 Now, I want to introduce our next three panelists, experts and guests on the stage. Here you see Bob Bolch. Bob is an agricultural development economist working on poverty dynamics, household service and food price analysis. He is a leading economist at RMIT University in Vietnam. Welcome, Bob. Next to him, Katarina Kacca-Mikaelaoua from the University of Zurich. No, sorry, it's Abby. You are in the wrong order, shame, but I can change. Abby Riddell, welcome also you, an educational planner. She has been involved professionally in education and development for over 30 years, currently a freelance, previously as aid effectiveness advisor in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport in Cambodia, and before that as a senior program specialist at UNESCO in Paris. Welcome, Abby. And then we have Katarina Kacca-Mikaelaoua from the University of Zurich. Katya is a professor of political economy and development at the University of Zurich and also work with the OSCD on education and Africa. Welcome, all three of you, we'll talk about education and aid, but first start with Bob. Bob, is social sector aid focused on the poorest and most deprived countries, would you say? Well, thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here. On the whole, I would say that social sector aid and aid in general is not focused on the poorest and most deprived countries. We saw in Miguel's earlier presentation how there's been a big rise in aid, and also that the share of social sector spending in aid has also risen from about a fifth in 1990, 1991 to a little bit over a third, 35, 36 percent today. The big question, as you say, is how much of this aid goes to the poorest and most deprived countries. In the paper which we've prepared for this conference, we looked at that issue and came up with four key findings using the latest available data on poverty, aid flows, malnutrition, under five mortality, also the number of children who are out of primary school to assess those different dimensions of poverty and deprivation. And we came up with these four main findings. Firstly, the overall allocation of aid, what's called net official development assistance, is broadly neutral. It doesn't favor either the poorest and most deprived or the richest countries. It's broadly, fairly evenly spread with a slight bias towards the poorer countries. And that is mirrored in our second point by aid to the social sectors, which is also broadly neutral. We do, however, find that there are significant contrasts between the multilateral donors. These are the big international organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF and the European Union. So what do you see there? What is the difference? There we see more focus on the poorest and more deprived countries relative to the bilateral donors, which are the individual countries making direct allocations to developing countries. So this would be Swedish aid or the United States or these sorts. Whose aid tends to be a little bit more regressive. So there's a big contrast there. And why is that so? I mean, I suppose that it should go to the poorest and most deprived countries. That's the best way to do it. And first of all, why doesn't it go there? And second of all, why is there such a big difference in those two ways of challenging aid, do you think? I think there's two reasons. The first is that there are traditional historical ties, if you like, between particular bilateral donors and particular countries. These could be former colonies or countries with whom donors have had special interests for a long time. Or they could simply be countries where they've had aid programs for a long time. But aid is, if you like, a bit like an oil tanker in the sense that it takes an awfully long time to turn it around. And once things get going, it tends to continue in that direction for quite a long time. The multilaterals are a little bit more, shall we say? Small ships. Well, they're a little bit smaller, but they're also a little bit nimbler in kind of navigating their way around the sea. I think the other issue, which actually is the fourth point there, is actually what the composition of aid is, particularly within the social sectors. And what we found here was that the distribution of aid to health and population, we combine those two together, is typically quite a bit more progressive, targeted towards the poorest countries, than aid to education or other aid to the social sectors, which would include water, which we talked about before, also social infrastructure, but also quite a bit of aid to governance, something like 30% of all aid to the social sector is actually going towards governance, which is something which people maybe don't always equate with the social sectors. And when it comes to education, could you say, because we are going to discuss education later on, can you say something more about that, what aid looks like there overall? Well, I can do. It would be helpful if I give you just a little bit of background to what an aid concentration curve is. And then I'll skip to telling you about aid concentration curves for education, if I may. So, with apologies if this diagram seems a little bit confusing. This is actually an example of an aid concentration curve. What it does is it plots the cumulative percentage of aid. This is actually social centre aid for all bilateral donors from the Development Assistance Committee in this graph. The cumulative share of that on the vertical axis is plotted against the cumulative share of some measure of poverty and deprivation. The one we've used here is the standard World Bank One of people living on under $2 a day. So what does it actually say? Well, if an aid concentration curve crosses that diagonal 45 degree line, that shows you that aid is being targeted towards the poorest countries. Whereas if it's below the line, it shows that aid is more aggressive and is going to higher middle income countries, that sort of thing. Now, one thing I would like to draw people's attention to here is the contrast one has between different countries on this graph. So, India on most aid concentration curves, because they have such a large population, such a large number of poor people, India accounts for about 36% of the moderately poor people in the world, but it receives about 5% of all bilateral aid. So it has this long, flat segment. Now, go a little bit further up and there is the segment for Iraq, which is almost vertical. Iraq actually received more aid, about 5% of total aid, but only has about a quarter of 1% of the moderately poor people in the world. So it's clear from this type of diagram, we can also identify other countries and we can also identify low income countries, low middle income countries and upper middle income countries on this graph. But it's clear that aid is not being distributed according to the pattern of need, as will be indicated by moderate poverty living below $2 a day. And in our paper, we go through another number of different measures. I won't talk about these now, but I think you have malnutrition. We also have children out of school for different sectors, but just going to the point on education, what we've also done is construct aid concentration curves for the four big bilateral donors, which are Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA, and then see how their spending relates to the poorest and the richest countries. As you can see from this diagram, the UK actually does quite well in terms of aid for education. Which colour is it? The UK is green and the USA also does reasonably well there, whereas Germany and Japan, they are spending a lot more money in middle income, upper middle income countries relative to the money, which for example the UK would spend in four countries in sub-Saharan Africa. And so that is what leads to this different distribution of aid by these countries. So what do you think can be done so more aid goes to the poorest and most people in need? I think the first thing is that donors actually just need to start being more honest and more transparent about where they are actually spending their aid. Secondly, we need to recognise, as I mentioned earlier, that aid is a bit like an oil tanker. It takes some time to reform and turn things around, so we can't expect these things to happen immediately. But certainly if we think about the post MDG post 2015 agenda, if we can start thinking about some of those things and how to monitor these things better, how to make aid allocations more transparent, how to hold governments more accountable, so they actually do what they say they're going to do, we can start to set the framework in mind. Katja, some remarks on this before you start on? I think actually we're going to get to a couple of points where I can point back to what you said. For instance, the way donors tend to allocate aid sometimes may be also due to different incentives to different countries. When Sharon asked about why would multilaterals spend aid differently than bilaterals, I thought of it more from within education, like when would they spend more on tertiary rather than on primary, etc. But I think I'll perhaps get to some additional answers on that when we go on. Because Katja, you have actually studied how aid works for education. So what can you say about this? Did aid help kids to go to school actually? So actually this is a first glance of aid on the red lines and the blue lines show you the enrollment rates for different regions in the world. And I think at a first glance that's some kind of good news for aid in terms of quantity. On the upper parts, well actually the enrollment rates, primary enrollment rates haven't changed much, but they're already pretty high to start off with. And in the lower parts, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and North African region, there you basically see the two lines trending together. So this could be a pure trend, but it's already good news to see that it's not kind of the opposite direction because that would make us feel that there could be a problem. So I guess it's not too bad news from this first picture, whereas of course we also see already from the top left chart that there are countries where a lot of spending has been done. Also, at least in terms of primary education quantity, there wasn't much to change. So that also already gives us an idea that probably not everything is about quantity or that also there could be inefficiencies by, as you said, maybe spending on the wrong countries. If you want to spend money, if you want to focus on primary education, and this is what all these MDG2 education for all was primarily about. So if this is really the international community's key objective, then of course you should not expect these kind of things to happen because then the key objective should be primary enrollment, and then you should probably go for these lower region countries where you have something to improve. So I think this is one of the first points where we get together in some way, right? So what worked? Yeah, this is one slide I showed, and this is now getting back to actually things that have been said in the first panel here about complementarities because this is also something we found. I looked at different types of educational spending for instance spending on infrastructure and spending on training, spending on primary education and spending on secondary education. And as it turns out, for some of these categories like training versus infrastructure, actually the data are not so sharply distinguishable, so it's more difficult to establish these complementarities. But for primary and secondary education, it actually came out pretty clearly. At least now that for most countries primary education is already at quite some level. I mean we saw, I think in Miguel's or in Fin's charts, I don't remember so well anymore, that nowadays we already have reached quite something in terms of overall primary enrollment. So nowadays you have to keep thinking about what's going on after that. And what this graph here shows, I can't point it at, but you see the increasing line. And on the lower axis you have aid for secondary education and on the y-axis you have the effect of aid on primary education. And actually what this graph shows is that, well it's only for some spending on secondary education that also spending on primary education now still is effective. So you have to have a combination of the two to make it work. And you could draw this chart the other way around if you spend a lot of secondary education but you have no primary education, no basis for that. Of course your aid on secondary education also won't work. So these things, I mean you have to look at where a country stand and then at some appropriate point of time think further. And I think this was one of the key elements of where we thought things might work. There is one very tricky issue in the same context. I thought, well maybe secondary education provides you an incentive to go to primary education in the first place because you feel well then I can go on, I have some perspective, I can get a good job later on. But then I was wondering how will this move on in the future? Maybe at some point secondary education will be saturated as well then everyone will want to move into tertiary education. And then what? If we don't have the jobs, if we don't have simultaneous labor market development, or and that was one of the things I was a bit concerned about, there's also a lot of aid going into vocational training. And you could think it should have the same effect like secondary education. It should be somewhere people can go after that with their primary education and then move on and find some appropriate job for their economy later on. And that is something we don't see. So I thought that a little concerning here. So what happens then with vocational trained people? I don't know. There are no jobs. I don't know that because we haven't looked at the effect on the labor market, but at least it doesn't seem to generate for the moment these kinds of complementarities between different types of aid, which for me was a concern. And for me might mean that people in these countries still don't really see the vocational part of the economy as something they want to go to. It's maybe not incentivizing enough. So you know how many that people have enrolled and for primary education especially, but do we know if they learn anything or what the quality of education is? I have these charts and I think our minister from Rwanda will be very happy to see the chart because Rwanda is on the top left and it's actually the one example out of that chart which has a very positive outcome. This chart shows again on the X axis, the number of years in school and on the Y axis the share of people who have been asked in household surveys about whether they can read and write. It's actually just a matter of reading three, four little sentences and you have two different ways of testing that and that's why we have two lines which don't always give exactly the same results. And I've drawn these little dotted lines where approximately you have the end of primary education. So you would usually want people even after three, four years after they leave primary education when they have gone through a full cycle to be able to read at least three, four simple sentences. And in Rwanda that happens. I mean those guys who have gone through six years of education, they actually pretty much at 100% being able to do so. Whereas you see for Senegal right next to it that the share after five to six years of education, a couple of years later asked in these household surveys, they only get to what is that 50, 60% or something to be able to do so. And for chart it's even worse and also for Kenya it's not that splendid. So you see that there is a problem. There's actually a big problem and there is a lot of variety between countries. I drew this chart from a dissertation in Dijon. There are more countries in there. So this girl took the trouble to go through all these household surveys and create these different charts. But these are just some examples and they're not, I mean I didn't choose the worst ones. But do you think they don't learn from each other? Like Senegal doesn't learn from the Rwanda example, how to make it well or? There's very little learning going on across countries and it's very difficult also. I mean of course they come from different backgrounds and the education systems are structured a lot according to colonial history and stuff like that. So there's a lot of difference in how they are structured. And Rwanda of course is again a very special case. So what did you find the most unexpected here in your survey? In fact for both quality as well we found when we tried to analyze that which is more difficult because they're not such good data. I mean even for enrollment the data are not that great but for quality having comparable data is a challenge in Africa. But we did some analysis in this context and we found similar things that again there might be complementarities. There again there seems to be like an incentive to do well in primary education if you have well an outlook onto secondary et cetera. So these things were similar but then when you look at how aid is actually distributed and now we get to the tertiary versus primary issue. Now look at the lines here. What would you imagine what the top line is? If you can't read it we could actually make this test with the voting here. You have to vote by arms. Having education for all and MDG to et cetera wouldn't you think that primary education should be the top line of all these eight categories going into education? And guess what it is? It's actually tertiary education. Oh really? So that's kind of a surprise. Then the following line the dark blue one is primary education. And then secondary education of which I just showed that it's so important now as kind of the second step to follow the primary education where we should think that now maybe we would invest more into that. That's the pink line. So that's very much down at the bottom. So again one would wonder what are the incentives? Why do donors put so much money into tertiary? While they all say they want to promote primary education. And I think there is an incentive issue here. You want to train the diplomats you're going to talk to later. Even within the countries I think there are incentives to have well the elite well trained who is going to support the government, et cetera. Interesting, thank you. Abby you are going to talk about major challenges in education and we just heard there are some. What do you think is the greatest challenge to education? Well I've picked out six and I think this is a really good starting point together with the previous presenters in terms of the things that I would like to emphasize. This chart is a really good example of flavors of the month by donors and the lack of systemic support for an education system. So if you look at tertiary education indeed on the left hand side hey whatever happened and yet they were trying to provide support to primary education in the old days but if they didn't produce any teachers and secondary education was so denuded well isn't it interesting that quality is so poor? So Rwanda gets full marks for having done well. I go back to my first experience what I would call the first EFA which was in Africa in Zimbabwe and over two years you raised the kind of enrollment levels that we've seen after MDGs. Five years after independence a third of the schools that had been built in those first few years were denuded because parents sent their kids elsewhere they knew that the quality was so low just like what was said earlier if you listen to the people and you're actually modeling your support on what their needs are rather than what you're writing about in your book for your accountability and doing the research that you need because it's actually contingent upon the donor support that you're giving you get a very different picture and those are some of the challenges that I would like to present that have to do not so much with the problem of aid and donors and recipients but the donors themselves it was also raised this morning about coordination amongst donors. I remember addressing and I think it was the year 2000 the International Working Group on Education which is the group of all major donors to education in the world and I said to them and this was really at the very beginning of the new aid modalities when swaps and budget support were just coming out I said what would it take you as a donor to tell another donor that what they were doing wasn't supportive of the commitments that they had made in the swap? Jump ahead to 2005 and the Paris Declaration what have we seen in terms of the actual realization of those commitments? So yeah, we can talk about budget support not having been the answer but did we even try it? Did we actually get the coordination? Okay, I'm talking about aid effectiveness let me go back now to what are the challenges to education aid? The two big, oh sorry it's me I'm sorry, the two big issues are quality and sustainability both of which we've talked about we talked about sustainability in the previous session and these are really the words let me just pick apart those in some ways. The first thing and this was also raised earlier this morning the superimposition of donor projects even when there exist national education development plans and even when they do accord with the goals given the different accountabilities so you come along and you say there's your plan, okay I'll support textbooks in this region another donor comes along you need a teacher training institute over here well it's like support for malaria you know the skewed aid budget what happens to the bits that don't get supported? What is the minister of education to do when that happens? Lack of coordination, lack of alignment lack of harmonization all the things that the donors in 2005 signed up to that were not realized and I say that as somebody who held the flag up as the swap lady in many countries you know at the very beginning with 25 million pounds in my pocket in 1998 in Zambia where we had one of the first education swaps following indeed the health basket funding I used to use the term pool rather than basket for one good reason this maybe is partly the difference between health and education in a pool if you pour money in you can't distinguish the bottles in a basket like a picnic basket you can have a bottle of wine next to a bottle of apple juice and that's part of the problem that I'm also gonna raise about even what happens when you do get that level of coordination it's having those separate bottles and you wanna know whether they're half full or half empty nearly half of all ODA to education is still in project form not withstanding raising the flag for all the new aid modalities donors are still very worried about whether their monies are being well spent we've also talked already about the short time span to achieve impact when we all know that education change and impact is generational and related to that something that has certainly been emphasized in the social sectors is the mobility of the staff and personnel that donor agencies have on the ground you know I know is having had many hats that I've worn in my 30 odd years as a donor, as an academic, as a UN professional whatever that you just get to know a place and then you're out and part of the problem as you have mobility and also the deep professionalization of those that are in country is the fact that you're then having as an institution to create best practices that you can export from one country to the other because you don't have the time to develop and mentor the expertise that you need to ensure that the programs that you are supporting are the right ones for that country I'm actually sick to death of the word best practice because what we really don't know is sufficiently the necessary contextualization and I don't just mean whether they have six or seven years of primary education or whether you know the ethnic groups in one corner of the country are not being included but something that is much more indigenous and much more representative of the other thing that came out this morning which was national leadership and ownership of those development plans but sure enough you can have a development plan but if it's not something that you know the nationals actually believe in and rather is something that is a tick box that is necessary as indeed the you know a global program on education what used to be called the FTI is touted as the most effective and yet they have a three year timeline which really limits what you're able to do other challenges besides those timeline systemic projects and so forth is the focus on quantitative indicators enrollments and access with insufficient attention given to quality this is what happened when you know the EFA became the MDG I'm sorry but there's a story to be told about what happened you know in the you know discussions of how the MDGs And please explain what EFA and MDG is I'm sorry education for all came out of well actually going back you know 20 years but in 2000 there was in Dakar a big you know grouping of you know all the you know countries and donors that said you know we want not just primary education for all but a quality education for all with all of the bells and whistles of what an education system needs what happened with the millennium development goals was a real you know narrowing of that to primary education and then the donors got onto the bandwagon and moved okay enrollments let's see impact and what we have our real achievements I wouldn't deny that but we're also having to focus now rather belatedly on the quality that wasn't provided at the same time now and this is in my next point on the slide we're looking at quality but as determined and measured by agency please note I say represented perhaps by superimposed goals and maybe lip service that is paid to genuine dialogue with recipients my greatest worry to be frank is that we've replaced measuring learning achievement by our agencies that are going out to countries with our as we said earlier our companies that are being supported by our aid monies superimposing on you know poor examinations branches that may have one or two people that have the capacity to develop their own exams and of course say yes because the money is riding on it are they given the support necessary to develop the sustainable I make the point capacities to develop their own examinations that they do need without any question I'm not belittling the need for learning achievement please don't misunderstand me but the donor relationship is clouding yet another important area teachers training status and salaries many of you may have read about the use of contract teachers and indeed many of the randomized control trials that have shown the contract teachers work again one country's needs will be very different from another you know where you have inflated salaries and teachers are on more than a living wage it's a different issue from where teachers cannot be expected to be in the classroom because they can't keep bread on the table for their families so surprise surprise that many of the teacher methodologies that are being taught just go out the backdoor because either the teacher isn't there or they don't have the time to even implement them so are we paying lip service to the quality that is needed I think so and then this is a real a radical statement on my part the final one about challenges to education inappropriate use of evidence within the policy framework it's super imposition without genuine local ownership I am also sick to death of having research or monitoring and evaluation that is totally part and parcel of the aid program where one of us will be employed to go out and set up a research project and we have maybe you know lip service paid to the enumerators that are on the ground to actually collect the data and translate into the language what needs to be done you go back you analyze it you know in your office you then come back and it may be something that's over three to five years and you show wonderful results the minister of education sits around the room and he tells you well that's great and then you try to get some kind of a dialogue of what that would mean to implement the policy in a sustainable way when the donor funds aren't there and there's silence in the room and why is there silence in the room because again this is something that is showing impact but for whom and with what kind of ownership and what kind of analysis that is really being done by those who need to go through that kind of level of capacity development that actually brings about the sustained capacities to determine what the priorities are rather than respond to what is on a plate of options that donors bring to the table I'm gonna jump ahead because although I have a lot to say about what we have learned about what works and what doesn't work I think it can be encapsulated very much in the kinds of changes that need to come about in an aid system that not myself but as a kind of it's on two slides I hope you can read this interesting research it was done it's called time to listen hearing people on the receiving end of international aid it was done a few years ago if you look on the left hand side I think it fairly well describes the aid system as we know it it's entitled externally driven aid delivery system and on the other side is aid as some of us who are old and jaded and really frustrated that things keep going the same way and many of our young things that we're training keep asking us questions that we answered 30 years ago but because they don't even have the history of what had gone before no less the experience of implementing them something that we call collaborative aid system so if you look on the left and you see local people seen as beneficiaries and aid recipients and you look on the right and you see local people seen as colleagues and drivers of their own development I think this reads a lot into what you were saying earlier about water and sanitation it says the same thing about education and health but I think you know as you said to me Katya everybody and this is the thing about education feels that they know what's best about education so you know they come out on the plane and they say this is what you need to do very much like if I can be an incendiary Michael Gove is trying to do in my country in the UK right now evidence-based policy making where's the research behind it let's learn that lesson before we start doing the same around the world thinking that it goes like that focus on identifying needs focus on rather supporting and reinforcing capacities and identifying what those local priorities like the story that you know Dr. Butta made about no health expenditure well actually we dug a well because they knew what they wanted same goes for education you've got a lot on the slides there that you can refer to I will only just quickly say capacity development is the biggest blind spot not for lack of funding the blind spot in terms of the challenge to aid to education it shouldn't be seen as a collateral objective a gap filler, a preliminary something that is done for individuals it has to be systemic it has to be nationally led it has to be long term it cannot be the way it has been done we need to criticize ourselves those of us and myself I've had every hat worn in training people in ministries of education as an academic, as a project supervisor, as a donor, whatever and I'm going to give you one quote that comes from a review of a huge amount of USAID education projects in the rush to scale up in a cost effective way there is a tendency to look for a formula instead of recognizing that the human process of developing ownership strengthening new behaviors and changing systems is done at province by province district by district and school by school levels let's have a little humility and show that those who really are to be changed have a few ideas themselves rather than getting off the plane and trying to teach them what their grandmother knows and how to suck eggs thank you Abby there is a lot of frustration out there yes now we have like 15 minutes for some comments we'll start on the stage with comments if you have comments here or there please raise your hands and you will get a microphone and this gentleman here, wait sit, you can stay sitting because I will start with Katja and Bob, yes Katja there is challenges, we have been trying to sort out now for the last at least two decades I suppose is, I mean when we want to have these collaborative aid efforts I mean it's easy to say that and it's easy to have that with a country which shares the same opinion than those who want to come in the country and help from the outside and then of course there is this whole issue about the donors themselves not having the same interests and the same ideas, et cetera but even leaving that apart and just looking at the well the government side itself it's kind of complex I mean of course you're aware of that I'm sure but I still want to put up the point for instance when you get we once got into a discussion with the Cameroonian Education Minister and it was an issue about basically well whom education in the country and whom education spending should be allocated to and the issue was about quality and the idea was that the country might be spending too much on those schools within the capital or the bigger cities who anyway were basically catering to the richer kids and then the response was well when we off the Cameroonian Minister when we were young we were sent into the woods and only the best survived saying well I mean well we focus on those who have something and well let's see for the rest if you get these kind of responses then what do you do? Don't you invest in aid in Cameroon because you think it's anyway I mean you won't get to a collaboration with this kind of people or do you still go for it and then obviously it will be donor driven and I think this is an issue we still haven't sorted out really how to go about this Bob just one reflection from what Abby and I were talking about over coffee which was that there is a contrast between how budgetary support and swaps have worked in some countries which have very strong governments I'm particularly thinking of a country I've worked for a long time and work now, Vietnam where if you have a strong government which is very proactive and is prepared to tell donors very clearly what they want and to reject certain things how that can lead to a much more cohesive system I think there's a couple of things which are important here I've mentioned that they need to be government led needs to have active participation of both local and national NGOs to add a sense of perspective they need to meet on a regular basis the former minister from Rwanda said they met once a year I said that meeting these sector support groups at least quarterly, preferably more than that will be necessary to meet a genuine understanding and that can also contribute to selectivity in terms of the number of donors one of the great problems with aid is that it is extremely fragmented every donor wants to be doing something in every sector in nearly every country if a substantial commitment in both time and money is required to a sector support group that can often make donors think twice about whether we really want to become involved in sector X in country Y thank you, I really want to let the floor in so where are the microphones now? one and where is the other microphone? there, so I start with you and then you I will take, wow we'll take three comments one, two, and we'll try all five of them let's start, we'll see what we get yes, short comments or questions please very short comments first my name is Francis Matambalia and I'm from the Nordica Africa Institute but I'm Tanzanian also so let me say that it's a bit surprising what was presented I think is by the lady in green because I thought that for quite some decades now primary and secondary education in particular these are private goods they're no longer public goods they don't really enjoy the same kind of attention in terms of support as tertiary education so I was wondering to which extent whichever you find in the crafts is more of a coincidence than a reality in the many graphs you had there and of course I cannot agree less with the lady at the middle I think she said it all in terms of how everything is done nowadays I think there is a lot of donor decision of everything they come up, for instance at the university they'll come with even research themes and if you want to be considered maybe for a master's degree or PhD degree scholarship in Sweden you must fit yourself in and they have decided they say okay you're Africa we think that you need microfinance you don't need development finance so I'll stop there okay next there, thank you hello hello my name is Joshua I live in Stockholm I have a problem here I just want to make an allusion to what they just said there there is always this question about the number of enrollment in primary schools in Africa I think that the focus should be on the quality of education in Africa, I have a problem I'll just make a perspective of myself in the early 80s we had the best primary schools in the rural areas the best teachers in the rural areas but as of now if you go to the primary school in the rural areas they are all gone, they are all destroyed they are no trained teachers they have only PT teachers with first school living certificate so I tend to doubt where they get the statistics sometime when they talk about education in Africa she just said about Cameroon, I'm from Cameroon it's chaos in my homeland the quality is going down drastically every day and you know the highest number of students or whatever they come from rural areas and now they are no primary school teachers in a division of about 10,000 people you have 10 secondary schools, 50 primary schools those are not policies and how does Donald reflect on these issues? so that is the question thank you, an interesting challenge two more who has the microphone? thank you my name is Anders Molin and I work with health here at SIDA I think it's really interesting that so much of the discussion so far has been on aid efficiency and I have two comments on that the first one is that maybe we should stop having any hopes of the possibility of governments to move forward on aid efficiency because we now see the results so many years after the Paris Declaration and behaviors of bilateral donors hasn't really lived up to any of the expectations that we had in the beginning the only way forward as it seems according to the discussion here as well is increasing national ownership to the point where countries actually say no to money and then how to do that is another issue so that's the first the second one is related and that is that when it comes to resource transfer to low and middle income countries I think we need maybe to or I do think that we need to create global mechanisms that can replace bilateral aid because it's obvious that from a political reason governments, donor governments find it much easier to that it is the international mechanisms and the multilateral mechanisms that actually follow the Paris and Accra principles rather than doing it, than them doing it themselves Thank you, one last comment and then I want to give well no we have one last, sorry Yes, thank you, my name is Mika Lvikeng, I work with the Swedish Mission Council Development Corporation, organization My question is perhaps mostly directed to Katarina and it's a question relating to to a study that came out last year by an Indian social scientist called Krishna and it's written a report called One Illness Away, Why People Become Poor In this study, one of the points that he's making is that education is not always primary education and secondary education is not always leading to development or to poverty eradication above all you don't see poverty reduction as a result of more people being, having education and I would like to ask you what you have seen in your research and perhaps from the other panelists also what you think about that issue if there is if this lack of link between education and poverty eradication actually exists what do you think about that? Okay, let's see who wants to start, Abhi Okay, well I'll take a bit about global mechanisms I couldn't agree more but I mean the real problem is whether we can actually get agreement that has teeth you know unless you have some kind of mutual accountability amongst donors whether it's in country or whether it's global in terms of how it's activated I've tried, I've basically given up I spent a year as a defectiveness advisor to the ministry in Cambodia and I followed in the subsequent year and a half since I've been away what has happened with a lot of the plans that I set afoot which were to bring in principles of behavior to try to give more ownership to the government whether on the government side or on the donor side the government doesn't want to know because basically they don't want to criticize the donors the donors don't want to know because they don't want to criticize each other I don't know where you go from here I don't think it as we've seen well I'm not sure it was in these yeah it was in your graphs earlier maybe it was Miguel's you know the percentage that goes into multilateral aid that's been the easy fix certainly for DFID to get rid of the amount of money for the commitment that it's made whether that's made the difference I have a lot of questions I have a lot of questions over what I described as the necessary best practices when on the one hand you're having to spread more money around to more countries with fewer professional staff to decide how that is spent and to look at it thank you Bob I'd make two comments to our colleague from CEDA he mentioned about countries sometimes having the courage to say no to aid I think that's a very good point but I would turn it slightly around slightly around and say say no to aid from particular donors or in particular areas and this is a way that they can make aid more selective and also reduce these problems to do with fragmentation and burden of aid the other point I would like to make which regards general aid flows is that with the recent revisions to the OECD classification of countries into low income, lower middle income and upper middle income countries you now have a large number of formerly low income countries who've just crossed threshold of $1,050 per person per year into being lower middle income countries these countries include places like India and Nigeria and Pakistan where there's a huge amount of poverty and deprivation and so I think it's important for donors not to focus too much purely on the low income countries as they have in the past they need to either raise the threshold or start to say well, we need to include some lower middle income countries in their programs The last remark, it actually has to be like a two minutes answer try it I just start somewhere there were so many questions I can't stop me if I have to No, you just choose something that you can say something really interesting I start with your question your question has been set out even in a prior paper by a World Bank economist, Lan Pritches where has all the education gone is actually the title of his paper and he also finds that well, education can't robustly be shown to lead to growths can't robustly be shown to lead to poverty reduction and so on and what's the issue here? I mean my impression on the interpretation you have to give to that is on the one hand side of course again we have a lot of data problems that's one thing but that aside I think there are a lot of substantive issues behind there too for instance, some is about the complementarities we were talking about earlier if you don't have quality looked at at the same time as quantity you can for instance quote the example of Tanzania in the late 70s they were already at almost 100% gross primary education with a lot of aid by foreign donors quality is so low that even in the country itself it was not sustainable because well the kids and the parents didn't know what to do with that education if they land up in the fields later on again it's not used for anything so education levels dropped again and then labor market development is another thing as long as you have the civil service growing after colonization I mean you can fill up every secondary school lever into this sector but that's going to be saturated at some point and then you need some other area if that's not developing where should it go and then you have the issue of of civil wars in many countries of course you can train people and they use their human capital for very different things they can actually use it for for activities that are detrimental to the development of the country so again there is a lot of question about the setting whoop thank you very much thank you Katya, Abhi thank you also Bob a big applaud