Public Education Financing in Liberia: A Case Study
Semester
Education financing can amplify or mitigate socio-economic inequalities within and across countries. In order to understand the impact of different allocation mechanisms on equitable educational outcomes, the Brookings Institution has launched a research agenda to map the existing public education financing practices in developing countries. As part of this initiative, the Center for Universal Education commissioned the Capstone workshop team to conduct a case study on the financing mechanisms of primary education in Liberia.
What the Capstone team found is both troubling and encouraging. Liberia’s education system has been slow to recover from a second civil war between 1999 and 2003. Not only did the war leave the primary education system devastated in terms of infrastructure, logistics and qualified personnel, but data collection has also suffered considerably so that it is still difficult to take stock of the existing resources. This, coupled with the heavily centralized administrative setup, also contributes to inefficient spending and widespread corruption. On the other hand, there have been some successful reform initiatives in the country; the efforts of the Ministry of Education to clear the public payroll from the salaries of ‘ghost teachers’, and the national school census can both lead to a more efficient resource allocation mechanism in the future. Some others, such as the 2011 Education Reform Act’s provisions on the elimination of school fees or the decentralization of the system have not succeeded thus far.