Challenge
Pakistan’s progress in improving its human development indicators has been uneven. While there have been efforts in recent years to strengthen education service delivery, the country is unlikely to meet the education Millennium Development Goals for 2015.
Consistent with the national picture, the province of Sindh performs poorly across a range of socioeconomic indicators, including education indicators related to access, equity, and achievement. Several factors, reflecting poor governance and weak accountability systems, hamper efficient and effective public spending on education and public education service delivery.
Approach
To address these challenges, the Government of Sindh launched a comprehensive and ambitious medium-term reform program in 2006/07. The Sindh Education Sector Reform Program (SERP) seeks to improve education outcomes by improving governance and institutionalizing accountability in education service delivery. The objectives of the SERP are to increase school participation, reduce gender and urban-rural disparities in school participation, increase progression, and improve the measurement of student learning.
The objective of the Sindh Education Sector Project (SEP) is to support the overall education reform program in Sindh. The SEP has four defining design features. First, it is performance based: the event and amount of disbursements are tied to pre-specified annual implementation progress and performance targets, referred to as Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs). The DLIs capture intermediate results that are considered central to the medium-term achievement of the project development objective. Second, the project is underpinned by education sector governance initiatives, which attempt to set the structures and incentives right for service delivery performance. Third, it supports improvements in budget and fiscal management, financial management, procurement management, and environmental safeguard principles and practices. Fourth, it further strengthens monitoring and evaluation systems in several ways, including via third party validation studies and rigorous impact evaluations.
Results
Prior to the recent catastrophic floods, some of the targets were either nearly met or have already been met. For example, the primary net enrollment rate has increased from 50 percent to 54 percent, which translates into an additional 600,000 children in school. In addition, the ratio of female-male primary net enrollment in rural areas has increased from 61 percent to 76 percent.
School infrastructure rehabilitation: In the second round of the school infrastructure rehabilitation initiative, 847 schools (82 percent of the schools screened as needing rehabilitation) were fully rehabilitated and met minimum construction quality and school safety standards in a record time of twelve months as independently certified. Evidence suggests that these schools suffered less damage than other schools in flood-affected areas, suggesting improved construction quality. The government allocated US$27 million to the second round, and covered over a thousand schools. The government expects to raise the allocation for the third round of rehabilitation to US$52 million, and rely on this program as the sole mechanism for school infrastructure development.
Teacher recruitment and placement: Approximately 13,000 new teachers were hired into government service, based on test scores and other objective criteria and locally placed in schools under fixed-term, school-specific contracts. In the second round, the teachers were placed in understaffed schools. Evidence suggests that the newly recruited teachers have a lower rate of absenteeism on average than older teachers.
Private sector service delivery and reaching the unserved: There are many communities in Sindh where service delivery, either by the government or by the market, is completely absent. A public-private partnership program was designed to address this dual failure. Today, around 300 new private coeducational primary schools are in operation in underserved rural communities supported by public per-student cash subsidies of US$4–6 per student per month conditional on free schooling and stipulated school quality standards. These schools have over 26,000 students in attendance as verified by program administrators through unannounced monitoring visits. Evidence suggests that the school participation rate has increased from 30 percent to 80 percent on average in these communities, and that gender disparity in school participation has been eliminated. The evidence also suggests that this is one of the most cost-effective interventions for raising participation among all rigorously evaluated programs in the developing the world. The initiative is being scaled up to reach more underserved rural communities.
Voices
Only my brother could go to school before this school started but now I am going too because it is totally free. We learn new things every day. The teachers are very kind and school is so much fun.
Bank Contribution
The International Development Association financially supported the design and implementation of the first year of the SERP, through the Sindh Education Sector Development Policy Credit (SEPDC), with US$100 million, approved by the Bank’s Board in June 2007.
The SEP is a US$300 million Standard Investment Credit and was approved by the Bank’s Board in June 2009. The project is composed of two components. The first component provides US$294 million to finance key education sector budget line items (Eligible Expenditures), using a Sector-wide Approach, with credit disbursements tied to pre-specified implementation performance and progress results. The second component is a Technical Assistance (TA) component of US$6 million to assist the government with program implementation and monitoring and evaluation.
An Additional Financing (AF) project of US$50 million, following the design of the SEP, was approved by the Board in March 2011.
Partners
The European Union (EU) presently cofinances the SERP under its Sindh Education Plan Support Programme (Project Period: 2006/07-2010/11). The current project commitment is €33 million, against the same disbursement targets (among others) as the SEP. The provision of TA by both the Bank and the EU are coordinated. The EU and the Bank use common monitoring and reporting arrangements, and program review is carried out jointly via Joint Review Missions. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is presently in discussions with the government to finance selected subprograms in the SERP.
Toward the Future
The Bank is fully committed to supporting the government’s education sector reform efforts. The AF project is expected to support the government to enhance the impact and effectiveness of the SERP, currently supported by the SEP. The AF would leverage its resources to support the launch of two new education sector reform activities and the extension of one existing reform activity under the SEP.
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