As part of efforts to build the capacity of Civil Societies working in education to campaign effectively for adequate resources to ensure quality education delivery ActionAid International in collaboration with Education International has produced a toolkit for campaigning on education financing. Subsequently, it has become necessary to ensure effective utilisation of this toolkit and to achieve this effectively the target group has been carefully divided into units to be trained. The training for Anglophone West Africa was held in Banjul, The Gambia from September 27 to October 1, 2010 with representatives from Teachers’ Unions, National Coalitions on Education and ActionAid from Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone as participants. The Gambia being the host country had a total of fifteen representatives.
The objectives were to:
· build the capacity of participants to understand key issues relating to education financing in their country
· develop a national campaign on education financing, tailored to the national context that builds on existing initiatives
· align the national campaign on education financing with the specific opportunities and demands of other campaign opportunities in 2010
· enable participants to leave with the confidence and clarity to run efficiently their own national workshops
To achieve these, the workshop introduced the participants to the key principles to follow in building an evidence-based campaign buttressed by international requirements and identified common regional groups to collaborate with. It also helped identify targets for advocacy both in-country and as a sub-region and provided a lot of practical examples of issues that need to be tackled in education financing advocacy.
As practical as it was, it drew on examples from participating countries to explain how suggestions provided in the toolkit could be adapted. Thus, for instance, there were discussions on the various country-budget cycles with emphasis on the need for gender budgeting as well as the power dynamics in setting the budget for education. This enabled participants to identify players involved and establish the level of ‘power’ each wields in determining what is finally approved as the budget for education. This was to help participants know who to target on what issue. Other areas of focus included key teacher issues that need to be considered during budgeting and these were identified mainly as funds for training and professional development, remuneration and accommodation.
Officials from various government offices such as the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Finance, Tax revenue office generously gave presentations on the Gambian example to facilitate the discussions. There was also an introduction to Macro-economics and education presented by an in-country World Bank official. This brought pages 80 to 83 of the toolkit on those to see when collecting relevant macro-economic data and conducting interviews to life and generated a very lively discussion leading to major lessons.
By the end of the workshop, each country group had, from the series of group work, developed a plan to start an evidence-based national education financing campaign
As a way-forward, ANCEFA encouraged represented organisations to build on campaign plan from the workshop for implementation and make budgets available to carry the plan drawn at the workshop through at the national level. It is anticipated that CSEF will fund national workshops on education financing as well as research to buttress campaigns. It is also expected that participating countries will apply knowledge and experience gained to achieved improvement in actual finances for education in their various countries
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