Can Results Based Financing in education improve learning outcomes?
BlueSquare has started to work on Results Based Financing (RBF) in the education sector with Cordaid. We are very excited about this collaboration. Indeed, education financing is too often input driven, centrally managed and very bureaucratic.
An estimated 250-million children worldwide are unable to read and write. One in 5 young people (age 15 to 24) has not completed primary school and lacks the basic skills necessary for life and work (1). Poor quality of education means millions of children are not learning the basics, even though half of them have spent at least four years in school. The annual cost of this failure is estimated at around US$129 billion (2).
A change in the education sector is obviously needed. Anyone who has visited a rural school in Burundi or Chad understands that these schools are under financed and that incentives for school directors and teachers are poor: school directors have very limited decision rights on resources and their motivation is undermined by the lack of autonomy. During my last visit to a school in rural Burundi, the new benches on which four children were seated had been purchased in South Africa at a price that was around ten times higher than the nearby carpenter. Obviously, the money spent for the benches would have been allocated differently had the school director been consulted.
Back in January in Davos, Jim Kim announced the set-up of REACH, a trust fund focusing on Result Based Financing in education. I hope that this trust fund will have a similar impact as the Health Results Innovation Trust Fund : (i) trigger a shift of World Bank IDA investments from input to output based financing, and (ii) put Results Based Financing on the forefront of countries’ policy dialogue.
At BlueSquare, we are working hard on Results Based Financing systems for education. First, we have adapted OpenRBF, a software to collect and manage RBF data, to the education sector. We have released a new whiteboard presentation that explains how Results Based Financing operates in the education sector.
Most recently, we have released new data visualization dashboards to monitor the education sector performance. As in the health sector, you can zoom in to look at the performance of every single school, like the school of Lukumbo that benefitted from a RBF subsidy of $ 1129 for the first quarter of 2015.
Cordaid RBF Education pilots and the World Bank Trust Fund have the potential to accelerate a shift to data driven financing systems in the education sector. We look forward to bringing ITC innovations to help these systems perform.
Nicolas de Borman, Co-founder and CEO at BlueSquare
