By Tanu Jalloh
With limited natural resources and the conviction that human capital is the most dependable factor of production and development, the East Asia region invested in their people to produce knowledge-based economies. But what have been some of the challenges investing in the people of Sierra Leone and growing its economy over the years?
In a paper submitted in contribution to the Sierra Leone Conference on Development and Transformation, January 2012: “Prospects and Challenges for Poverty Reduction and Economic Development in Sierra Leone”, Sheka Bangura, a JICA Scholar (PhD) at the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan stated that that investment to produce a knowledge-based economy was a great asset for easy absorption of foreign technology and undertaking domestic research and development.
He discovered that during its fourth review in 2002, the Indonesian Constitution stipulated that at least 20 percent of the government’s expenditure should be allocated to the education budget. The region dramatically reduced adult illiteracy rate. In Sierra Leone the order is still a tall one.
According to figures from a mixture of data collected by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, national self-reported data, and the UN Development Programme's global projection models, Sierra Leone ranked 174 out of 183 countries in the world, ahead of unstable countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan and Mali. With merely 40.9 educated people, the country faces a huge problem of informed and structured economic activities at informal level.
While others revere and emphasise physical capital accumulation and labour in emerging economies, Economists John Malcolm Dowling and Rebecca Valenzuela are among many others who believe that human capital formation leads to increased total factor productivity, which many researchers agree is the key to the ballooning of East Asian economies.
As part of the Africa Human Development Series by World Bank, a document titled: “Education in Sierra Leone, Present Challenges, Future Opportunities”, (2007) discovers that the huge household expenditure on education was limited to primary and secondary schools after the war. This was totally unequal to those efforts expended in raising tertiary education. This fact has been corroborated by the Sierra Leone Integrated Household Survey (2003/04) indicating that the number of students in the tertiary sector was too small to infer anything [serious] about their contributions to tertiary education. However, the survey finds out, that institutional data on tuition and other fees provide a conservative estimate of these costs.
For primary education, the cost was about Le 53,000 per student in 2004, an equivalent of 9.2 percent of GDP per capita. The unit cost increases with higher levels of schooling: in secondary education, the cost was around Le156,000 per JSS student and Le 169,000 per SSS student, representing 26.8 and 29.1 percent of per capita GDP, respectively, and around three times the cost for primary school students. For technical and vocational education, the unit cost roughly doubles the cost of secondary education, or Le 355,000 per student (or 61.0 percent of the per capita GDP). For tertiary education, the unit cost was substantially higher at Le 1.6 million (2.8 times the per capita GDP), which was about 30 times higher than the cost per student in primary schools and 10 times higher than the cost per student in secondary schools.
As a country there was not much investment in education, especially at tertiary level. Research, around selected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, shows that there is a wide range in unit cost in relation to economic development. In particular, Sierra Leone spends relatively less per student on senior secondary school and technical and vocational education in relation to its wealth. Primary education is also relatively low, with Kenya, Niger, and Burkina Faso spending more than twice that (in relation to their wealth) of Sierra Leone on primary students.
There have been slight changes upward in terms of investment in the education sector, all aiming at the overall economic growth of the country. The trend was captured in a report about basic education in Sierra Leone by Campaign for Good Governance. The study discovers that government’s expenditure on education has increased tremendously. In the 2003 budget: Government recognized that basic education and health are critical to enhance economic growth, increase income-earning opportunities and reduce poverty. In this regard, an amount of Le44.2 billion is provided to the Education Sector of which Le14.0 billion is allocated to Primary Education to enhance the supply of teaching and learning materials, textbooks, school fee subsidies and the payment of examination fees for the NPSE.
Three years later the country’s budget for education increased from Le44.2 billion to Le58.7 billion (which is about 32.81%). Of the Le44.2 billion allocated to the education sector in 2003, 14.0 billion, (which is about 32.35% of the total sum) was allocated for primary education. Also, of the Le58.7 billion allocated to the education sector in 2006, Le14.3 billion (which is about 24.36% of the total sum) was allocated for primary school education. In essence, the government’s expenditure on education has been increasing year after year.
Today the education sector budget has risen from Le 112.1 billion in 2011 to Le 138.9 billion in 2012. For that, Budget Advocacy Network, a civil society coalition, issued a statement in December 2011 to commend government for what it said was an increase of 23.9% budgetary allocation to the education for 2012. Special provision, it said, should be made in the budget to increase enrolment, quality and retention of children in schools and called government to provide benchmarks in the budget regarding the status of achieving Education for All targets.
But what is being done for infrastructures, personnel and capacity to achieve and sustain the cost in providing quality education. Salaries for teachers are forthcoming. The figures for salary expenditures represent only those teaching and administrative personnel on the government payroll in both government and government-assisted schools. However, a survey of government and government-assisted schools showed that up to 10 percent of teachers are community teachers that are not paid by the Ministry of Education and therefore were not on the government payroll (Glennerster, Imran, and Whiteside 2006). Only 6 percent of the current expenditure goes to teaching and learning materials and other school inputs.
The Africa Human Development Series therefore adduced that the level of domestic public resources available for education since 2007 would depend on (1) the change in GDP over time; (2) the change in public domestic resources as a percentage of GDP (fiscal pressure); (3) the change in donor assistance to the country and to education; and (4) the change in the priority given to education within public funding (as assessed by the proportion of public resources, both from domestic and external origins, allocated to the sector).
Assuming that (1) GDP grows at an average real rate of 5 percent per year during the coming years; (2) domestic public resources increase from about 12 to 14 percent of GDP; (3) the proportion of external funding remains at about the 2003 level (38 percent of total public resources); and (4) the priority for education remains at the 2003 level (22.7 percent), the amount of public resources for the sector could rise from Le 106 billion in 2003 (US$40 million) to about Le 160 billion (US$60 million) in 2009, an increase of more than 50 percent over 6 years (or about 7 percent per year) in real terms. However, such an increase is not likely to be sufficient to adequately expand and upgrade the education system. This is particularly true in the context of the Millennium Development Goal to achieve universal primary completion by 2015.
