Education finance in sub-Saharan Africa
A new report by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics , Financing education in sub-Saharan Africa , presents comprehensive data for the past decade for 45 African countries. The number of children enrolled in primary school in sub-Saharan Africa grew from 87 million in 2000 to 129 million in 2008, an increase of 48 percent. Over the 1999-2009 decade, real public expenditure on education, adjusted for inflation, grew on average by 6.1 percent per year, based on data from 26 countries. The highest annual growth rates of education spending in sub-Saharan Africa, over 12 percent, were observed in Mozambique and Burundi. Of the countries with data, only the Central African Republic experienced a decline in public expenditure on education. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined spend 5.0 percent of their GDP on education, the second highest value of the eight EFA regions , after North America and Western Europe, where 5.3 percent of the regional GDP is spent on the education sector. The ...