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FINANCING FOR EDUCATION
AMADOU
ABDOUL SY
Traditional and modern
societies have found ways for the transmission of
knowledge, that is, for reproducing ideas, customs and
traditions through structures, methods and processes
that take on major orientations of society’s dominant
ideas.ANAFA - Senegal In the traditional society, this way of transmission was assured within families and communities or ethnical-cultural groups through initiation rituals. In modern societies, even if the traditional way still exists, knowledge is transmitted through learning, education and training in schools which system, structure and orientation are defined by the State. We will address the financing of this formal and non formal way of knowledge transmission known under the term of education, first, in general, and second, through the example of our country: SENEGAL. Financing Education has become in all countries an important issue that interests the State, which administrates the public sector and the nation, the private sector, for which the profitability of invested capital in economy is a main objective, and the civil society in which inhabitants citizens’ participation in the city’s affairs, that imply information and training acquisition, assure the quality required to achieve the success of this enterprise. Education financing is both an important issue and a debate and a combat between the different participants: the State, the private sector, students’ parents (families), trade unions, pupils and students and the civil society as well. A training sector of youth and adults engaged in the production of wealth at the different sectors of the economic life, development remains conditioned and linked to the education and training level attained by the population. This is obtained through the definition of a strategy adapted to a program that carefully draws the goals aimed and the material, human and financial means to be implemented, as well as the cost of acquisition of these means, the construction, purchase, maintenance and repairing of capital assets (buildings, vehicles, machines), recruitment, strengthening, conservation and motivation of human resources in charge of defining educational policies, executing decisions and following up and assessing them. The State must also ensure the balance between the budgets assigned to the different sectors: basic education (primary), secondary and higher, and their articulation with the sub sectors of adults literacy and education, as well as vocational training. It must also establish a balance between training in social sciences and training in scientific sciences. Some economists currently talk of knowledge economy defined “as the one that uses knowledge as a strategic resource and competitiveness factor much more important than natural resources”. Those countries that succeed in making profit from this new economy are those that have wisely integrated ICT into the economy, which makes them need an innovation and so an investment and has caused important depreciation of their accounting but also revenues from patents and inventions that they have sold to less developed countries. In this sense, the OCDE has given 26 indicators that prove the use and the integration of knowledge economy in the economic life of the country in question. The elements kept by the OCDE are: 1 - Graduated in sciences and techniques 2 - population having received a higher training 3 - Access to networks of high start 4 - Lifelong training 5 - Schooling level attained by youth 6 - Public expenditures on research and development 7 - Companies’ expenditures on research and development 8 - Percentage of high and medium level research and development 9 -Percentage of firms that receive public assistance 10 - /Research and development of universities financed by the State 11 - Innovative and internal SME 12 - SME innovative in cooperation 13 - Innovation expenditures 14 - Risk capital for emergent firms 15 - Expenditures on ICT 16 - Non technological changes 17 - Jobs created in high technology services 18 - High technology exports 19 - Sale of new products into the market 20 - Sale of new products by the firm 21 - Use of high and medium technology in the firms 22 - EPO Patents 23 - USPTO Patents 24 - TRIADIC Patents 25 - Community trademarks 26 - Community industrial designs THE CASE OF SENEGAL Since its independence in 1960 until 2000, the education sector has worked in the classic form with a voted and executed budget. The DECENNIAL PLAN OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING was adopted in the beginning of the XXI century. The Ministry of National Education budgets and services that enter into the area of the management of the public budget were administered within the framework of the general execution of the State annual budget. The programming, the adoption, the commitments, the certification and the liquidation of expenditures were executed on the basis of an annual planning of this public budget. The huge efforts and sacrifices made, even if they reached a certain amount of results, did not enable the Senegalese educational system to absorb the whole of the target formed by school-aged children, adults (15-50 years old), illiterate people who convey a request of basic education (read and write, literacy) and continuing education training to adapt themselves to the labour market innovations. This management, expressed within an annual time horizon, has shown some limits. At the end of the twentieth-century, within the dynamics of the preparation of Dakar conference on education for all and the literacy decade launched by the United Nations after the CONFINTEA V meeting in Hamburg, Germany, and leaning on a lucid reading of the world environment, strategic trends and options of world policy in favour of education, Senegal begun the elaboration and the adoption of a strategic plan of the education sector called Decennial Plan for education and training development (PDEF). Designed for a time horizon of ten years, articulating the set of educational sub sectors and as unifying framework of interventions of the different donors or partners for development, the PDEF innovates with a participatory approach that combines trade unions, NGOs, students’ parents, local groups and donors, broadening the strategic vision of the State that, by means of annual assessments established by private cabinets and so independent, has obtained with this plan a diagnosis tool that enables to fix the goals to be achieved, the means to implement them, to evaluate the results obtained with a view to redress the situation, with the permanent concern of keeping efficiency and effectiveness. A STRATEGIC PLAN: THE PDEF Designed for a time horizon of ten years, articulating the set of educational sub sectors and as unifying framework of interventions of the different donors or partners for development, the PDEF innovates with a participatory approach that combines trade unions, NGOs, students’ parents, local groups and donors, broadening the strategic vision of the State that, by means of annual assessments established by private cabinets and so independent, has obtained with this plan a diagnosis tool that enables to fix the goals to be achieved, the means to implement them, to evaluate the results obtained with a view to redress the situation, with the permanent concern of keeping efficiency and effectiveness. Education financing within the PDEF Please see Table made from PDEF reports (in millions of francs) in attached document Education is a sector of the utmost importance in Senegal, not only for the State and the financial partners, but also for the households that invest lots of money in their children’s education. Education is a core activity that brings value added to all the rest of the society’s sectors; training of qualified human resources depends on the educational sector, and this is why its financing is particularly important. The table above shows that the State is the main donor of education. The actors that participate in the financing of education, as a whole in three years, have made great efforts to increase financing they grant to education and training sectors. The international cooperation referred to in this table as financial partner has more than doubled its share that goes from 8,300,000,000 to 22,575,000,000, that is, an increase of 171.98%. The households, despite the endemic poverty they live in, increase the financing they assign to education when we add their contribution to the investment budget of the STATE under the form of taxes that households pay as tax payers and consumers, and so we appreciate the value of the place education has in Senegalese people’s lives. CONCLUSION It is difficult to address the financing of education on a debate like this; we wanted to share an experience and we appreciate that we have been given the chance to do so. Table made from PDEF reports (in millions of francs)
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