education strategy

The Bank’s education team recently hosted a one-day colloquium, “Getting to Equal in Education,” to address how girls worldwide can achieve the full benefits of a quality education and as a result lead healthy, productive lives that benefit their families, their communities, and their nations.

At the launch of the World Bank's new Education Strategy for 2020 during the "What Works in Education” Policy Research Colloquium this spring, World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged the international development community to focus on interventions that produce learning results and emphasized the vital role that evidence must play in propelling smart investments in education. The strategy also emphasizes the Bank's role in helping countries move beyond the provision of inputs to a system-level approach for improving the quality, performance, and outcomes of education programs.

To improve learning for all, we are rolling out an innovative assessment tool to help our partners use knowledge more effectively to drive education reform.

The System Assessment and Benchmarking for Education Results (SABER) initiative is being designed to help countries systematically examine and better understand their education system's policies.  SABER's policy diagnostics are being built upon a solid evidence base and draws from research on the education policies of well performing or rapidly improving education systems. By leveraging global knowledge, SABER fills a gap in the availability of policy data and evidence on what policies matter most to improve the quality of education and achievement of better results.

The call for ‘Learning for All’ in the Education Strategy 2020 is particularly appropriate for the Middle East and North Africa region, where education quality has been a major concern for more than a decade.

Even if the Arab world has made considerable progress in improving many aspects of education in recent decades, the quality of that education is still far from satisfactory: slightly more than 50% of Arab students who participated in TIMMS 2007 ranked below the “low” mark in mathematics, and employers complain that schools are not producing consistently well-trained graduates, endowed with the knowledge and skills they require.

The challenge becomes even more acute when demographic evidence is considered: school age populations (0-24 years) in the Arab world will grow by about 2 million by 2015 but will surge by 10 more million between 2015 and 2030. If these large cohorts are well served by good quality education, this could be an unprecedented window of opportunity; if neglected, the promise that education should be making to the young will continue to be broken.  This leaves about five years to address this question.

In the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region, the World Bank’s newly-launched Education Strategy 2020 is consistent with our own strategic direction in recent years and presents us with the chance to expand and build upon vital work.

Across the region we have been responding to the needs of a growing cohort of middle-income countries looking to maximize the productivity of their people, the lifeblood for national prosperity and well-being. At the same time, we have seen important progress in first generation reforms in low-income countries, fragile contexts and small states — where we are helping build the capacity of education systems to get all children in school. Across a spectrum of EAP countries we are supporting life-long learning, including early childhood development, basic and secondary education, second-chance education, skills development and vocational training, and science, technology and innovation.