Rationale, Issues, and Conditions for Sustaining the Abolition of School Fees • 37
abolition of fees in 2000. The GER increased from 87.7 percent to 102.8 percent during the same one-year period (see World Bank/Pôle de Dakar 2003). 13. See UNESCO (2002) and a discussion of different studies in Van Uythem and Verspoor (2005). The case studies also refer to this factor; see fourth section of this chapter (What Are the Practical Lessons Learned from These Five Countries?). 14. For countries that are far from reaching universal access, good analyses of access problems are given in World Bank (2004) for Niger and World Bank (2005b) for Ethiopia. 15. The quality problem in education in Sub-Saharan Africa goes well beyond these five countries. For a comprehensive study, see Verspoor (2005). 16. In the late 1990s, OECD countries’ annual average expenditure was US$3,851 per primary pupil (OECD 2000). 17. The level of teacher salaries varies widely in Sub-Saharan Africa. In some cases, salaries are too low for teachers to survive on teaching alone. When compared to other regions, teacher salaries in Sub-Saharan Africa have seen a severe long-term decline, reflecting a mix of decline in (a) GDP per capita and (b) average teacher salaries expressed in GDP per capita terms. As regards (a), excluding South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP per capita (in 1987 U.S. dollars) declined from US$525 in 1970 to US$336 in 1997 (36 percent), as compared to increases from US$1,216 to US$1,890 (55 percent) in Latin America, from US$239 to US$449 (88 percent) in South Asia, and from US$157 to US$715 (355 percent) in East Asia (see World Bank 2000, 8). As regards (b), primary school teacher salaries in Sub-Saharan Africa decreased from 8.6 times GDP per capita in 1975 to 4.4 times in 2000. The drop was largely the result of a sharp decline in Francophone countries, from 11.5 times to 4.8 times per capita GDP (Mingat 2004). 18. In 2005, for the 39 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for which data were available, the pupil-teacher ratio in primary education exceeded 50:1 in 11 countries, and 60:1 in 6 countries, including 3 of the 5 case study countries (Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique) (see UNESCO 2006, 2007). In addition, the pupilteacher ratio is often much higher in the early grades of primary schooling. 19. For Korea, Lee (2008, 170) says that “the implementation of the Low Cost Approach was an inevitable policy choice. The forced expansion of enrollment in elementary education resulted in large class size and double or triple shifts in classroom use. In the large cities . . . class size exceeded 90 in some schools. During the implementation periods of the Six-Year Compulsory Education Expansion Plan, some 40 percent of all classrooms practiced such double or triple shifts.” 20. See, for example, information on UNICEF’s Web site—www.unicef.org— under Essential Learning Package (ELP). 21. Few Sub-Saharan African countries have more than 750 hours in the school year, as compared to about 1,000 hours in the OECD countries. 22. In 2000, about 18.0 percent of primary school pupils in Sub-Saharan Africa were repeaters, compared to 7.1 percent in Arab states, 6.5 percent in South Asia, 5.9 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 1.1 percent in Europe. In a thorough study of the impact of repetition, Bernard, Simon, and Vianou (2005) conclude that repetition is a very ineffective way of improving learning outcomes and, instead, often results in dropouts. In addition, based on data for