The World Bank Tuesday approved a 100 million US dollar (610 mio. DKR) credit to Bangladesh for implementation of a reform program to enhance access to and quality of secondary education.
The Programmatic Education Sector Adjustment Credit is the first in a proposed series of three support packages to education. This will assist the Ministry of Education in pushing through the first phase of a long-term and ambitious reform agenda.
In this South Asian nation of 135,7 million people, there are over 8 million students in the secondary education system, mostly in private schools, which are subsidized by the government.
Secondary enrollments more than doubled in the 1990s. And the enrollment of girls increased from 33 percent in 1990 to over 50 percent by 2003. As a result of this rapid expansion, the quality of education has suffered, causing attendance rates to fall and teacher absenteeism to rise. The governments reform program is designed to address this quality issue.
The vision behind the reform program is that by increasing the quality of education, Bangladesh will build a more skilled labor force, making the country both more competitive in the global marketplace and better able to tackle its high rates of poverty.
– The reform program, supported by this Bank operation, will change the incentives in Bangladesh for the financing and provision of education, says Amit Dar, World Bank Senior Economist and task leader for the project.
– This will ultimately build greater accountability in the education system, which, in turn, will increase cost effectiveness for the benefit of students, teachers, parents, and service providers, he added.
The goals of the reform program are:
– To provide more equitable access to secondary education by building more schools particularly in underserved areas;
– To increase accountability of the schools both to the community and to the government, link government subsidies to schools to objective measures of performance and devolve more authorities to local levels of government;
– To enhance capacity to monitor public expenditure in education, evaluate programs and policies and disseminate information on standardized examinations results, school performance and program effectiveness;
– To reduce teacher absenteeism and build teacher efficiency with improved teacher recruitment and training programs;
– To work toward greater student enrollment, higher completion rates, and better examination results; and
– To improve textbook quality by introducing competitive production.
By raising the quality of service delivery and improving equity in access to secondary education, this credit will help improve governance in the education sector, which has repeatedly been identified as a major development challenge facing Bangladesh.
Given the strong linkages between poverty reduction and human capital development, delivery of high quality education, especially to poor people, is a major goal of the governments poverty reduction strategy.
The credit from the International Development Association, the World Banks concessionary lending arm, carries a 0,75 percent service charge and has 40 years to maturity with a 10-year grace period. It will be disbursed in one tranche upon credit effectiveness.
For more information about the World Bank in Bangladesh, visit:
www.worldbank.org/bd
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
