Julia Gillard: “Educating a child costs just $1 a day”

In a post on her Facebook page, Julia Gillard challenges the world to attend to both the unexpected, fast-moving enormities of humanitarian emergencies and to the longer-term, seemingly invisible and slow-moving catastrophes like poor education.

September 24, 2015 by GPE Secretariat

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Primary wing of Adarsha Saula Yubak Higher Secondary School, Bhainsipati, Lalitpur, Nepal. Credit: GPE/NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati

This post is published in full on Facebook

We cannot avert our gaze from the humanitarian catastrophe of drowned children as families try to flock to Europe from...
Posted by Julia Gillard on Wednesday, September 23, 2015

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Focus areas: Financing

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October 02, 2015 by John Friend-Pereira

Dear GPE, I would be very interested in understanding the methodology used to come up with this figure which actuall seems on the low side. I am currently working in the education sector in GPE supported country and any per child costing I have seen have been much higher. Could you please provide links to documents outlining methodology or address is your calculation takes into account the following:
1. recurrent cost from the state budget?
2. capital costs I.e. Infrastructure, equipment?
3. include teacher salaries?
4. household contribution?

which might explain why it is relatively low but I am checking their methodology and will confirm.

October 02, 2015 by Chantal Rigaud

John,
you can find the detailed explanation of how this number was calculated here: http://www.globalpartnership.org/education-costs-per-child

October 02, 2015 by John Friend-Pereira

Chantal,

Many thanks for the link to the calculations and the GMR background paper. Having read this I note two key issues: the assumption of the base ratio of teacher salary to per-capita GDP is 3.4

"Teacher salaries are related to GDP per capita in a dynamic fashion based on trend analysis of global data. The target teacher salary multiple (salary as a multiple of GDP per capita) is inversely correlated with GDP per capita using an equation based on global data. In the 2010 report the target teacher salary multiple was static: 4.5 for sub-Saharan Africa and 3.5 elsewhere." Page 7 background paper GMR

however in many countries the teacher salary in lower than 3.4 per capita GDP

"for example, in Cambodia, the average teacher salary is less than the average per capita income." Page 5 background page 5 background paper GMR

Therefore there would be an additional investment needed in these teacher salaries to bring them up to 3.4 per capita of GDP which would require significant increases in vestmen well above $1.18 per day.

The second issues is that household contributions are not accounted for in the education costs which looks only at the tax and development funding this means the real cost of education is significantly under reported.

Therefore I conclude the absolute minimum required in country were the global baseline assumption in the background paper hold to be true excluding household contributions may be $1.18 but this does not reflect the real costs for countries that require significant investment to reach the globa baseline assumed or household contribution which is significant.

October 05, 2015 by Chantal Rigaud

Hi John,

Please note that the original source of the data is the Global Monitoring Report’s Policy Paper #18 which you can find here: http://en.unesco.org/gem-report/node/819#sthash.1Iocfe6b.CmqbckNy.dpbs. You are correct that the costs vary greatly depending on the country. For example, the funding gap is much greater in low-income countries than in other developing countries. We suggest you contact the Global Monitoring Report team directly if you need further details or to provide input on their methodology.

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