[ New InWEnt focus ]

Responsible education budget management

[ By Christoph Hansert ]

Key requirements for successful decentralisation in the education sector are more authority for managers and specialists at the medium level and the introduction of intelligent control mechanisms. These findings resulted from a conference organised by the World Bank and the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) in January in Washington, D.C. The outcome encourages InWEnt to further tackle the challenges of building capacities and improving dialogue at the interface of education, budget management and decentralisation.

Owing to the Fast Track Initiative that the World Bank and major international donors adopted to promote “Education for All” as a universal human right, the amount of direct support provided to education budgets in developing countries is currently increasing. The biggest challenge is to ensure that additional funds actually lead to better and more comprehensive education. Continuous donor monitoring is expected to help in this respect. At the same time, donors wish to increase the opportunities for stakeholders – parents and pupils – to exert influence. To achieve this, they must get involved in decision-making processes.

At first glance, transferring control of education budgets to districts and even schools seems an appropriate way to give more power and responsibility to the experts and administrators on the ground. What conditions contribute to ensuring that this actually leads to a better education system, was the central topic of the “Education Finance and Decentralisation” conference.

New empirical studies show that shifting budget control to the medium level can lead to bad investment and more bureaucracy. In some countries, better results have been achieved by directly allocating resources to schools on the basis of a simple distribution formula. It also makes sense to give fairly ample decision-making powers to school principals. Central governments often have problems with defining formulas to ensure that different regions are all treated fairly. Among the cases presented and discussed were China, Chile, Romania and the United States.

Examples from other countries showed that decentralising education budgets produces the most successful results where accountability is also increased at the medium level. In Uganda, for instance, a press campaign was used to inform parents and school principals about fund allocations to districts. In Indonesia, an independent monitoring group was set up within the education ministry to monitor the flow of funds through decentral units. And in the Brazilian state of Paraná, parents and their elected representatives were systematically included in the school appraisal process (based on school report cards) and decision-making procedures at the federal level.

The conference agreed that relevant national decision-makers should promptly and systematically acquaint themselves with different decentralisation models and their financial implications. Decentralisation should not take place in the education sector until the main interest groups have reached a basic consensus on budgetary consequences.

InWEnt has agreed to cooperate with a group of international partners – including the World Bank Institute (WBI) – to help promote better education budget management. A first multi-component course is currently underway for high ranking managers in Southern Africa. Here, representatives of education ministries are being trained along with colleagues from the finance ministry and the districts. National programmes are planned for Mozambique and Malawi.

To achieve cohesive results, cooperation with the German development agencies GTZ (German Technical Cooperation) and KfW development bank is particularly close. Concepts are developed in consultation with the German Development Institute (GDI) and the actual training courses are conducted in conjunction with UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), the Association for the Development of Education in Africa’s Working Group on Finance and Education (ADEA-WGFE) and Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa. The ministerial partner in Germany is the education ministry of the German federal state of Hesse. Joint international policy events are planned with the WBI.