Catalog

	Table of Contents
p. 18 of 22 BACK | NEXT Preface Executive Summary I. Introduction II. Development of the Policy Paper III. Education and Poverty Reduction IV. The Changing Context V. Experience of the Asian Development Bank VI. Assistance Policies and Support for Education VII. Role of the Asian Development Bank VIII. Dimensions of the Education Policy IX. Education Policy Principles A. General Priorities B. Subsector Priorities X. After the Policy Paper XI. Recommendation Appendixes

Policy on Education : IX. Education Policy Principles

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A. General Priorities

43. The principal priorities for education sector development are reducing poverty, enhancing the status of women, and facilitating economic growth. Subsidiary priorities linked to achieving these are

1. increasing equity, access, and retention, especially for the poor, women, and other marginalized groups;

2. improving quality of education;

3. strengthening management, governance, and efficiency; and emphasizing greater stakeholder participation;

4. mobilizing resources for sustainable education delivery, in particular facilitating the role of the private sector, while protecting access by the poor to affordable basic education;¹⁸

5. strengthening collaboration with partners and beneficiaries; and

6. emphasizing more experimentation with, and dissemination of innovative strategies and technologies.

These six subsidiary priorities are in a sense not new, because the issues they seek to address are perennial. What is new is (i) ADB’s determination to focus its efforts to address these issues with particular reference to poverty reduction, and (ii) ADB’s determination to approach resolution of the issues through a broader sector policy reform framework and to seek greater leverage for its investment.

1. Reaching the Poor

44. The priorities are to increase the access of the poor (especially girls) to affordable basic education, and to assist governments to develop propoor education policies and strategies to ensure equitable allocation of resources to disadvantaged groups. Designing interventions to reduce dropout from school will be a major thrust, since the poor are most likely to leave before finishing primary school. ADB will support programs for “reaching the unreached”—including children in remote and usually poor regions; ethnic minority children; and marginalized children such as working children, street children, and disabled children who are often excluded from schooling or assigned to specialized institutions that isolate them from the mainstream. The learning environment, e.g., the students’ immediate surroundings, also influence learning outcomes. Even if the poorest students have access to education, they often suffer most from ill health. A child’s health affects the child’s ability to learn. Health programs and school health services, such as deworming and micronutrient supplements, will help to solve some of the most immediate problems, and should be part of interventions to reach the poor and disadvantaged.

45. While strategies must be adapted to particular situations, in general ADB will seek to develop flexible approaches to basic education delivery, including nonformal and community education for adults as well as children. ADB will encourage development of equitable resource allocation formulas that recognize and seek to compensate for differences between schools and communities in their ability to provide supplementary budget resources for education. ADB will give greater attention to early childhood development in recognition of its impact on enhancing the capacity of poor children to take better advantage of later formal schooling opportunities. ADB will also encourage development of policies and strategies to ensure that government resources are targeted at basic education as a public good, rather than disproportionately at higher education where cost recovery from beneficiaries is more justified. Finally, ADB will promote policies and strategies to enhance equity of access to higher education and skills training opportunities for women and the poor.

2. Improving Quality

46. Quality, by definition, is an elusive goal. The degree of quality perceived will almost always lag behind the degree of quality expected or required. Continuous investment in education quality is thus needed, especially since there is a positive correlation between quality and the demand of poor households. ADB will support quality improvement at all levels of education and training, with particular emphasis on attainment. ADB will support efforts to define minimum standards, and to strengthen quality monitoring through better assessment at the classroom and national levels. It will concentrate on improving the quality of instruction at the classroom level (basic and higher education). ADB will give greater attention to experimenting with, evaluating, and institutionalizing innovations designed to enhance learning to focus on the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills at all levels, and to meet the needs of poor families. Curriculum reform, including curricula that meet local needs, and take full account of HIV/AIDS realities will also be emphasized. ADB will continue to support provision of teaching and learning materials in all subsectors, but with greater attention to low-cost and locally produced materials, and to improving overall materials development and delivery systems (as opposed to improving printing and publication capacity alone). Teacher training and development, and improvements in teacher service conditions and incentive structures, including the promotion of community support, are other areas for support. In higher education, and skills training, ADB will give priority to supporting activities designed to strengthen accreditation, establish standards, and monitor achievement of standards.

3. Strengthening Management, Governance, and Efficiency

47. ADB will continue to support the general trend to decentralize education management where appropriate. Among the types of support that could be provided by ADB are (i) supporting organizational restructuring, role redefinition, and capacity building of central education ministries to reflect their changing responsibilities in a decentralized system; (ii) developing capacity at the provincial, district, and school levels in planning, administration, and financial management; (iii) strengthening community participation in school management to improve accountability, increase transparency of decision making, and enhance ownership; and (iv) capacity building for institutional autonomy for higher education facilities. ADB will intensify its support for the development of education management information systems, with increased emphasis on (i) providing long-term support through a series of interventions spread across several projects, and (ii) strengthening the capacity and willingness of education policymakers to use education management information systems proactively to assess the extent to which sector reform is being effectively implemented. ADB will also provide support, when required, for drafting legislation and regulations needed to facilitate programs of education sector reform. Finally, ADB will provide technical assistance to help governments identify major constraints to improving the efficiency of resource utilization at all levels of education, and to develop policies and programs to address those constraints.

4. Mobilizing Resources for Sustainable Financing

48. ADB will provide technical assistance to help governments formulate policies and programs to enhance cost-sharing and cost recovery to lessen the burden on government, although with careful attention to maintaining or increasing support for women, the poor, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups for whom basic education should be free. ADB will assist governments in developing policies and strategies to increase local generation, retention, and control of revenues for education through, for example, revised taxation codes. ADB will actively support private sector education institutions and education-related industries and services through direct lending, and through assistance for governments to formulate policies and regulatory frameworks and develop roles conducive to the growth of the private education sector, for example, providing tax incentives, and outsourcing provision of student places and education services to the private sector when this is clearly the more cost-effective alternative.

5. Strengthening Collaboration with Partners and Beneficiaries

49. ADB recognizes that achieving its goal of poverty reduction, and maximizing the contribution of its education investment to that goal, requires it to work in close collaboration with other development partners. Education reform can only be achieved through the joint efforts of all players—ADB, governments, other funding agencies, NGOs, and the communities and beneficiaries themselves. ADB will therefore seek to strengthen its cooperation with its development partners, for example, through the country and strategy programs, in education sector work, and through sectorwide or subsector approaches to education programs. Resident missions will help support partnerships at the country level. ADB will more actively seek the views of NGOs, and encourage NGO involvement in project design, service delivery, and monitoring. It will seek to involve communities, especially poor communities, more substantially in managing education locally and through the schools.

6. Supporting Innovation

50. ADB will provide more support for the application of appropriate forms of ICT to leap frog conventional means of providing instructional resources. ADB will support development of information technology policies and strategies for the education sector, and seek to link these to improving the efficiency and quality of education at all levels. ICT, for distance education, offers enhanced opportunities to improve quality in teacher training and higher education. Connecting educational institutions to the Internet, coupled with appropriate investment in training and equipment maintenance, should be even more important than traditional support for library development. Facilitating Internet linkages between regional and nonregional universities, for example, can expand access to higher education while improving the quality of instruction in local institutions. ICT can also be used to support regional cooperation through existing networks to facilitate exchange of education experiences, methodologies, and ideas. Experiments in many countries have also demonstrated the potential of the Internet to bring immediate change to the lives of the poor by providing them with direct access to needed information. The challenge for ADB is to systematically incorporate ICT strategies into the education sector component of country assistance programs that are suitable to the context, sustainable and affordable, and directly promote access to and quality of education.

51. Innovation, of course, means more than supporting ICT. It means developing and adapting new approaches to deal with a range of issues. Often, the problem is not identifying a new approach, but adopting it and integrating it with the education system. The region abounds in examples of good practices that have been developed on a small scale—often by NGOs—but never expanded or mainstreamed. Reasons for this include higher costs, lack of trained staff, unwillingness to accept change, and lack of understanding. ADB should seek out and evaluate innovative practices, and ensure support for incorporating them in the education system, especially innovations that will improve access and quality of education for the poor.

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