Public Expenditure Tracking Survey : Afghanistan - Education Sector, Synthesis Report

Abstract

The Public Expenditure Tracking Survey
 (PETS) looked at four components essential to the
 strengthening and development of the education sector in
 Afghanistan: 1) the payment of staff salaries; 2) the
 availability and use of an operations and maintenance
 (O&M) budget to support administrative teams and
 schools; 3) the construction of new schools through the
 Education Quality Improvement Program (EQUIP); and 4) the
 distribution of textbooks. The overall objective of the PETS
 is to understand the dynamics of resource flows in the
 education sector, to articulate a number of recommendations
 to improve effectiveness of this resource flow and increase
 the impact of reforms in the education sector in
 Afghanistan. This first study will focus on key aspects of
 resource flow: the extent to which public resources reach
 service-delivery points (schools); the timeliness of that
 delivery; the type and scale of bottlenecks and anomalies in
 the system that may result in delay or leakage of inputs to
 services; the capacity and flexibility available amongst
 local officials at all levels to address these bottlenecks.
 The report is organized as follows: section two presents an
 overview of the financial landscape of education in the
 country as well as specific profiles of the three provinces
 and districts where the research was carried out. Section
 three looks at the issues related to the payment of salaries
 and wages to teachers. Section four presents the factors
 that lead to inefficiencies in meeting the O&M needs of
 schools and provincial offices. Section five presents the
 state of completion of schools under EQUIPs and analyses the
 reasons that lead to these in the three provinces. Section
 six tracks the distribution of textbooks to provinces from
 the central level to the schools.