In the countries of the South, education caught between debt crisis and decline in development aid

Students carrying school bags provided by the United Nations, during a ceremony for the start of the school year, at the Wahda school, west of Port Sudan (Sudan), September 16, 2024. AFP Sudden end to recruitment of teachers in Zambia, intermittent schooling of high school students in Ghana… Poor countries are finding it increasingly difficult to make education a priority. In their annual report monitoring education financing 2024, unveiled on October 31, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Bank warn of the drop in spending by student in developing countries, which also devote a smaller part of their budget to school. For the first time since 2016, education spending fell to 3.9% of gross domestic product (GDP) in low-income countries, compared to 4% in 2022 – with UNESCO estimating that between 4 and 4% would be spent. 6% of GDP for school. The phenomenon affects, although in different proportions, the majority of countries in the world: around 70% of them have lowered education in their budgetary priorities since 2015. This situation is partly due to the crisis linked to Covid-19, which caused public debt to explode. The effect of this crisis is combined with the fact that public development aid, which forms part of the school budget of the poorest countries, gives less priority to education than before – 7.6% of the volume total donations were directed towards the education sector in 2022, compared to 9.3% in 2019. The general trend, for public finances as for aid, is towards the reorganization of expenditure towards other sectors considered priorities, in particular health systems and the fight against global warming. Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Development aid: the great European withdrawal Read later This reorientation comes at the worst time, because UNESCO and the World Bank are simultaneously warning of the major risks posed by the public debt crisis on education systems in developing countries. Low-income countries spend on average 14% of their budget on debt repayment, double that of ten years ago. “The link between the debt crisis and cuts in public spending is already clear in several countries, confirms Manos Antoninis, director of the UNESCO global education monitoring report, even if the consequences are not identical from one place to another. » The debt crisis is particularly worrying in certain countries in Africa and South-East Asia, where interest repayments, based on the number of inhabitants, exceed public spending on education, according to Unesco and the World Bank. You have 59.76% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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