TITLE:
Assessing the Funding and Quality of Education in Public Primary Schools in Mali
AUTHORS:
Abou Sidibé, Wei Gao, Lala Jaiteh
KEYWORDS:
Public Expenditure, Education Funding, Education Quality
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.1,
January
29,
2022
ABSTRACT: Malian primary education has been suffering
from funding inadequacies over the past two decades, negatively affecting the
school’s learning outcomes. At the same time, several studies on school funding
conducted in Mali continue to drive the school stakeholders’ attention to the
drawback of school funding inadequacies on the quality of education. After a few decades, the percentage of the country’s GDP allocated to the
education sector continues to rise and exceeds the state’s financial capacity and affects the quality of education in
public primary schools in Mali. Based on this fact, this study examines the
impact of these funding inadequacies on learning and teaching outcomes of
public primary school students. We used a secondary data collection technique
to collect the data. We extracted data from government expenditure from 1992 to
2020. World Bank and OECD report documents to answer four fundamental questions
related to the impact of school finance inadequacies on the quality of public
primary schools in Mali. First question: what are the Malian public primary education main sources of funding? Second, what are the financial
discrepancies of the public primary schools in Mali? Third, what are the effects of these financial discrepancies on
the quality of education in public primary schools in Mali? Fourth, is the
current budget allocated to primary education adequate to offer a mass and
quality education? Our results
indicated that: 1) The government is the leading funder of public primary
education in Mali, followed by external donors and local funders. 2)
Insufficiency and mismanagement of funds are the main financial discrepancies.
3) Those discrepancies have resulted in poor quality education (low completion
rate, high school dropout, poor performance, low learning outcome.). 4) No. The
current budget allocated to public primary schools is not sufficient enough to
have a mass and quality education.