Sistema de captación y tratamiento de biogás

In his paper Bridging the Financial Gap: Implications for Equity and Access presented to the 18^th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers, Lewin (2012: 1) identifies the resources available to finance progress towards education goals as being determined by national revenue and the amount allocated to public services; the proportion of domestic expenditure apportioned to education; and private household expenditure as a complement to public spending. He goes on to argue that for the provision of education to be

financially sustainable it will depend upon the proportion of school-aged children; the cost per child of a school place; the percentage of GDP allocated to education; the amount and distribution of household contributions; as well as the cost of providing the necessary infrastructure and materials for learning. Where insufficient resources are available to finance universal access to basic education, gaps may be filled with external assistance as part of plans that make clear the route to future sustainable self-financing.

Sustainable domestic modes of financing are no doubt the most important sources for achieving education goals. In many countries, widening the tax base and ensuring that an appropriate share of government expenditure is apportioned to education - the UNESCO (2015) EFA Global Monitoring Report suggests a government expenditure target of 15 to 20 percent - will be among the most important means for securing future education goals (IMF, OECD et al. 2011; Bhushan, Samy et al. 2013; UNESCO 2015). However, it is argued that even with such reforms many poor countries will be unable, for the foreseeable future, to bear all the costs of education, particularly given the financial needs related not only to expanding access to schooling but also to improving quality in education provision (UNESCO 2013). Increased domestic resource mobilisation alone will often be inadequate and international aid will therefore be needed (UNESCO 2010).

Colclough (2011) posits that aid for education plays an important contributing role in meeting education goals, particularly for those countries furthest away from achieving EFA. While this point is generally acknowledged, it is in practice, difficult to determine the

government, aid donors, households, individuals and private organisations - as well as incomplete and inconsistent reporting. Moreover, donors finance education through government budgets, but also outside them via different agents such as NGOs and civil society organisations. Top line public expenditure on education statistics collated by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and published by the World Bank (2015a) represent government spending on education, when the government is acting as the spending agent.

This point is crucial as it means that what is accounted for in the figures includes not just domestic resources spent on education, but also those aid resources allocated to education that are spent through government channels - aid that is ‘on budget’. Aid spent outside of the government budget or government systems - ‘off budget’ - is left out of public

expenditure data, complicating analysis of the extent to which education spending at country level is aid financed and, therefore, whether countries are becoming more or less dependent upon aid to fund their education systems over time.

Aid for education that is channelled off-budget is likely to be sizeable in many countries, and its inclusion in studies wishing to understand the relative importance of aid in public spending on education (and thereby the extent of aid dependency) is therefore important.

Total ODA as reported by the OECD DAC has substantially exceeded external aid financing as reported by the government in a number of countries - in Uganda by 10 per cent of GDP (Fagernas and Roberts 2004aa); in Zambia by between 20 and 40 per cent of GDP in certain years (Fagernas and Roberts 2004bb); and in Senegal by 12 per cent of GDP, twice as high as aid reported by the Ministry of Finance (Ouattara 2006). Fagernas and Schurich (2004) report approximately 40 per cent of total aid to be off-budget, while the Republic of Liberia Ministry of Finance (2009 cited in Van de Sijpe 2013) estimate approximately three-quarters of aid in the fiscal year 2009-10 to have been off-budget.

In order to establish a clear picture of the relative contributions of donors and

governments to the education sector, the most complete and internationally comparable data currently available on public education expenditure and ODA is used, published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) respectively. A technical note published by UNESCO (2012b) outlines three important issues that must be considered when attempting to untangle education aid from public expenditure:

First, that aid to education reported to the CRS overstates foreign contributions by

including aid that does not reach recipient education systems (donors’ administrative costs

and ‘imputed student costs’ - costs incurred by donor countries’ higher education institutions when receiving students from developing countries¹⁰ and scholarships). This issue is addressed in the present analysis by using a sub-set of ODA - country

programmable aid (CPA) to education data, available at the sectoral level since 2004 and a closer approximation of aid directly supporting developing country education systems - as opposed to total education aid figures.

Second, considering aid specifically allocated to the education system risks missing an important part of donor support that is channelled to the Ministry of Finance in the form of general budget support - aid that is not earmarked to a specific sector and can be spent according to national priorities. UIS questionnaires do not ask about general budget support; the assumption here, then, is that budget support channelled to education will be recorded in public expenditure on education figures as reported by countries. A 20 per cent share of country-programmable general budget support is therefore added to the education aid figures based on the recommended share of the budget that should be dedicated to education (FTI 2006; UNESCO 2015).

Third, determining whether education aid is ‘on’ or ‘off’ budget - disentangling whether donor support to education has been channelled through government systems, for example via sector budget support, pooled or programme funds, or earmarked projects recorded in public expenditure accounts; or whether it has been delivered in parallel through projects implemented by NGOs or by private entities - is complicated by the lack of accurate recording of both on and off budget aid by governments. The UNESCO (2012b) estimate of 60 per cent of country-programmable aid to education as being on-budget and 40 per cent off-budget is adopted. The methodology for calculating these estimates compares direct aid to education as stated in country reports and education CPA figures reported by donors to the OECD. Figures for the sample countries for which data is available are averaged over a period of eight years in order to smooth out volatility.

Taking into account the considerations outlined above, and in order to obtain an

estimation of the relative importance of aid in education financing using data available at international level, first the share of aid in the education budget (from donors and governments, but only what is on budget) is calculated using the following formula:

Equation 3: Share of Aid in Education Budget

(20% * general budget support CPA) + (60% Education CPA) Total education budget

In order to calculate the share of aid in total public funding of education (from donors and governments both on and off budget), the following formula is employed:

Equation 4: Share of Aid in Total Public Funding to Education

(20% * general budget support) + Education CPA Total education budget + 40% Education CPA

Table 10 shows the average share of aid in education budgets as well as total public education expenditure (which includes ‘off budget’ aid to education) for 43 of the 61 countries included in this study where sufficient data was available over the period 2004-2012. While education aid continues to fall far short of the amount required to fill annual financing gaps, it clearly provides a substantial additional contribution to education finance in some of the world’s poorest countries where domestic resources are too scarce -

amounting to, on average, approximately a quarter of public expenditure on education in those countries in the sample defined as low-income and a quarter of public expenditure on education of those found in sub-Saharan Africa.

Table 10: Average Share of Aid in Education Budgets and Total Public Expenditure on Education (43 Countries 2004-2012)

Sub-Saharan Africa (23) 20.3 25.9

Low-Income (21) 20 26

Lower-Middle-Income (22) 9.2 12.2

TOTAL (43 countries for which data available) 14.4 19

Source: World Bank (2015a; 2015b) and OECD CRS (2015)

It is clear from Table 10 above, that a large portion of aid reported by donors is not channelled through recipient countries’ public accounts, demonstrating the importance of accounting for off-budget education aid when estimating the share of aid relative to

government spending. It should be noted that percentage averages of regional and income groups cannot give a complete picture of dependency on education aid. The proportion of education expenditure apportioned by aid donors differs vastly from country to country. In a number of countries, for example in Latin America and the Caribbean, the donor share is nominal; however, there are many countries where aid contributions account for a

significant share of the resources allocable to education. In 20 of the 43 countries - Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Bhutan, Cambodia, Djibouti, D.R. Congo, Eritrea, Gambia, Guinea, Lao PDR, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia - education aid represents in excess of 20 per cent of total public education funding, fifteen of these are sub-Saharan African countries (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Share of Aid in Education Budgets and Total Public Expenditure on Education (Average 2004-2012)

Sources: World Bank (2015a) and OECD CRS (2015)

Considerable differences are evident even within similar country groupings. Approximately 5 per cent of public education spending in Kenya is comprised of aid, a significantly smaller percentage than many other low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Zambia and Mozambique, where, on average, 62 and 51 per cent respectively of total public education expenditure is found to be aid funded. The majority of Latin American country education spending is financed almost entirely by domestic resources, although Guatemala stands out with 16 per cent of total public expenditure on education (and 11 per cent of its education budget) financed by external donors. Even though in 2013 India remained amongst the top ten recipients of education aid (following significant reductions from key donors such as DFID in recent years), in absolute terms (US$ 233m) the share of education aid relative to government expenditure on education is extremely small at just 1 per cent.

The relative importance of aid in education spending across countries is extremely varied.

Significant amounts of aid have been provided to countries where access to basic education was extremely limited prior to the introduction of the MDGs and where there has been considerable progress in primary enrolment. Mozambique, for example, has been witness to unprecedented rises in access to schooling with out-of-school numbers dropping from 1.6 million in 1999 to less than 0.7 million in 2012. Throughout much of this period 51 per cent of total public expenditure on education (42 per cent of the education budget) was funded by aid sources. However, there are a number of examples, of countries highly dependent upon aid, such as Malawi, where far less progress has been evident. The

following section looks at contrasting cases of aid dependency, selected on the basis of the analysis above, and examines the effectiveness of their education aid programmes.