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Toward the post 2015 education cooperation – an insight from Japan

Tue, March 10, 11:30am to 1:00pm, Washington Hilton, Floor: Terrace Level, Columbia 04

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

By now (March 2015), the post 2015 education agenda and its corresponding Framework for Action are about to take off. The new agenda emphasizes being universally relevant, transformative, and achieving outcomes. This emphasis applies both to the education agenda as well as the post 2015 development agenda, and the outcomes in the education primarily mean improving learning and learning outcomes. (See Target 2 of Muscat Agreement 2014, for instance).
Meanwhile, the recent development aid discourse increasingly prefers the use of results-based financing (RBF), building on the much supported program-based approach. It is expected that the limited effectiveness of budget support for improving learning (e.g. Independent Commission for Aid Impact 2012, though it has been more effective in addressing access and equity issues) will be better addressed with this mechanism. The government and development partners agree on the results (and their corresponding indicators), and funds will be released after those results/indicators are achieved.
Combined effects of these contextual environments pose important challenges: how can we improve learning under the influential discourse on aid effectiveness using RBF?
Emphasis on learning in recent years has helped raise public attention to policy issues around learning, shedding light to better understanding factors for learning (learning metrics by Brookings 2013, for instance), identifying systemic perspectives (such as SABER by the World Bank), and has strengthened the measurement culture (PISA, EGRA, SACMEQ, etc.). All these provide useful tools for respective purposes.
Meanwhile, several influential instruments have been introduced in the development cooperation, including the disbursement-linked indicators and Program for Results by the World Bank, a new performance-based funding mechanism of Global Partnership for Education, Cash on Delivery by DFID. Under a wide prevalence of the program-based approach, these instruments are usually used to support a comprehensive education sector development plan that is implemented mostly (and legitimately) by the government, with less cases of direct support on the ground by developing countries. Both the assessment culture and the dominant aid discourse (RBF), however, have so far failed to exhibit pathways through which learning actually improves.
On the other hand, there is a huge stock of knowledge and lessons accumulated from researches on teaching practices by Japanese researchers (and certainly by researchers of many other countries) and by the experience of Japanese aid practices that have focused on addressing issues mainly at the field levels (i.e. schools and education sites). Not only the researchers and practitioners at universities and institutions in the public sector but also the private sector make unique contributions to this effect.
There is apparently a crucial missing link between policies and practices.
This session discusses a proposed new set of perspectives that we believe are important in connecting this missing link. They include pooling relevant knowledge on learning, analyzing and translating it into relevant policy messages, influencing and instituting global and regional mechanisms of involving multiple stakeholders and utilizing the knowledge, improving aid effectiveness for quality learning, and all of which collectively contributing to advancing the realization of the education development goals as have been put forward by the post 2015 education agenda.

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