Looking ahead: Education reforms and global support

National and international efforts have made considerable progress in pushing enrolment rates in primary education to near universal level in large parts of the developing world. At the same time, national educational systems have to cope with a faster pace of technological developments and the accompanying needs of a more skilled and adaptable labour force.  Primary education alone, even if efficiently managed, does not provide individuals with skills that are highly rewarded in the labour market - critical thinking, communication and social skills. Existing education systems in many developing countries are also suffering from a so-called learning crisis due to low quality of education, starting from early education but permeating through all levels of education. While the importance of the basic education at the primary level should continue to be recognized, education reforms need to pay more attention to increased access to post-primary education and skill training and to quality improvement across the board.
In achieving universal primary education, many less developed countries already face funding constraints, which will become even more severe if the focus of educational goals is to be widened. Educational reforms will have to look for ways of making educational spending more cost-effective. In an average developing country, students are found to take much longer than five years of primary schooling to become functionally literate or numerate. Given the importance of early learning, improving the quality of basic education system can thus be the first step toward making the entire education system more cost-efficient. In respect of post-primary education, technological change requires more varied and more frequent training. There are many cost-effective options available for delivering such education, including distance education, blended learning, IT-based instruction, and short duration professional courses. Planning for higher education also involves many difficult trade-offs: between the size of the higher education, its quality, its capacity to widen access, and its fiscal cost.  
Educational reforms have to also deal with the institutional and governance aspects. Connecting higher education and training systems with the labour markets will need reorienting the public system of higher education, reforming the regulatory framework for the private provision of education, and building effective industry-academia partnerships (as well as pathways between the formal and informal systems). A related question is whether low-income countries should aim at establishing national universities that try to consciously link up with the so-called global network of centres of excellence. The issues here are whether there will be enough scale economies to ensure quality, and whether it will lead to brain drain and a high degree of separation of higher education from the rest of the economy.  Instead, there may be a case for building universities more strongly rooted in the context of the local economy with emphasis on problem-solving, where problems are taken from the domestic reality?
Educational planners may look for opportunities for regional collaboration in higher education. One option is to set up regional universities, and additionally, to link these with national universities through collaborative network agreements. Regional universities may develop advanced research in niches where they reveal strength or in areas where regional demand is strong. An example of a regional university is the newly established South Asian University in New Delhi which is sponsored and funded by the governments of the SAARC member countries. Another example is the recently established Asian University for Women located at Chittagong in Bangladesh, which is funded by a global consortium of private and public organisations. Thus, while the former represents south-south cooperation through pooling of resources, the later is supported by faculty and funding from developed countries. There is also increasing commercial presence of foreign universities in low-income countries in the form of franchises, joint programmes and full local presence. The pros and cons of such trade in education services, along with the existing barriers, need closer scrutiny.
The potential negative effects of the out-migration of highly skilled manpower from the developing countries - the so-called brain drain - are well recognised. But there may be some positive aspects of the brain drain as well. One argument is that the prospects of highly paid jobs abroad may lead to more investment in skills, resulting in a more highly educated domestic workforce - the so-called beneficial brain drain (Mountford 1007; Stark, Helmenstein and Prskawetz 1998). There is also the prospect of benefiting from a reverse brain drain (or brain gain) by attracting back the emigrant skilled workers. In the case of post-liberalisation China, most of the initial FDI (foreign direct investment) came from the business people of ethnic Chinese origin.  In India, a large number of highly skilled professionals who have built their careers in the Western countries are now relocating themselves to the country of their origin.  It has even been suggested that the so-called 'brain circulation' in a globalised market for skilled workers should be seen as an opportunity and not as a threat. Temporary migration of labour can help the labour-exporting less developed countries both in terms of inward remittances and skill-training. Much will depend on the policies of the developed countries as well as the prospect of introducing facilitating WTO (World Trade Organisation) rules in future. An example of pro-active policies in this regard on the part of developed countries is a recently introduced scheme in Japan which allows temporary migration from a number of developing countries for apprenticeship in skill-training.
An appropriate role for the private sector in human resource development remains another important policy concern. The participation of the private sector can help the education-labour linkage by providing more market-oriented skill training, while reducing the government's fiscal burden in education spending. In some countries, the sector has provided technical training courses along with nationally recognised licenses to trainees and has also directly placed them in employment. The Republic of Korea, for example, has established a qualifications act, which allows the national technical qualifications system set up by the Government to be supplemented by certification of qualifications issued by the private sector. In turn, private sector involvement in vocational education and training is assisted by the policy that supports industry-level training through the Employment Insurance Scheme (EIS) administered by the Ministry of Labour.  The EIS supports training and re-training of workers through a tax on firm-level wages.
There are also important equity issues to be addressed. Increasing returns to higher education, along with unequal access, may potentially lead to a deepening of income and social inequalities, particularly in the developing countries that are enjoying rapid growth. In these countries, there is evidence of increasing earning differentials between highly educated people and other workers, often exacerbated by global trends in technology diffusion and competitiveness (Carnoy1999; Bourguignon and Rogers 2008). The public education systems have not often been able to respond efficiently to increasing demand, let alone extend access on an equitable basis. While the increasing participation of the private sector has helped address part of the problem, it may have sometimes created other problems, including those of quality and equity. Finding an optimum combination of tuition fees, scholarships and loans is not easy, given limited resources and institutional capacity constraints. Access to higher education is also determined by what happens to the pipeline of qualified entrants.  For example, how far children from poor households can compete in a merit-based system of entry into higher education will depend on their access to quality education at the primary and secondary levels. So far the policy focus has been on getting these children to school in the first place.
There is clearly a need for a rethinking of national education policies and international support for such policies in the light of the emerging challenges. Education and aid experts have already begun to focus international attention on the learning outcome and quality of primary education (Filmer, Hasan and Pritchett 2006). Many developing countries, particularly the Least Developed ones, face serious resource gaps even in achieving universal primary education, let alone focusing attention to the expansion of post-primary education and to quality improvement. There is a need for creative ways to meet this financing gap, such as by harnessing at the global level private streams of financing to complement official education aid (as has happened to some extent in the case of global health initiatives). Assistance needs to be provided in conducting learning assessments on the basis of international standards and in collecting good, comparable and detailed information on learning outcomes.  
The equity aspects of educational strategies need to be reemphasised. Studies have shown that in most developing countries, the degree of access to education has replaced landownership as the main vehicle of inter-generational transmission of poverty and inequality. The time may have come to shift emphasis from the global agenda of "education for all" to providing access to quality education and to higher education for the children from disadvantaged families. And, why not even think of setting up "universities for the bottom half"?
 The article by Professor Wahiduddin Mahmud, a member of the UN Committee for Development Policy, was presented as the key-note paper at a public lecture, titled 'Beyond Education for All: Meeting the Human Resource Needs of Economic Development' that was organised by International Growth Centre (IGC) and Institute of Governance Studies (IGS) of Brac University in Dhaka on February 23, 2014.