Last week the Global Partnership for Education allocated seven grants totaling $168 million to support the implementation of national education plans in Afghanistan, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Moldova, Mongolia and Timor Leste. This new financing for education will bring concrete results, including helping to build and rehabilitate schools in Cote D’Ivoire after 10 years of political instability, put girls into school in remote rural areas of Afghanistan and include more children with special needs in pre-school programs in Moldova.
The scale of needs is enormous, especially in countries emerging from conflict where education systems have all but been wiped out. It takes a lot to make education work again, often almost from scratch, and educate a new generation of children: providing meals for students, recruiting and training teachers, and repairing classrooms and equipment.
But the Global Partnership is about much more than funds. It’s about making sure that a good, solid national education plan exists to get children into school and make sure they are learning. An education plan is like a complicated recipe. It lays out what you are trying to achieve and exactly what “ingredients’ will be needed to achieve it – for example, how many and what kind of classrooms, textbooks and teachers will be needed over the next five years to make sure that every child of primary school age can have a fair shot at learning to read and write. All developing countries who are members of the Global Partnership have invested huge amounts of time and effort to develop an education plan for their country. The Global Partnership supports them to do this.
Once the plan – the right “recipe” – is in place, the Partnership supports developing country partners to make sure that the right “ingredients” are available. This is harder than it sounds. Not only because money to buy the ingredients – teachers, textbooks and classrooms – is tremendously scarce – and increasingly so with the current economic crisis – but also because the money that is available is often used to buy things that are not in the recipe. So the Partnership supports its developing country partners to make sure that everyone is working together, with the same end result in mind, and clear roles and responsibilities. This is a recipe for success.
Results
Because the Global Partnership invests its resources in countries that have already demonstrated their commitment to education by producing good quality education plans, its investments are paying high dividends. Many of the Partnership’s developing country partners are delivering very encouraging results in terms of providing good quality schools for increasing numbers of children. And increasingly, countries like Moldova are successfully achieving the objectives laid out in their education plans and are coming back for more financing from the Partnership to consolidate and improve on these results.
This is true also of Mongolia. For many children in this country’s remote and rural areas, herding activities and the nomadic lifestyle that comes with them mean fewer opportunities for education. In recent years, grants from the Global Partnership for Education have financed 100 gers or tent-like mobile schools located in 21 remote, rural provinces enabling thousands of children to go to school, often for the first time.
What’s next?
Over the next three years, the Global Partnership will strive to provide quality education to 25 million more children.
With major new funding commitments to the Partnership from donor countries, developing country partners will be able to look to the Global Partnership for the kind of long-term financial support that will enable them to not only get more children into school but make sure that they stay there.
Next year we anticipate more countries emerging from conflict will join the Partnership. We will have a unique opportunity to support them to rebuild and rehabilitate their education systems to provide schooling for some of the most disadvantaged children in the world. This is an exciting time for all of us.
The above examples are excellent but why ‘our’ (GPE) ‘success stories’?
Surely the successes are due to the relevant ministries and their in-county partners? The above reads like GPE funding a number of successful ‘projects’. The GPE message is – should be- that it helps in funding good national education plans. Implementation of these plans depends upon the ability of the local ministries to work with their civil and external partners. Plans and money are necessary but it is only after these are in place that the real work begins.
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