Emerging African Picture of Official Development Assistance and Education-Related SDGs Indicators

Abstract

Official development assistance (ODA) in Africa remains a contested subject, and Africa worries about the conditionalities and dwindling ODA inflows. This has led to increased attention on domestic resource mobilisation to complement ODA. This chapter attempts to follow trends in the volume of ODA for scholarships and to establish a baseline composite index drawing on data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the available United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2018 tier indicators for the education Sustainable Development Goal—SDG 4. In addition to analysing ODA flows for the period 2006 to 2015, two additional indicators were used to compute the composite index, namely, adjusted net enrolment rate 1 year before the official primary entry age and percentage of trained teachers in primary education. The findings reveal huge gaps in the volume of ODA for scholarships. It emerged that achieving SDG 4 targets is going to be an uphill task without scaling up efforts towards quality education. We therefore recommend that ODA for scholarships as well as the net enrolment rate a year before official primary entry age and the percentage of trained primary teachers should be increased. We also suggest additional domestic funding and data collection to populate missing data on indicators, including the percentage of trained secondary school teachers.