Bangladesh Increases Education Expenditure 13.5% for FY 2010-2011

The proposed budget for fiscal year 2010-2011 has been delivered to parliament.

One of the brightest lights of the budget is the proposed 13.5% increase in allocated education expenditure. The Finance Minister has argued that the increase is the largest of any other sector in the budget. The lion’s share of the allocated funds is targeted for primary and public education. This is extremely welcome news. But more needs to be done. So far the budget is a blunt instrument; it has to be hammered and shaped into a document that best approaches and satisfies the needs of the Bangladeshi people.

I have long argued that education is the engine of economic growth, and of development. With an increasing share of the economy employed in the service sector, better, more upwardly equitable education is the key to Bangladesh’s poverty alleviation strategy. Perhaps, as is more immediately obvious the political game has no takers for lower education spending; the only real debate in parliament is the apportionment of the allocated funds in structuring what might seem, to each interested party, an equitable way to fund a forward looking education policy.

Each partisan will have different goals in this game: religious leaders will want the funds driven toward increased expenditure on public and matching private madrasa education. Humanists will want to see a larger share of the funds go toward public primary and secondary education. Egalitarians might seek to improve funding for the education of women. Business leaders will want to drive a large share of the funds to tertiary education. In some non-trivial each is an improvement from the status quo.

Each argument for increased share of education is a valid one. Religious study in madrasas remains good training for community leaders in many villages across the country, even if broadly speaking, a skewed emphasis on madrasa education is very likely to have negative consequences. A religious education that is interspersed with a humanist curriculum–in theory, the model of most madrasas in the country–is, perhaps, a suitable training for at least some people who might not thrive in Dhaka’s business community. The haggling, as ever, will be on how to balance out the different shares of education spending for each interested partisan in parliament.