Learning for All

Abstract

Education is fundamental to development
 and growth. Access to education, which is a basic human
 right enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights
 and the United Nations Convention on the rights of the
 child, is also a strategic development investment. The human
 mind makes possible all other development achievements, from
 health advances and agricultural innovation to
 infrastructure construction and private sector growth. For
 developing countries to reap these benefits fully both by
 learning from the stock of global ideas and through
 innovation they need to unleash the potential of the human
 mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than
 education. The new strategy focuses on learning for a simple
 reason: growth, development, and poverty reduction depend on
 the knowledge and skills that people acquire, not the number
 of years that they sit in a classroom. At the individual
 level, while a diploma may open doors to employment, it is a
 worker's skills that determine his or her productivity
 and ability to adapt to new technologies and opportunities.
 Knowledge and skills also contribute to an individual's
 ability to have a healthy and educated family and engage in
 civic life. At the societal level, recent research shows
 that the level of skills in a workforce as measured by
 performance on international student assessments such as the
 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the
 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study
 (TIMSS) predicts economic growth rates far better than do
 average schooling levels. For example, an increase of one
 standard deviation in student reading and math scores
 (roughly equivalent to improving a country's
 performance ranking from the median to the top 15 percent)
 is associated with a very large increase of 2 percentage
 points in annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita
 growth. To achieve learning for all, the World Bank Group
 will channel its efforts in education in two strategic
 directions: reforming education systems at the country level
 and building a high-quality knowledge base for education
 reforms at the global level.