The World Bank, a United Nations financial institute that works with developing countries, has pledged to spend $5 billion on education funding over the next five years. This is about twice as much as they spent over the last five years. The new program is a “results-based financing” model, which requires countries to show that they can meet certain performance targets in order to get their money.
The announcement coincides with a conference in South Korea featuring 160 countries meeting to work on global education goals to be met by 2030. One of those goals will be to get about 120 million children who aren’t in school into classrooms and learning. According to Jim Yong Kim, the president of World Bank, there are about 250 million children worldwide who are attending schools but still can’t read or write. He says that many education systems are failing their poorest children, who arguably need education the most.
Shoring up global education can go a long way towards ending extreme poverty, which is a definite goal of the World Bank. To that end, World Bank, which claims to be the world’s largest education funder, has sunk about $40 billion into education programs since 2000, and aims to end extreme poverty by 2030 by furthering education.
One such plan involves the Big Results Now in Education Program in Tanzania, which is funded by the World Bank. The program links finances to results in placing teachers in under supported schools. In Pakistan, the World Bank has pledged $350 million to address several problems, such as low enrollment and high teacher absenteeism, and to improve testing to measure achievement and inform instruction.
Kim claims that the World Bank is keeping up on new and innovative education programs, with the intention of spreading them to places that need them most.
