Education

Budgets That Get
From Treasury to Textbook

Every African government spends more on education than on almost any other sector. Yet learning outcomes have stagnated and, in many countries, deteriorated. The shortfall is rarely about the size of the education budget alone — it is about how that budget is structured, executed, and accounted for.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, up to 80 percent of education expenditure goes to teacher salaries — leaving very little for the textbooks, learning materials, infrastructure maintenance, supervision and assessment systems that determine whether teaching translates into learning. At the same time, evidence suggests that nearly a third of total education spending in developing countries is lost to inefficiency, leakage and poor targeting. Learning outcomes track the discipline of spending much more closely than they track the headline budget figure.

The Global Partnership for Education launched its 2030 strategy in Nairobi in January 2026, with a fully funded plan that could enrol 204 million more children, improve learning for 105 million, and lift 23 million out of poverty. None of that potential lands without functioning country PFM systems. Education reform succeeds when budgets are protected, payroll is clean, materials are procured on time, and frontline schools have the financial authority and accountability to make decisions that work for their pupils.

Where PFM Needs to Make a Difference

Seven priority areas where public financial management determines whether education spending actually translates into better learning. Scroll across to explore each.

Teacher Payroll and Workforce Management

  • Are teacher payrolls clean — free of ghost workers, duplicates and unauthorised additions — and subject to regular independent audit?
  • Are teachers paid in full and on time, every month, including in remote and rural deployments?
  • Are payments tied to verified deployment and presence, not just to the establishment list?
  • Are hardship allowances and incentive payments delivered reliably enough to support deployment in underserved areas?

Learning Materials Procurement

  • Are budgets for textbooks, learning materials and assessment tools protected from in-year cuts when fiscal pressures mount?
  • Are procurement systems competitive, transparent, and capable of delivering materials before the school year begins?
  • Is there a verifiable chain of custody from central procurement to the classroom — and are stock levels tracked at school level?
  • Are arrangements in place to fund timely replenishment of consumables, not only one-off start-of-cycle purchases?

Infrastructure: Build and Maintain

  • Are recurrent maintenance budgets protected — or do schools deteriorate between successive build cycles because maintenance is the first line cut?
  • Is public investment management for new school construction subject to robust appraisal, procurement and oversight?
  • Are budgets for basic infrastructure — water, sanitation, electricity, connectivity — credible and executed in full?
  • Are climate-resilient design standards funded through actual construction budgets, not left as unfunded mandates?

Equity Across Regions and Income Groups

  • Do per-pupil allocations narrow the gap between richer and poorer regions, or do they reinforce existing inequalities?
  • Are formula-based grants used to channel resources to the schools and districts that need them most?
  • Is there public, school-level reporting of allocations and execution — enabling communities to hold the system accountable?
  • Are budgets for inclusive education (girls, children with disabilities, refugees, the very poorest) protected and tracked separately?

School-Level Financial Authority

  • Do head teachers and school management committees have the authority to manage discretionary budgets in response to school-level needs?
  • Are school grant disbursements predictable in timing and amount — or do delays cripple operational planning?
  • Are accountability tools (school accounts, expenditure tracking, social audit) embedded in the system rather than bolted on?
  • Do oversight mechanisms protect frontline managers from politically driven over-spending pressure?

Examinations, Assessment and Data Systems

  • Are national learning assessments funded as a permanent line item, or are they dependent on donor cycles?
  • Are EMIS (Education Management Information Systems) financed end-to-end — collection, validation, reporting — and used in budget decisions?
  • Do data systems support payment formulas, deployment decisions and equity adjustments at the right level of granularity?

Skills, TVET and Tertiary Financing

  • Are TVET and skills budgets aligned with labour-market signals — or do they fund obsolete programmes by inertia?
  • Are there transparent, performance-linked financing mechanisms for tertiary institutions?
  • Is there a credible mechanism to co-finance skills programmes with the private sector and capture employer demand?
  • Are scholarships and student-support budgets executed in full and reaching the intended beneficiaries?

A Three-Layered Support Model from PFPR

Immediate

Technical Assistance for Education Financing

PFPR teams apply established diagnostic tools — including FinEd and PEFA — to the most pressing PFM-in-education questions in each country. The starting point is a baseline across payroll integrity, learning-materials procurement, infrastructure maintenance, and school-level financial authority.

Working with Ministries of Finance and Ministries of Education together, PFPR co-creates reform actions that are owned and driven by country counterparts — and stays with the work through implementation rather than handing over a report and moving on.

Structural

Building African Capacity for Education PFM

Through the Africa School of Governance, PFPR develops dedicated curriculum modules on education financing — covering payroll integrity, materials procurement, school-grant systems, and the use of EMIS data in budget decisions.

The goal is a cohort of African practitioners fluent in both the realities of education systems and the PFM mechanics that determine whether budgets reach the classroom. These practitioners form the backbone of PFPR's in-country support, deployed alongside government teams.

Collaboration and Convening

Connecting the Education Financing Ecosystem

Education financing is shaped by a broad set of partners — the Global Partnership for Education, UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, regional development banks, philanthropies, and bilateral donors. The system risks fragmenting under that weight.

PFPR connects these actors around the practical question of how education money is budgeted, executed and tracked. At the country level it convenes finance, education and oversight institutions around a shared reform agenda; across countries it enables South–South exchange among reformers facing similar payroll, procurement and equity challenges.

PFPR — Public Finance for Prosperity & Resilience
Founding Partners

An African Initiative,
Backed by African Institutions

PFPR was conceived, designed and launched by Vanguard Economics in 2024–2025, and is delivered in partnership with the Africa School of Governance. Together they provide the institutional foundation for PFPR's first phase.