The issue of financing is increasingly becoming an issue in many sectors, including education. Noting the difficulties of states to ensure such charges on their own, several national and international players called, Saturday in Rabat, for a diversification of resources through innovative financing solutions. Indeed, the participants in a “Colloquium-Webinar”, organized by the General Treasury of the Kingdom and the Association for the International Public Finance Foundation, emphasized the importance of education as a determining factor. in the quality of human development, democracy and economic growth.
Financing education today is a major challenge facing the majority of governments around the world. According to the Minister of National Education, Vocational Training, Higher Education and Scientific Research, Saaïd Amzazi, the funding of education is mainly provided by the State in Morocco. “It allocates 22% of its budget to it, or 7% of its national GDP,” the government official said on Saturday. Speakers within the framework of a “Colloquium-Webinar”, organized by the General Treasury of the Kingdom and the Association for the International Public Finance Foundation (Fondafip) under the theme “Financing of the education system: what innovations?” Mr. Amzazi made it clear that the funds allocated by the State to the Ministry of National Education “only ensure the basic functioning of it, and in the end would leave our ministry only a very small margin of maneuver for carry out reforms and improve the quality of the education system ”.
Highlighting all the “significant” improvements made by framework law 51-17 on education, the minister stressed that “our education system is ultimately forced to resolve a most improbable equation. That of satisfying both the rapid growth in demand, the new educational requirements capable of forming human capital worthy of the aspirations of our society, as well as the requirements imposed by the Covid-19 crisis, all with a budget which focuses almost exclusively on the payment of the wage bill and which will not be increased despite the current economic situation ”.
Mr. Amzazi thus proposed some avenues for innovative financing of this strategic sector. In this sense, he affirmed that “the model of public-private partnerships (PPP) constitutes a strategic alternative more and more used in the world”. The official underlined that “the private sector in such a framework can as well be embodied by a variety of non-governmental actors, including companies, charities, etc.”. He also cited, in this sense, “the levy on the discharge contribution” as well as “the contribution of the Moroccan disapora” and which is strongly recommended by the Bank.
global and successfully tested by countries like India and Israel, he noted, affirming that this model could provide significant support to the financing of education in Morocco, a country which has nearly 5 million expatriates.
For his part, the General Treasurer of the Kingdom, Noureddine Bensouda, affirmed that education contributes to strengthening democracy in our societies. Opening the work of this conference, he noted that “thanks to education, citizens have more tools to fully play their role of actor, even agent of change in their community, both in terms of economic and social than political ”. The senior official also recalled that making the best use of the available resources and being able to convert them into real freedom to act is the foundation of the capability theory of Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize in economics in 1998) to whom we owes the famous Human Development Index (HDI) which he developed with Professor Mahbub Ul Haq.
Continuing his intervention, Mr. Bensouda argued that a good education would be better than a lot of material resources to guarantee real freedom of individuals and, ultimately, real social justice. In this sense, he recalled the Royal Speech delivered on the occasion of the Feast of the Throne in 2015. In this speech, the Sovereign said: “The reform of education is the basis of development. It is the key to openness and social promotion, the pledge of protection for the individual and the community against the scourges of ignorance and poverty, and the demons of extremism and ostracism. . This is why We have never ceased to plead for a substantial reform of this vital sector, so as to rehabilitate the Moroccan school and to make it capable of fulfilling as it should be its mission in terms of education and of development…”
For his part, Professor Michel Bouvier, president of Fondafip and director of the French Revue de Finances Publiques, assured that it was essential to develop long-term public policies. “It is essential, in other words, to make the necessary investments to respond to possible risks and new needs in the long term,” he said. In this sense, he indicated that it is crucial to focus public policies on investments for the future such as health, research, the environment and of course on education. “Indeed, the quality of education, from primary to higher education, determines the quality of human development, democracy and economic growth. In other words, the present and future well-being of populations, ”he said.
For the president of Fondafip, the time is no longer for DIY, but rather for the creation of solid institutions appropriate to this world. This is how this researcher asserted that among the structuring fields of a strategy for an education policy, we must first retain the participation of the education system in the achievement of social justice, as well as its participation in development of the economy. He also underlined in this sense the importance of opening the educational system to the world as well as the institution of a pedagogy in phase with the contemporary culture of pupils and students. Regarding the modes of financing, the professor indicated that they must be designed according to a systemic approach, which means first of all a diversification of the sources of financing. Noting the difficulties of the “State” in providing the necessary funding, the researcher asserted that such a context presupposes finding alternative or complementary funding, in particular from a private sector which, moreover, cannot ignore it. he has an interest in the public sector developing an investment policy. “But this variety of funding sources still needs to be structured in the form of a multi-actor system,” he concluded.
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