Learning Improvement: a Japanese Insight to Fill the Gap in the Aid Architecture

The new education development framework for action to be adopted in Incheon this May will most likely focus on learning outcomes. This is a natural course of development following decades of serious attempts to universalize... [ view full abstract ]

The new education development framework for action to be adopted in Incheon this May will most likely focus on learning outcomes. This is a natural course of development following decades of serious attempts to universalize primary education under Education for All (EFA).
The international aid architecture has strongly influenced the ways the developing countries achieve the EFA objectives, where an emphasis has so far been given to ensuring access, participation and completion. The aid harmonization demands as a prerequisite that the country has developed a comprehensive education sector policy as a basis of the donor support. During the first decade of 2000, budget support was much used as the most aligned mechanism for the sector development support. However, the evaluation concluded that while the modality was effective in improving the access and to some extent equity, it has not been so in achieving learning outcomes (e.g. Independent Commission for Aid Impact 2012). In response, the results-based financing has emerged as an improved version of the instrument and characterizes the new aid architecture. At the same time, the systems approach is being considered by dominant players (The World Bank, DFID and USAID) to reorient the focus of interventions toward learning. The question is whether these approaches are sufficiently trustworthy in improving children’s learning outcomes on the ground.
This paper identifies a gap between the policy intents and learning existing in the dominant aid architecture and presents an insight from Japan to fill it.