National Education Accounts: a planning tool to improve the national reporting systems on education finance statistics

• In Event: Creating global public goods: Experiences from the Global and Regional Activities initiative of the Global Partnership for Education

Abstract

Objectives: To discuss how National Education Accounts (NEA) provide relevant finance statistics that describe the economy of the sector and institutionalize the use of these statistics for evidence based decision making, policy formulation, planning, monitoring and evaluation. NEAs aim to track and gather, in a coherent and comprehensive accounting framework, all financial flows in the field of education in order to answer the following questions: How much is the educational domestic cost? Who finances it? And what are the unit financing and cost of the different levels and type of education?

Methodology: Education finance statistics from funding units (public, private, external) and education providers (institutions receiving the funds to deliver education activities and ancillary services), are collected, processed and compiled within an analytical framework that respects the fundamentals principles of the System of National Account in order to estimate the cost and financing of all the economic transactions by object of expenditure in the field of education. The funding units are financing but not delivering educational services.
Results/conclusions: This initiative will improve the education budget allocation mechanisms, the adequacy of the education spending towards achieving the strategic goals, the reporting on the use of the education resources, and will fill the finance statistics gap in the Educational Management Information System. It will also strengthen national technical and institutional capacities by making Finance and Education Ministries, National Bureau of Statistics and international experts work together. The objective will be to set up satellite accounts that will be coupled with the National Accounts in order to enable an in-depth analysis of the economy of the education sector for planners, decision-makers, civil society and development partners etc.

Author

• Ousmane Diouf, UNESCO International Institute for Education Planning