World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz has called for a doubling of aid for basic education in poor countries over the next four years, amid concerns that donors are not honouring pledges of support.
Wolfowitz said $7 billion per year in such aid was required to provide quality primary education to all children in low-income countries, compared to $3.4 billion today.
Wolfowitz said that for the 20 countries so far endorsed for the Fast Track Initiative – a programme launched in 2002 that gives long-term financial and technical donations in return for agreements to prepare sound national educational plans – there is a $1.2 billion shortfall in external financing requirements.
“The demand for initial finance will grow. We can’t afford hollow promises,” Wolfowitz said. He said World Bank support for education should increase to as much as $1.5 billion in each of the next two years, from $900 million today. Kenyan finance minister Amos Kimunya complained about the costs he had had to bear in generating universal primary education, saying 26% of the country’s total budget into education this year, or euro 1 billion in this financial year. “Despite the support that had been pledged”, outside assistance is just 5%, of which 2% was loans rather than grants, he said. Support had been pledged, and then disrupted. “I would really like to ask, if you are not committed, let’s not make the pledge.”
Louis Michel, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, said: “We are not fulfilling our promises in terms of disbursing what we have committed. We are not providing security and predictability of our external support.”
He proposed a new long-term instrument with less conditionality than budget support, ensuring a minimum level of assistance to support education each year, and that “will not be undermined by the stop-and-go approach too often linked to budget support.”
The bank reported that between 2000 and 2005 the first ten endorsed countries enrolled an additional 3.5 million children in primary schools. It hopes that by 2008, 60 countries, with 70 million children who are not going to school between them, will be endorsed.
UK Chancellor Gordon Brown, whose government has committed $15 billion over 10 years, said: “We could be the first generation in history that would ensure that every child in the world had the chance of basic schooling in our time.” He announced a pledging conference will take place early next year to tie other countries to donations.
The Fast Track Initiative is one of the first to which Russia has pledged support since paying off its own debts to the international financial institutions earlier this year and becoming a donor nation. “We aim to make this a programme of the highest quality”, Russian finance minister Aleksei Kudrin told a press briefing.