (adjective)

Meaning: strong and healthy

E.g.: Ramen was a robust child, but now he has become sickly.

6. burgeoning (verb)

Meaning: growing or developing quickly

E.g.: The burgeoning of the company was the result of employee-friendly policies.

7. paucity (noun)

Meaning: the condition of having very little or not enough of something

E.g.: The paucity of water and food led to many deaths in the village.

8. bring to one’s knees (phrasal verb)

Meaning: to force to submit or give in

E.g.: He was brought to his knees after the repeated blow of his opponent.

9. eye-opener (noun)

Meaning: situation revealing surprising new information

E.g.: The celebrity’s death was an eye-opener for all.

10. paramount (adjective)

Meaning: more important than anything else

E.g.: The termination of the senior board member was the paramount reason for the company’s downfall.

Practice IELTS Writing Task 2 based on Essay types

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Socioeconomic inequalities and learning

Social and economic inequalities have important and long-lasting effects on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development as well as on educational outcomes (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007; Shonkoff and Garner, 2012). Multiple inequities combine, producing a negative impact on the ability of marginalized children to learn (Suárez-Orozco, Yoshikawa, and Tseng, 2015). Thus the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children widens over time (Shonkoff and Garner, 2012; Suárez-Orozc, Yoshikawa, and Tseng, 2015).

In contexts of high inequality, good quality and equitable education is key to the inclusive, peaceful, and sustained development of a society and a country. Ensuring the participation of marginalized groups and individuals in broader development processes helps reduce social inequalities. Inversely, unless attention is paid to equitable access, learning opportunities, and quality learning outcomes, education can entrench existing inequalities or create new ones.

Socioeconomic inequalities and education in the 2030 Agenda

Leaving no one behind. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development regards equity as central to achieving sustainable development and calls for leaving no one behind. This means including all vulnerable countries and ensuring all people, regardless of their background, have the right to fulfill their potential and to lead decent, dignified, and rewarding lives in a healthy environment. Sustainable development goal (SDG) 10 is specifically dedicated to reducing inequality, with a focus that goes far beyond economic inequality: ‘By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status’ (SDG10.2) (United Nations, 2015).
Addressing inequalities in education at the core of SDG 4. SDG 4 stresses the need to combat all forms of exclusion and inequalities relating to access to education and learning processes. This requires refocused efforts to improve learning outcomes for the full life cycle, especially for women, girls, and marginalized people in vulnerable settings. Equity is all-inclusive within SDG 4 (‘all girls and boys’, with all indicators disaggregated by sex) but is also the focus of a specific target (SDG 4.5): ‘By 2030, eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations’ (United Nations, 2015).

How socioeconomic inequalities affect learning

Whereas wide disparities exist across countries, this brief focuses on socioeconomic inequalities between groups or individuals within countries. It is important to understand who is vulnerable to marginalization and exclusion and how different types of exclusion affect learning.

Exclusion is contextual and influenced by supply- and demand-side barriers that prevent children and young people from enrolling and/or succeeding at school. Exclusion can occur:

at the individual level , based on socioeconomic status (poverty or low levels of parental education), location of residence (rural vs. urban, regional disparities), or other vulnerabilities;
at the group level (marginalized ethnic or linguistic groups, nomadic or indigenous peoples, gender or socio-cultural and religious factors, or migration status); or
as the result of environmental and contextual factors, such as state fragility, conflict, or natural disaster that often lead to displacement.

Factors of exclusion

Poverty. Children from poor families are less likely to meet the basic pre-requisites for learning and are often ill-prepared to attend school. Children who live in low-resourced communities are more likely to be malnourished, to have absent parents, and to be exposed to violence and stress. Their schools may receive less funding. These factors often lead to poor outcomes (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007; Shonkoff and Garner, 2012). School attendance may be affected by the need to work to contribute to family finances and by difficulties with paying school fees and other costs.
Parental education and literacy. The home environment plays a critical role in children’s development and early learning (Save the Children, 2018). Results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that children of parents with high socioeconomic status demonstrated higher reading literacy than children of parents with low socioeconomic status (Xin Ma, 2008). Findings from the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE) show that students achieve higher when their parents believe they will reach higher education (UNESCO Santiago, 2015). Inequities in parents’ level of education can significantly affect children’s ability to benefit from formal schooling. Parents who have not attended school, or who are illiterate, may avoid engaging in homework activities with their children or interacting with teachers and other service providers (Eccles, 2005; Tusiime et al., 2014). They may be unable to provide access to books and other literacy materials.
Location of residence. Most countries have regionally unequal conditions of economic development, funding, and social services, as well as significant rural-urban divides. Schools in low-resourced areas – including rural areas and informal urban settlements – often receive less funding than schools in high-resourced areas. This results in reduced access to early childhood centres, high-quality schools, and well-trained teachers. This, in turn, results in lower literacy rates, poor academic performance, and higher drop-out rates, ultimately contributing to the cycle of poverty (Hindle, 2007). According to a 2018 UNICEF report, the poorest urban children in 1 in 6 countries are less likely to complete primary school than their counterparts in rural areas (UNICEF, 2018).
Gender. In many countries, girls have less access to schools than boys and are more likely to drop out early. Factors may include practical matters, such as distance, safety, adequate facilities, etc. as well as expectations regarding participation in household chores, child marriage practices, etc., and limited opportunities for girls’ employment after school (GEM Report, 2016; Rihani, 2006; UNESCO, 2012). In some countries boys may drop out of school or underperform because of pressures to earn money or because school is deemed irrelevant (GEM Report, 2016). In school, teaching practices or instructional materials may contain gender stereotyping (Rihani, 2006), and students may face school-related gender-based violence that severely impedes their learning.
Sexual orientation and gender identity. Bullying, violence, and other mistreatment is often compounded for LGBTI or gender non-conforming children and young people (UNESCO Bangkok, 2015), and has a significant educational impact. They may miss classes, avoid school activities, or drop out of school altogether. International learning assessments show that bullying reduces students’ achievements in key subjects such as mathematics (UNESCO, 2017b).
Ethnicity, religion, and culture. Children who face direct and indirect discrimination based on their ethnicity, religion, or culture may suffer from negative psychological and physical effects from an early age (Shonkoff and Garner, 2012. This may cause them to underperform or struggle to learn.
Language. International surveys regularly show that speaking a language in the home other than the language of instruction at school amounts to a handicap (Duru-Bellat, 2004), which leads to a greater risk of grade repetition and drop out (Pinnock, 2009).
Conflicts, crises, disasters, and displacement. The experience of conflicts, crises, and disasters can leave children physically and emotionally traumatized. Migrant and refugee or displaced children may not have the formal residence papers allowing them to attend school or may face hostility and prejudice in school. Due to damage and/or insecurity, children may not have access to school buildings, learning materials, or qualified teachers (GEM Report, 2018b; IIEP-UNESCO, 2011).

Policy and planning responses

Education policies are among the most powerful levers to reduce income disparities. ‘In countries with currently low levels of education attainment, policies that promote equal access to basic education could help reduce inequality by facilitating the accumulation of human capital, and making educational opportunities less dependent on socio-economic circumstances’ (Brueckner, Dabla-Norris and Gradstein, 2014: 19). Education policies need to be inclusive, with the principle of equity being fundamental to all education sector plans and policies (UNESCO, 2017a). In addition, targeted policies to address specific instances of exclusion should be introduced.

Pro-poor education policies

Inequities can be addressed, and learning outcomes improved, when governments ensure that the most disadvantaged children and their families have access to quality education services in the formative years (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007; Shonkoff and Garner, 2012).

Policy-makers should provide fair funding and special assistance to the lowest-performing schools and students, and implement school-community partnerships. They should identify priority education zones to compensate for regional funding disparities, and allocate resources based on specific criteria (e.g. percentage of children of foreign origin or whose mother tongue is not the language of instruction). (Duru-Bellat, 2004).

Pro-poor education policies that promote equal access to basic education, such as cash transfers to encourage attendance or spending on public education that benefits the poor, can reduce inequality by helping build human capital and making educational opportunities less dependent on socioeconomic circumstances (WEF, 2014).

Extending access to private schools through vouchers to reduce segregation has been implemented in some countries, with mixed results.

Targeted policies to address specific dimensions of exclusion

Education planners may also ensure targeted support for population groups faced with specific types of discrimination.

Early childhood education policies should target the most disadvantaged children before they enter school.
Language/bilingual education policies may help improve the educational outcomes of children whose mother tongue is not the language of instruction.
Inclusive school curricula and teaching and learning materials can help reduce discrimination (e.g. providing age-appropriate information on sexual health, including information on sexual and gender diversity, can help address bullying).
ICT policies can provide the tools to help close the educational divide and make classrooms an inclusive place for all (UNESCO, 2011).
Policies to combat bullying based on gender and sexual identity can help schools establish relevant mechanisms and reporting requirements, and outline sanctions for non-compliance. For example, the Philippines 2013 Anti-Bullying Act provides the framework for national awareness-raising initiatives and school policies (UNESCO Bangkok, 2018).
Moving to later tracking can ensure that all students get a broad education. Later tracking is associated with better outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged children, who are more likely to otherwise be directed into vocational education (Blanden and McNally, 2014).
Affirmative action policies encourage and train people from under-represented groups to help them overcome disadvantages in competing with others, particularly in higher education. The benefits are widely recognized, but each country takes a different approach (e.g. Sweden pays special attention to gender, India to caste, and Sri Lanka to the district of origin) (GEM Report, 2018a).
Crisis-sensitive education sector plans and policies can build resilient systems, help prepare for potential disasters or conflict, and provide equitable access to schooling in crisis- and conflict-affected areas.
Non-formal or alternative education policies may target children and young people who are outside the formal school system. Adapted curricula and methods can reconnect young people to education or provide them with the skills needed to enter the world of work: ‘Non-formal education … can play a crucial role in providing second-chance education for out-of-school children … [as long as] such educational opportunities provide a recognized pathway into the formal system’ (UIS and UNICEF, 2015: 41).

The need for holistic and cross-sectoral policies

Policy-makers and planners need to investigate other ways to mitigate the impact of inequities on learning outcomes, including health interventions, parenting and community support, and employment policies. Targeting families and communities is particularly important as educational outcomes are shaped much more by the family than by the school. Families are responsible for the initial socialization of their children and for nurturing their educational aspirations (Duru-Bellat, 2004).

Social inequities may also be addressed through wider policies to fight racism and discrimination, strategies for welcoming refugees and migrants into communities, and child-friendly spaces for children who have experienced trauma. Due to the interconnected and cumulative nature of most social inequities, working both outside and inside schools is the best way to ensure that all children meet their learning potential (Suárez-Orozco, Yoshikawa, and Tseng, 2015).

Plans and policies

El Salvador: Política de equidad e igualdad de género (2019)
Malta: Trans, gender variant and intersex students in schools: policy (2015)
South Africa: Rural education draft policy (2017)
Chronic Poverty Advisory Network, 2012. ‘ Chronic Poverty and Education: A guide to what works in policy and practice’ . Education Policy Guide.
Education for All Fast Track Initiative Secretariat, EFA-FTI; United Nations. 2010. Equity and inclusion in education: A guide to support education sector plan preparation, revision, and appraisal. Washington, D.C.: EFA-FTI Secretariat.
UIS; FHI360; Oxford Policy Management; University of Cambridge, Research for Equitable Access and Learning Centre. 2018. Handbook on measuring equity in education . Montreal: UIS.
UNESCO. 2017. A guide for ensuring inclusion and equity in education . Paris: UNESCO.
UNESCO-IBE. 2016. Training tools for curriculum development: Reaching out to all learners: A resource pack for supporting inclusive education. Paris: UNESCO.

Blanden, J.; McNally, S. 2014. Reducing inequality in education and skills: implications for economic growth . EENEE Analytical Report No. 21. European Expert Network on Economics of Education.

Brueckner, M.; Dabla-Norris, E.; Gradstein, M. 2014. ‘ National income and its distribution ’ , IMF Working Paper WP/14/101.

Duru-Bellat, M. 2004. Social inequality at school and educational policies . Paris: UNESCO-IIEP.

Eccles, J.S. 2005. ‘Influences of parents' education on their children's educational attainments: The role of parent and child perceptions’. In: London Review of Education, 3(3) , 191-204.

GEM (Global Education Monitoring) Report. 2016. Gender review: Creating sustainable futures for all . Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2018a. ‘Everyone benefits from diversity on campus – why the problem with affirmative action?’

––––. 2018b. Global education monitoring report, 2019: Migration, displacement, and education: building bridges, not walls . Paris: UNESCO.

Grantham-McGregor, S.; Cheung, Y.B.; Cueto, S.; Glewwe, P.; Richter, L.; Strupp, B. 2007. ‘Developmental potential in the first 5 years for children in developing countries’. In: The Lancet , 369(9555), 60–70.

Hindle, D. 2006. ‘The funding and financing of schools in South Africa’. In: Commonwealth Secretariat, Commonwealth Education Partnerships 2006/2007 (pp. 148-150). Cambridge: Nexus Strategic Partnerships.

IIEP-UNESCO. 2011. Integrating conflict and disaster risk reduction into education sector planning: guidance notes for educational planners . Paris: IIEP.

Pinnock, H. 2009. Steps towards learning: a guide to overcoming language barriers in children's education. London: Save the Children UK.

Rihani, M. 2006. Keeping the promise: five benefits of girls’ secondary education. Washington DC: Academy for Educational Development.

Save the Children. 2018. ‘ Beyond access: Exploring equity in early childhood learning and development’ .

Shonkoff, J.P.; Garner, A.S. 2012. ‘ The lifelong effects of early childhood adversity and toxic stress ’. In: Pediatrics , 129 (1).

Suárez-Orozco, C.; Yoshikawa, H.; Tseng, V. 2015. ‘Intersecting inequalities: Research to reduce inequality for immigrant-origin children and youth’ . William T. Grant Foundation Paper.

Tusiime, M.; Friedlander, E.; Malik, S. 2014. ‘Literacy Boost Rwanda. Literacy ethnography baseline report ’.

UIS (UNESCO Institute for Statistics); UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund). 2015. Fixing the broken promise of education for all: Findings from the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children. Montreal: UIS.

UNESCO. 2011. Transforming education: The power of ICT policies. Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2012. From access to equality: Empowering girls and women through literacy and secondary education . Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2017a. A guide for ensuring inclusion and equity in education. Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2017b. School violence and bullying: Global status report. Paris: UNESCO.

UNESCO Bangkok. 2015. From insult to inclusion: Asia-Pacific report on school bullying, violence, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2018. School-related violence and bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression (SOGIE): Synthesis report on China, the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam. Bangkok: UNESCO Bangkok.

UNESCO Santiago. 2015. TERCE: associated factors, executive summary. Santiago de Chile: OREALC

UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund). 2018. Advantage or Paradox: The challenge for children and young people growing up urban . New York: UNICEF. Retrieved from:

United Nations. 2015. Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

WEF (World Economic Forum) 2014. ‘Why education policies matter for equality ’ .

Xin Ma. 2008. ‘ A global perspective on socioeconomic differences in learning outcomes’ . Background paper prepared for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2009 .

Related information

Education Equity Research Initiative
Spatial Education Inequalities website
Inter-Agency Group on Education Inequality Indicators (IAG-EII)
World Inequality Database on Education

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Why education is the key to development
Education is a right for everyone. It is a right for girls, just as it is for boys. It is a right for disabled children, just as it is for everyone else. It is a right for the 37 million out-of-school children and youth in countries affected by crises and conflicts. Education is a right regardless of where you are born and where you grow up.
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ity education for all and ... In 74 countries with comparable data for the period 2011-2019, around seven in ten chil- ... physical development, social-emotional devel-
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Education is a weapon to improve one's life. It is probably the most important tool to change one's life. Education for a child begins at home. It is a lifelong process that ends with death. Education certainly determines the quality of an individual's life. Education improves one's knowledge, skills and develops the personality and ...
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In conclusion, the development of a country is a complex process that involves many factors. It includes economic growth, education and health levels, and the social well-being of its citizens. By focusing on these areas, a country can work towards becoming more developed and improving the lives of its citizens. Word Count: 300.
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How many refugees are there around the world? At least 108.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 35.3 million refugees, around 41 per cent of whom are under the age of 18.. There are also millions of stateless people, who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom ...

Why education is the key to development

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1 The Problem of Education Quality in Developing Countries

Introduction

The Global Learning Crisis

Roots of the Learning Crisis: Lessons from Efforts at Reform

Understanding the Political Economy of Education Quality Reforms

Conclusion: Understanding Education Quality Reform Demands a Political Approach

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Importance Of Education In a Country’s Progress

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