GPE has been working closely with the Ethiopian government and development partners to strengthen the country’s education system and improve children’s learning. These efforts have led to significant achievements, including 95% of children enrolled in primary school and an almost equal number of girls completing primary school compared to boys.
COVID-19 response
Allocation: US$15 million
Years: 2020-2021
Grant agent: World Bank
Key documents:
The US$15 million grant will support:
- Creating educational content for radio and TV programs
- Providing radios and learning packets to the most disadvantaged students, such as pastoralist girls, students from the poorest households and students with special needs
- Creating a back to school campaign to announce the reopening of schools, highlighting safety precautions for parents and students
- Supporting the installation of WASH equipment in public primary and secondary schools, including portable handwashing stations, disinfectants and sanitizing materials and first aid kits
- Providing accelerated learning and remedial classes to students to mitigate loss of learning from prolonged school closures
The initiatives above are based on the Ministry of Education COVID-19 response plan.
In late March 2020, the UNICEF office in Ethiopia received a GPE grant of US$140,000 to support the Ministry of Education in planning its response to the pandemic. The funds were used to support 3 regions to deliver radio content for approximately 200,000 children.
Education in Ethiopia
Although Ethiopia has achieved remarkable progress in expanding access to education over the past twenty years, the challenges related to equity, efficiency and learning outcomes remain significant.
The country’s Education Sector Development Plan 2020-2025 has been designed to address these challenges, with the vision to transform society through harnessing the full potential of learners to become productive citizens. The education plan aims to enhance education and training by:
- Establishing an effective educational management and administration system with sector-wide accountability.
- Developing ethical, civic, and moral values in learners.
- Improving the quality of general education.
- Improving equitable access and internal efficiency from pre-primary to secondary education.
- Building a learning society linked to a lifelong learning opportunity that meets the diverse learning needs of young people and adults.
- Building an effective and efficient education system using digital technology.
- Putting in place a rigorous, systematic, and objective quality assurance system to monitor schools, colleges of teachers’ education and adult and non-formal education centers’ performance.
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Latest grant
Development objective:
Improve internal efficiency, equitable access, and quality in general education.
Allocation:
US$20,000,000
Years:
2021-2025
Grant agent:
WB
Utilization:
US$0
Ethiopia has been awarded two grants: A US$125 million Education sector program implementation grant, running from 2021 to 2024, and a US$20 million accelerated grant for 2020-2021.
The implementation grant co-finances the country’s General Education Quality Improvement Program for Equity (GEQIP-E) as an additional financing over three-and-a-half years; and builds on the lessons learned from the initial implementation period (2017-2019). Its overall objective is to improve internal efficiency, equitable access, and quality in general education.
The grant will be split between the program-for-results modality of GEQIP-E and an investment project financing component to support targeted capacity building and pilot activities.
The grant is divided into 70% as fixed part ($87.5 million) and 30% as variable part ($37.5 million).
The grant is mostly results-based financing with disbursements tied to a series of results, and both fixed part and variable part indicators support four main result areas:
- Improve internal efficiency. To address the chronic issue of over-enrollment in grade 1 and promote progression of children through the early grades, this component will support activities like:
- Training of pre-primary teachers
- Provision of teaching and learning materials,
- School inspections.
- Improve equitable access for students in three areas (Afar, Ethiopia Somali, and Benishangul-Gumuz) and children with special needs through:
- Construction of 500 new classrooms
- Enrollment of 25,000 students in disadvantaged areas, with girls-to-boys enrollment ratio of at least 60%
- Establishment of 600 new Inclusive Education Resource Centers within the cluster schools, to promote mainstreaming of children with special needs in education
- Enrollment of 21,000 students with disabilities and special needs in all grades benefitting from the services of IERC cluster schools.
- Improve quality by building digital competence of teachers and improving child development and learning in lower secondary schools (grades 9-10). through activities like:
- Updating the teacher licensing assessment to include a digital skills module
- Comprehensive teacher training program prepared and piloted on digital skills and the use of ICT in teaching
- Digital skills training for at least 1,000 teachers.
- Strengthen the system to improve planning, policy formulation, and reform. This aims to improve data collection and analysis, and teacher preparation, to enable students to achieve higher levels of learning.
The investment project financing component finances, through a project modality, the piloting of new activities and technical assistance to the government to ensure strong program management, with activities such as:
- Piloting EdTech innovations
- Building longer-term resilience of the education system to respond to COVID-like shocks and reintegrating displaced children into the schooling system
- Capacity building for regional and local levels including on new environmental and social framework
- Program management support
- Management of construction and expansion of schools in a sustainable manner.
The US$20 million accelerated grant supports the Comprehensive Home-grown, Inclusive, Learning and Development School Feeding Project (CHILD SFP).
The objective is to ensure that all boys and girls have equitable access to quality, safe and inclusive pre-primary and primary education, including students with disabilities, internally displaced population and host communities in 13 targeted Woredas of 5 regions (Afar, Amhara, Oromia, Somali and SNNP regions).
The School feeding program is the core intervention but, the grant will also finance activities related to water and sanitation, capacity building training for teachers, Parents, Teachers and Students Associations (PTSA) members and education officials.
The program is aligned with the country’s Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) 2020 and has three components:
- Increasing access and retention for children in pre-primary & primary schools especially girls, children with disabilities, refugee & displaced children
- Strengthening systems and capacity to improve the resilience of regional emergency response
- Improving learning and development outcomes for targeted children.
The program directly targets 499 schools in 13 Woredas benefiting 163,021 school children (86,521 girls); 1,351 children with disabilities (537 girls); 3,935 teachers (1,498 females); 2,609 PTSAs members (1,111 females); and 183 regional, zonal and district education experts and officials (35 females), who will serve as school teeding committee members, managing and monitoring the overall implementation, as well as 998 cooks. The program indirectly benefits about 100,000 community members (51% females).
Multiplier grant
The US$20 million Multiplier grant supports the General Education Quality Improvement Program for Equity (GEQIP-E) as additional financing for refugee integration. The 4-year program has co-financing from IDA (US$55 million) and the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (US5 million). The program aims to scale up GEQIP-E to refugee schools in the regions serving refugee populations.
The program uses the existing institutional framework and implementation arrangements of GEQIP-E, with some modifications to add the Agency for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA) as an implementing agency.
The program supports the government’s policy of increasing access to quality education for refugees and integration of refugee education. It has 4 components:
1: Harmonization of services at refugee primary schools
- Improve equitable access and supports the extension of key services to refugee schools.
2: Integration of refugee secondary education
- Start the long-term process of transferring refugee schools administered by ARRA to ministry of education oversight. Schools in areas with large refugee populations will prepare Refugee Integration Plans, as addenda to existing School Improvement Plans, and receive top-up grants as an extension of the existing Basic School Grants.
3: Innovations to address key challenges in refugee education
- Pilot and rollout life skills training for girls in all main refugee-hosting areas
- Appoint of adult female refugees who are secondary school graduates or above to act as “learner’s guides” in refugee schools, particularly in the schools with severe shortage of female teachers.
- Pilot and rollout of ICT-based interventions for self-directed learning in the major refugee-hosting regions, to mitigate learning loss due to COVID-19 and other factors.
4: Investment Project Financing (IPF)
- Scale up the existing IPF with an additional US$20 million from IDA and DANIDA to support capacity building activities including:
- establishing National and Regional Refugee Integration Units
- enhancing capacity for harmonization and integration
- supporting the reopening of refugee schools following the COVID-19 pandemic through provision of low-cost water and sanitation equipment at all refugee primary and secondary schools.
Grants
All amounts are in US dollars.
| Grant type | Years | Allocations | Utilization | Grant agent | |
| Multiplier | 2021-2025 | 20,000,000 | 0 | WB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerated funding | 2022-2023 | 10,000,000 | 0 | Save the Children UK | |
| 2020-2022 | 20,000,000 | 9,987,212 | Save the Children UK | ||
| COVID-19 | 2020-2022 | 15,000,000 | 0 | WB | Progress report |
| Program implementation | 2021-2024 | 125,000,000 | 8,908,807 | WB | |
| 2017-2019 | 100,000,000 | 89,991,617 | WB | Completion report (variable part) | |
| 2014-2018 | 100,000,000 | 100,000,000 | WB | Completion report | |
| 2008-2013 | 69,535,734 | 69,535,734 | WB | ||
| 2010-2013 | 97,828,573 | 97,828,573 | WB | ||
| Sector plan development | 2019-2021 | 500,000 | 465,000 | UNESCO | |
| 2016 | 187,170 | 187,170 | UNICEF | ||
| Program development | 2019-2021 | 199,923 | 199,971 | WB | |
| 2016-2017 | 199,000 | 196,999 | WB | ||
| Total | 558,450,400 | 377,301,083 |
Data last updated: March 17, 2023
As part of its investment in civil society advocacy and social accountability efforts, GPE’s Education Out Loud fund is supporting the Basic Education Network Ethiopia (BEN-E) for the 2019-2021 period.
This builds on 11 years of Civil Society Education Fund (CSEF) support to national education coalitions for their engagement in education sector policy dialogue.
GPE had provided the Basic Education Network Ethiopia (BEN-E) with a grant from the CSEF to support its engagement in education sector policy dialogue and citizens’ voice in education quality, equity, and financing and sector reform.
Last updated December 03, 2021