Education in Lao PDR
The government of Lao PDR recognizes education’s importance in achieving national development goals. The country relies heavily on external funding; however, it has shown improvements in recent years. According to government figures, in 2013/14, the education share of the government budget was 15.5%, up from 13.4% in 2009/10.
The country has made significant progress, achieving 98.6% primary net enrollment and a gender parity rate of .99 for primary education. The major challenges that the education system faces are: reducing the high grade 1 dropout rate, enhancing equity, and improving learning outcomes.
The ESDP 2016-2020 has set the following areas of focus:
- Achieve compulsory primary education and expand compulsory education to include lower secondary education
- Eradicate illiteracy, across all ethnic groups, by supporting relevant lifelong learning
- Expand, strengthen, and promote secondary education, technical and vocational education and training, and higher education to respond to future demands of the labor market and improve economic outputs
- Improve the responsiveness of the technical vocational education and training system
- Ensure that graduates have competence to enter the workforce through improving the quality of higher education and technical vocation
- Ensure that technical, professional, and academics have knowledge and are capable of using modern technology and science
- Improve quality and relevance of education to provide youth with the knowledge needed for socio-economic development
- Apply ICT as the tools for improving education administration and management and education quality
- Expand education policy research and evaluation from the central to local level
- Expand physical education and sports from central to local level.
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Latest grant
The US$16.8 million GPE grant for the second Global Partnership for Education project was launched in October 2015, and aims to improve the quality of pre-primary and primary education in the country.
The project allocates most of the resources to the districts that have the highest female drop-out rates and also provides schools and communities with the tools needed to ensure that all children are in school and reading in the early grades.
The main priorities are:
- Strengthening school-based management by:
- Promoting development, implementation, and monitoring of effective school development plans
- Strengthening the capacity of local/district/provincial level stakeholders to engage in discussions to increase enrolment, improve attendance, and school quality, with a special focus on districts with low girls’ primary survival rate
- Improving reporting and accountability after the use of school block grants
- Improving reading outcomes and assessment capacity by:
- Developing and piloting a reading development intervention in Lao language in Grades 1 and 2
- Conducting research aimed at informing policy and programming decisions to support reading development approaches for ethnic students and those with weak Lao language skills.
- Supporting project management and monitoring and evaluation by:
- Promoting the development of government-wide systems for financial management
- Strengthening the existing mechanisms for monitoring and data collection and supporting project specific data collection when needed.
The local education group in Lao PDR is called the Education Sector Working Group. It is chaired by the ministry of Education and Sports and co-chaired by Australia. It also includes the ministry of Finance and the ministry of Planning, as well as development partners such as Australia (DFAT), the European Union, GIZ, Japan, Luxembourg, Plan International, Room to Read, Save the Children, SIDA, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the World Food Programme. EU and DFAT are the co-coordinating agencies.
Grants
All amounts are in US dollars.
| Grant type | Years | Allocations | Disbursements | Grant agent | |
| Program implementation | 2015-2020 | 16,800,000 | 10,693,736 | World Bank | Progress report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-2014 | 28,268,034 | 28,268,034 | World Bank | Progress report | |
| Sector plan development | 2014-2015 | 239,520 | 239,520 | UNICEF | |
| 2012-2013 | 246,631 | 246,631 | World Bank | ||
| Program development | 2013-2014 | 199,977 | 199,977 | World Bank | |
| - | 200,000 | 0 | World Bank | ||
| Total | 45,954,162 | 39,647,898 |
Education sector progress
The graphs below show overall progress in the education sector in Lao PDR, and GPE data shows the country progress on 16 indicators monitored in the GPE Results Framework.
Source: World Bank - Education Data
Data on education are compiled by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics from official responses to surveys and from reports provided by education authorities in each country.