Governance and finance

Achieving higher access and better quality simultaneously poses difficult choices about how domestic and aid resources should be allocated. It is essential that decisions are based on evidence regarding effectiveness and efficiency. Institutions need to be organised in ways that facilitate the use of results-based approaches and promote accountability.

How should overall expenditure be balanced between the primary, secondary and tertiary levels? What should the relative emphasis be between formal and non-formal provision? Should budgets be decentralised, allowing local education managers delegated authority? How can education financing be managed to achieve the desirable results and linked to them? OPM’s work in developing policy scenarios has repeatedly proved invaluable to such decision-making. These strategic planning exercises highlight potential resource conflict and help countries clearly understand the tradeoffs they face in choosing particular policies.

The growing realisation of how decisions depend on each other has placed a stronger focus on timely, good quality information to support evaluation and inform future decision-making. This has implications for the capacity of education administrations to process and use information, the processes to link findings to resource allocation and the incentives to use these decisions to achieve better outcomes for the beneficiaries.

In many countries, aid flows are a major and vital source of education finance. Historically, this has often meant that expenditure on education has been heavily influenced by donor priorities – with mixed results. As a result, today development partners and country governments are moving away from project-based approaches and increasingly focusing on how to maximise the effectiveness of aid through strengthening country-led processes for education policy and planning. This has meant a rise in sector wide approaches (SWAps) and multi-donor budget support.