Education vouchers, not money, offer the best solution for overseas aid to schools

The handing over of aid money to governments to spend on state schools has often proved disastrous. Thousands of villages in the developing world now have ‘ghost schools’, where buildings are empty or half-built. The teacher is paid but doesn’t turn up. A local official is bribed to confirm that all is well.

In a recent paper for Civitas, ‘Aiding and Abetting’, Jonathan Foreman gives examples of bad practice. Officials in India admit that at least £70 million of the £388 million contributed by the Department for International Development to India’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (‘education for all’) programme was stolen or otherwise lost. The country’s comptroller and auditor general also found that £14 million of British taxpayers’ money for another education programme was embezzled by Indian officials in 2005-6 and never reached schools. Foreman adds: ‘Standards and teacher attendance in Indian government schools are often so wretched that large numbers of the poor scrimp to pay for private education.’

There is, however, better news about funding for low-cost private schools in developing countries. In Punjab, an education voucher system — under which aid money pays for pupils to attend low-cost independent schools — has proved a success, following a programme run by the Punjab Education Foundation. As a result of the voucher scheme, which is supported by DFID, more than 140,000 children are now enjoying the benefits of private education.

A report for the Reform think tank by Michael Barber says: ‘Since the data shows that these schools on the whole achieve better outcomes for less cost, the programme has significant implications for the future.

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‘The three PEF programmes combined are educating more children than, for example, Denmark. The beneficiaries are not just the children on the PEF programmes; the whole of Punjab benefits because of the competition effect.