Public Funding and Budgetary Challenges To Providing Universal Access To Primary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

Budgetary capacity that would allow for the public funding of the provision of universal access to primary education is lacking in many sub-Saharan economies. National revenues significantly lag behind the overall economic productivity measure of GDP. Analysis of data derived from UNESCO and UNDP for 2004 shows that governments in the region spend far less in US dollars per unit cost on primary education than do developed countries. Increasing the unit cost of education in order to enable a government to guarantee universal primary education would take away resources from other tiers of the education system in many countries in the region. The alternative is to universalise access, despite existing budget allocation constraints, and thereby further compound the problems of poor infrastructure and limited human resource capacity that continue to compromise education quality in sub-Saharan Africa.