The Education Record
Education Sector Analysis · April 2026 · mdbreform.com
$6.6 Billion Committed to Education in Africa. 69% of Committed Resources Below Satisfactory.
Human Capital Without Human Results — What the IEG Record Shows. What the Human Capital Agenda Must Answer.
Parminder Brar · Former World Bank Country Manager and Lead Governance Specialist · mdbreform.com · April 2026
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| 31% S+ by commitment — less than one in three dollars |
$4.6bn Below Satisfactory in a decade |
89.1% MS+ — the number the Bank reports |
$575M Ethiopia: zero Satisfactory |
The World Bank has committed $6.6 billion to 92 IEG-rated Education projects in Sub-Saharan Africa between FY2015 and FY2026. Of this, $4.6 billion — 69 percent — went to projects that did not achieve Satisfactory development outcomes. By project count, 33 of 92 achieved Satisfactory — 35.9 percent. By commitment, $2.1 billion of $6.6 billion went to Satisfactory projects — 31.3 percent. The commitment-weighted rate is lower because the largest education projects fail: Ethiopia’s General Education Quality Improvement ($530 million, MS), Malawi’s education sector ($256 million, MS). The global Education rate is 45.9 percent. South Asia achieves 56.0 percent on $12.2 billion — nearly twice the commitment, delivering substantially better outcomes.
The MS+ Gap — The Widest in Africa
The MS+ rate in education is 89.1 percent — the highest of any major GP in Africa. The gap between 89.1 percent (the Bank’s headline) and 31.3 percent (the commitment-weighted honest bar) is 58 percentage points — the widest in the entire Africa portfolio. Nine in ten education projects “mostly worked with significant shortfalls.” Fewer than one in three dollars went to projects that achieved their development objectives. The MS+ metric does the most damage to accountability in education and health — the two sectors where outcomes matter most to human welfare.
Seven Countries, Zero Satisfactory
Ethiopia: 3 projects, $575 million, zero Satisfactory — including the General Education Quality Improvement Project ($530 million), the largest single education commitment in Africa. DRC: 4 projects, $550 million, zero Satisfactory — spanning basic education, secondary education, and skills development. Central African Republic ($63 million, 2 projects), Liberia ($57 million, 3 projects), Lesotho ($52 million, 2 projects), Congo ($40 million, 2 projects), Mauritania ($28 million, 2 projects). Combined: 18 projects, $1.4 billion, zero Satisfactory.
The Jobs Silence
Jobs are mentioned in only 4 percent of education project lessons. Skills and employability appear in 23 percent. The sector that is supposed to build the human capital for the Bank’s jobs agenda barely measures whether its investments produce employable graduates. Teacher quality is cited in 41 percent of lessons — high, but suggesting that 59 percent of projects do not flag teacher quality as a constraint despite it being the single most important determinant of learning outcomes.
The Trend
FY2015: zero percent Satisfactory across 8 projects and $830 million. FY2021–22 showed a strong recovery — 100 percent and 78.6 percent. But FY2023 collapsed back to 14.3 percent and FY2025 returns 27.3 percent on $1 billion. The two strong years are the exception, not the new baseline. Education is building the workforce the jobs agenda depends on — and delivering at 31 cents on the dollar.
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