How financial resource management fecilitate educational development in schools? An exploratory study

Abstract

Education is considered as a basic element in any development process and it supports other social, economic, science and technology sectors in poverty alleviation schemes.Proper managemet and sound financial resource utilization in the educational system helps the efforts to improve edutional quality and expand access to achieving the goal of universal primary education.Improper financial resource management and misusing the resources tend to be difficult tasks of the education system. Hence the major objective of this paper is to assess the practice of financial resource management in primary schools for educational development in Daledistrict of Ethioipa. To address the specific objectives, multistage sampling procedure was adopted to select the district, schools and the respondents.Daledistrict was selected purposefully and the schools in the district were grouped in to five geographic clusters. From each cluster, one school was selected by using random sampling technique.The data were collected through questionnaires, interviews, focus group discussion and document analysis.Quantitative datawere analyzed using SPSS software version 21. The results indicated that, the participation of community representatives in the process of planning, implementing& evaluation was found below average.Financial resource management system has deficiency of transparency,lack of efficient and effective financial resource utilization, delay of budget released to schools, lack of qualified human resource forbudget preparation, shortage of capacity building trining, lack of commitment amoung committee members, lack of experience in management of finance, low educational back ground ofcommittee members. Thus, to alleviate the challenges, the District Administrators, District Education office, District Finance &Economic development office and primary schools should take measures to improve participation of community representatives in financial resource management, financial resource utilization should be transparent & schools should promote efficient and effective financial resource utilization in the system.