IBRD Trust Funds - World Bank

Purpose

This project aims to support a range of countries experiencing fragility, conflict, and violence to improve the quality and gender-responsiveness of their education systems and better address the health-related barriers that impede girls’ and adolescent girls’ access to quality education and learning, including for those with disabilities. This project is implemented by the World Bank in collaboration with the Global Financing Facility (GFF). The GFF is a multi-donor financing platform that provides country-led, sustainable financing for health, nutrition and education. Addressing education and learning challenges in countries facing fragility, conflict, and violence requires building on the inherent linkages between education and health. Access to school, quality instruction and learning materials are necessary but insufficient to achieve good learning outcomes. Children and adolescents need to be healthy to take full advantage of the education opportunities provided, and education is a key determinant of health outcomes. As a result of poor health, children miss an estimated 500 million days of school in low- and lower-middle income countries each year. This project supports GFF countries affected by fragility, conflict, and violence to improve education outcomes for girls and adolescent girls by: 1. Reducing health-related barriers that impede access for girls to education: Efforts to reduce barriers focus on scaling up the delivery of health programs in schools that target girls and adolescent girls with a package of health and nutrition services that have been demonstrated to reduce health-related barriers to education and improve enrollment, attendance and retention. Health interventions include for example, school-based malaria prevention, feeding/micronutrient supplementation, vaccinations, deworming, vision screening, and comprehensive sexuality education. These efforts can improve child and adult survival, reduce early and mistimed pregnancy, reduce childhood stunting, improve access to quality and equitable primary and secondary education, and strengthen the foundational skills necessary to enter and adapt to an evolving workforce. 2. Investing in coordinated, innovative, quality gender-responsive education systems: Countries benefiting from this project who commit to allocating a portion of their World Bank financing (loans from the International Development Association (IDA)) to education priorities in their county unlock GFF Trust Fund resources at a set ratio of 5 to 1. For example, $50 million of IDA loans allocated to education unlocks $10 million from the GFF Trust Fund. This financing from IDA and GFF is used to support various initiatives, for example: efforts to expand access to free or low-cost education opportunities for girls and adolescent girls; re-entry and technical and vocational training for young mothers; efforts to combat child marriage; gender-sensitive teacher training; conditional cash transfers to boost school attendance rates amongst girls; menstrual hygiene management; and investments in systems to support improved technical efficiency and quality in the educational system including efforts to strengthen administrative data systems and performance management practices, and other efforts to improve school accountability to learners and communities.