Early childhood education helps build a strong foundation for learning. GPE works with partner country governments to improve the quality and availability of early education for all, through cross-country exchange of best practices, increased financing and investments and the promotion of laws, policies and advocacy campaigns dedicated to…

Every girl deserves a quality education and every country deserves gender equality. In December 2020, Global Partnership for Education (GPE) created the US $250 million Girls' Education Accelerator to transform girls' opportunities to go to school and learn. To secure funding, countries commit to ambitious action for gender equality by investing…

Most countries are far from achieving the new sustainable development target of equal access to higher education by 2030, with those in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa furthest behind. This raises questions about the allocation of public resources across the education system to promote equity. We use data from Demographic and Health Surveys and…

This paper looks at how countries have mobilized additional resources for education and assesses their impact on access and learning outcomes, using the World Bank's new Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling measure. The paper shows that global spending on education has risen significantly over the past two decades, although spending as a share of…

Over the next two decades, sub-Saharan Africa will face substantial pressure to expand its secondary education system. This is driven by the current low development of secondary education compared to other world regions, continued rapid population growth, the increase in the enrollment and completion rates at the primary education level, and the…

This study examined the social and spill-over benefits as motivating factors to investment in formal education in selected countries in Africa. The paper had three objectives, namely) to profile the key statistics of formal schooling; ii) examine the formal education and iii) link national goals of education with expectations in Ghana, Kenya and…

In the past decades, most of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have been affected by armed conflicts. By means of a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) database, we attempt to measure the impact of war on a sample of 43 countries in Africa from 1950 to 2010. These conflicts, and especially civil wars, are shown to have a strong negative effect on…

Three universal demands characterize higher education globally: the demand for higher quality, for increased access, and for greater equity. In East Africa, where resources are highly constrained, no nation has been able to meet these demands on the basis of public expenditures alone. Instead countries have had to increase resources from nonpublic…

These self-instructional resources have their origins in a workshop on the Costs and Financing of Open & Distance Learning which took place from 6-10 August 2007 in Gabarone, Botswana. The workshop was sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) with the overall aim of building capacity to plan, negotiate and manage appropriate financial…

Meetings were held in Senegal in 1985, in Cote d'Ivoire in 1986, and in Zimbabwe in 1987, concerning the current state of higher education finance in Africa, the structure of unit costs, and the role of development assistance agencies and other sources of financial support. Reports are presented concerning the macroeconomic perspective, internal…

Higher education in Sub-Saharan African countries is examined. Attention is directed to the development of higher education in sub-Saharan African countries since the early 1960s, as well as criticisms currently directed at the sector, and the economic and budgetary environment for resource allocation. The labor market for African college…

This book contains papers presented at a conference focused on the subject of funding for higher education and providing comparative perspectives on, and case studies of, educational financing from around the world. After an introduction by Ernest L. Boyer, the papers and their authors are as follows: "The Costs of Higher Education: Worldwide…

Examines educational expenditures, 1975-87, in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Senegal as a proportion of total government expenditures and with regard to resource allocation. Discusses educational expansion during this period; process indicators such as dropout rates, repetition rates, and availability of trained teachers; and…

Drawing on implications suggested by several recent studies in comparative urban research, the extent to which the structure of intergovernmental relations affects the allocations of public funds within a nation is examined. The focus is on educational policy and determining whether differing degrees of centralization affect the outcomes of the…

A discussion of academic freedom and university autonomy in African universities established in the French colonial tradition focuses on their implications for college admission and enrollment management, curriculum design and development, faculty selection and promotion, and government funding and resource allocation. (MSE)