The Ministry of National Education in Senegal, together with UNESCO Dakar and IIEP-UNESCO, is hosting a workshop on 31 January 2018 on education financing.
Along the sidelines of the upcoming Global Partnership for Education (GPE) replenishment, the high-level workshop will put the spotlight on Senegal’s recent inroads in improving the tracking of education financing flows.
The main focus of the workshop will be on Senegal’s experience in developing a National Education Account (NEA). With technical support from IIEP and UNESCO’s capacity development in education programme (CapED) through UNESCO Dakar, the NEA established new data collection mechanisms in the country, enabling Senegal to better understand who pays for what in education.
The upcoming workshop will provide an opportunity to discuss some of the main findings of the NEA. More specifically, it will look at education financing between 2009 and 2016 and answer questions such as how much does education in Senegal cost, who finances it, what are the related education financing policies, and what are the costs and funding sources for the different sub-sectors of education.
The Ministry of National Education – and its partners – developed the full NEA throughout the course of 2017. This came on the heels of a major project involving eight countries, one of which was Senegal, to develop a global methodology to help others on a step-by-step basis implement a NEA. Led collaboratively by IIEP and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), it also included a report on all of the country experiences in developing and implementing an NEA.
An NEA is a very useful framework that can help countries better understand how exactly education is paid for. It includes comprehensive data collection and analysis across all levels, providers, and sources of funding including central and local government, external aid, and households. This crucial information can help countries in directing limited resources to where they are needed most and support in planning for the education related Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4).
Workshop participants will include the Ministries charged with overseeing education in Senegal, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the National Agency of Statistics and Demography, and members of civil society organizations, trade unions, the private sector, as well as technical and financial partners.
