Glossary
Additionality: the principle that external resources granted by (the) donor(s) are additional to and do not substitute national resources. The additionality principle, varying in strictness, is generally a condition for granting external financing in order to avoid eviction effects due to aid fungibility. Verification of resource additionality requires a sound knowledge of the level of public expenditure prior to granting financing, a hypothesis on the evolution of internal resources and a verification of expenditures made. (AFD)
Sustainable literacy: an individual’s lifelong capacity to read, write and count in his/her everyday life. Literacy cannot generally be considered sustainable with less than six years of studies. (AFD)
Workbased learning: pedagogical method hinged on general, professional and technological training and the acquisition of skills by work experience linked to the studies. Students alternate experience in the workplace with classroom studies. (AFD)
Training: the term has several definitions.
- from a cognitive point of view the concept of training is a group of activities which enable an individual to acquire or develop theoretical and practical knowledge or develop abilities;
- from a pedagogical point of view training is a type of work-based learning. It aims to give young workers, who have fulfilled their schooling obligations, general, theoretical or practical training in order to obtain a professional qualification recognized by a diploma from vocational, technological, second-grade or higher education, or one or several accredited qualifications;
- from a legal point of view (e.g. France) training is materialized by a work contract which binds the employer and trainee in a relationship of subordination. The trainee works for the employer and receives a salary in return. As with all work contracts, the training contract is subject to labour legislation and collective bargaining agreements. It is however a specific type of work contract with compulsory training both in the enterprise and in a public or private training center and recognized by an accredited professional qualification. Training refers to a legal framework specific to each country. Thus the dual system refers to the way training is organized in Germany. (AFD)
Skills approach: this approach is based on an analysis of professional activities and the context in which they are carried out in order to define the skills to be mobilized by the people concerned, then to set up a training programme focused on acquisition, before validation, of each of the skills required to carry out the activities. (AFD)
Medium Term Development Framework (MTDF): The MTDF is a budget planning instrument for the implementation of a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper or a sectoral programme, generally fixed for three or five years. It creates a link between policy, planning and budget making and guarantees operational policy. It is a way to base expenditure programming on an action plan coherent with policy implementation. The MTDF must include the four following features:
- be exhaustive and include all sources of financing, even external;
- be realistic and neither underestimate expenditure nor overestimate revenue;
- be clear on the way resources will be used and the results to be measured;
- be validated by the Ministry of Finance (or budget). (AFD)
Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP): the PRSP initiative was launched at the end of 1999 by the World Bank and IMF in relation to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). The PRSP is a document which defines the economic and social development of a country for the three coming years; it ideally reflects country-ownership of policies and broad-based partnerships between stakeholders. At its inception only a small number of poor countries soliciting debt relief under HIPC prepared PRSPs. PRSPs subsequently became a prerequisite for all poor countries benefiting from either International Development Association (IDA) concessional loans or IMF-Facility loans for growth and poverty reduction, or multi-donor global budget support programmes. (AFD)
Human capital: people’s innate abilities and talents plus their knowledge, skills, and experience that make them economically productive. Human capital can be increased by investing in health care, education, and job training. (World Bank)
Earmarked aid: earmarked funds respond to the desire to implement an additional safeguard, to “securize” priority expenditure lines, particularly in the following cases:
- High fiduciary risk;
- Unrealistic budget or lack of coherence between objectives and resources;
- Liquidity problems at the Department of State for Finance and/or incomplete or inappropriate budget programming.
Two types of targeting exist:
- Ex ante earmarking, also called real earmarking, requires the opening of a special appropriation account or a dual signature to mobilize certain credit lines;
- Ex post, or notional, earmarking where the targeting process is not based on accounting provisions but on ex post verification of expenditure actually made (invoice verification) and the additionality of expenditure (DfID, Managing fiduciary risk when providing poverty reduction budget support, September 2004).
Budget support is said to be non earmarked when it is paid directly into the account of the Department of State for Finance account at the Central Bank, without being transferred through a special appropriation account, and verification concerns development outcomes and not accounting controls to ascertain that certain budget lines have been credited for a specific amount. (AFD)
Multi-shift schooling: classes with several groups of students at different times of day. This teaching method mainly stems from a lack of teachers or classrooms.
(AFD)
Multi-grade teaching: class with several student levels and different age groups combined in a single classroom under the same teacher. This teaching method is particularly suitable in rural regions with scattered populations. (AFD)
Debt Reduction-Development Contracts (C2D): Debt Reduction-Development Contracts are the additional French bilateral component of the HIPC debt relief initiative for developing countries. It is a grant refinancing mechanism for debt repayments by the countries concerned. Financing focuses on a limited number of “allocation areas” selected in four sectors: (i) basic education and vocational training; (ii) primary healthcare and fighting the great endemics (particularly the fight against AIDS); (iii) equipment and infrastructure for local authorities; (iv) land use planning and water resource management. (AFD)
Intake rate: the number of children that a country is capable of enrolling in its education system. The indicator generally used is the gross primary intake rate. (AFD)
Curriculum: training programme: A course of study to acquire knowledge. It includes assessments and can lead to validation. (AFD)
Hazard ratio: proportion of situations where the number of teachers cannot be explained by the number of students. The hazard ratio is a measure of class size variation depending on the school. It is calculated from the R² coefficient of determination which assesses to what extent the number of teachers is proportional to the number of students in the schools where they are teaching. The hazard ratio is calculated as follows: 100% - R². The closer the hazard ratio is to 100%, the more the posting of teachers is without relation to the number of children in class. (EFA report 2005, Pôle de Dakar)
Education demand: refers to social and economic factors which determine access to schooling and dropouts: direct and indirect costs borne by families, cultural obstacles, family assessment of external outputs of education. (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Discontinuity: situation whereby the school does not offer all levels of a study cycle to students. It leads to dropouts and hinders the achievement of universal primary education. (AFD)
Basic / primary Education: basic education comprises primary education (first stage of basic education) and lower secondary education (second stage). It also includes a whole range of educational activities (formal, nonformal and informal, public and private), that aim to meet basic learning needs for people of all ages. (UNESCO)
Positive Externalities: effects of a person's or firm's activities on others which are not compensated. Externalities can either hurt or benefit others - they can be negative or positive. One negative externality arises when a company pollutes the local environment to produce its goods and does not compensate the negatively affected local residents. Governments can increase positive externalities by subsidizing goods with positive externalities or by directly providing those goods. (World Bank and AFD)
Priority Solidarity Fund (PSF): the Priority Solidarity Fund is the project aid instrument of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It finances, exclusively through grants, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs support to the priority solidarity zone (ZSP) for institutional, social and cultural development and research. These projects were transferred to AFD in 2005 after the reform of the French cooperation mechanism in 2004.
(French Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Harmonisation: process begun by bilateral and multilateral donors with the aim of: (i) sharing information, diagnostics and sectoral studies for instance; (ii) rationalizing and simplifying systems and procedures; or (iii) implementing ODA according to common procedures or even joint decision-making. (AFD)
EFA Development Index (EDI): a composite index to measure total progress towards Education For All. It currently only uses four EFA goals, selected on the basis of data availability: Universal primary education (UPE) measured by Net Enrolment Ratio (NER), adult literacy measured by the adult literacy rate, gender parity measured by the gender-specific index and quality of education measured by the survival rate at grade five. The EDI value is thus the arithmetic mean of the observed values for each of the four indicators.(UNESCO)
Gender-specific EFA index (GEI): composite index measuring relative achievement in gender parity in total participation in primary and secondary education as well as gender parity in adult literacy. The GEI is calculated as an arithmetical mean of the gender parity indices of the primary and secondary gross enrolment ratios and adult literacy rates. (UNESCO)
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC): debt relief initiative for heavily indebted poor countries launched in 1996 by the G7, IMF and World Bank and enhanced in 1999. It targets about forty countries which may benefit from up to 90% in debt relief in exchange for adopting strategic frameworks for poverty reduction. (AFD)
Medersa: private Islamic education institution which gives lessons in both Arabic and French.
Education supply: education services proposed to the whole population comprising three aspects: (i) quantitative intake capacity (constructions, teacher recruitment and training), (ii) equitable geographical distribution of human and material resources, (iii) quality of teaching. (AFD)
“Orphan” country: the World Bank considers an orphan country one which has only 4 donors or less whose contribution exceeds 1 million dollars. The status of “orphan” country gives access to the Catalytic Fund set up in the framework of the Fast-Track initiative. (AFD)
“Credible” policy: a credible policy must include:
- a strategy aiming to accelerate progress in achieving the goal of universal primary education for all, within a sustainable budget plan;
- a strategy to fight against the issue of HIV/AIDS, the issue of gender inequality and other key issues;
- a series of national measures to improve the quality of teaching, equity, effectiveness, political, budgetary and social sustainability.
- an inventory of obstacles to implementation capacity and strategies proposed to remedy them;
information on the way the country will ensure monitoring and evaluation and identify annual objectives to measure achievements in certain policies and key achievements, in particular those within the indicative framework of the Fast-Track Initiative adapted to local conditions.(World Bank and AFD)
Education pyramid: provides a visual representation of student flows from primary education to higher education. (AFD)
Private output: relationship between profits (benefits) that an individual obtains from his school career and its direct and indirect costs. (AFD)
Social output: relationship between the benefits to society due to the increase in population education levels and the cost of financing the education system. Social benefits integrate private benefits as well as positive externalities stemming from education in terms of health, hygiene, respecting the environment, social integration or citizen behaviour. (AFD)
Fiduciary risk: generally speaking fiduciary risk designates the risk that funds are improperly used or are misappropriated. DfID identifies three specific forms of risk:
- risk that the funds are not used for intended purposes;
- risk that they do not achieve value for money;
- risk that they are not properly accounted for. (AFD)
Informal sector: characterized by an absence of regulation and taxation and is made up of non-structured microenterprises and self-employed workers. It has limited capital and its workforce is often unskilled and plentiful, costs little, and is driven by market laws based on both competition and tradition. Family relations play an important role. This population is widely illiterate and few young people go to school. (AFD)
Primary completion rate: the total number of students successfully completing (or graduating from) the last year of primary school in a given year, divided by the total number of children of official graduation age in the population.
Due to variations in the length of primary cycles and the sometimes selective nature of the end of year exam before lower secondary education, an estimation of the primary completion rate consists in measuring the access rate to the last year of primary school. (AFD)
HIV prevalence rate: estimated number of people of a given age group living with HIV/AIDS at the end of a given year, expressed as a percentage of the total population of the corresponding age group. (UNESCO)
Net enrolment ratio (NER): number of pupils in the official age group for a given level of education enrolled in that level expressed as a percentage of the total population in that age group. (UNESCO)
Gross intake rate (GIR): number of new entrants into first grade of primary education, regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of the population of official entrance age to primary or basic education. (AFD)