The funding of secondary education : towards sustainable development in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The challenge in most developing countries is lack of funding in education. This leaves no option for most learners except to drop out of school. Even when safety nets are provided for by governments, this does not fully address the issues of access, equity and retention in secondary education. Education for All, as pronounced in the Dakar Declaration (2000) calls on governments to address access, retention and equity in basic education, overlooking the provision of secondary education. Many policies were adopted by governments in post-colonial rule in Africa and Asia to address the colonial disparities in education. This had a tendency of drowning the budgets in educational matters, notwithstanding the issues of fully addressing access, equity and retention in secondary education. In the developing world, the bulk of the population lives in rural areas where infrastructure for teaching and learning still has to catch up with the urban setting. In view of the global economic meltdown in the 1980s, 1990s and mid-2008, education has seen a squeeze on its budget. It is in this context that funding for secondary education has to be analysed in order to establish policies and programmes which are most suitable and sustainable to enable access, equity and retention of learners in secondary education. Models of funding in various countries are carefully examined in this study, in order to draw on the best practices in funding secondary education as applicable to the Zimbabwean case, and possibly to other countries in a similar situation. The research was carried out in three administrative districts of the Manicaland province of Zimbabwe. Using a mixed methods approach, this study examines the safety nets for the provision of secondary school education in Zimbabwe and proposes better ways to finance secondary school education.