Author(s)

Abou Sidibé¹, Wei Gao², Lala Jaiteh³

¹School of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.
²Department of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.
³Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology, Serrekunda, Gambia.

Malian primary education has been suffering from funding inadequacies over the past two decades, negatively affecting the school’s learning outcomes. At the same time, several studies on school funding conducted in Mali continue to drive the school stakeholders’ attention to the drawback of school funding inadequacies on the quality of education. After a few decades, the percentage of the country’s GDP allocated to the education sector continues to rise and exceeds the state’s financial capacity and affects the quality of education in public primary schools in Mali. Based on this fact, this study examines the impact of these funding inadequacies on learning and teaching outcomes of public primary school students. We used a secondary data collection technique to collect the data. We extracted data from government expenditure from 1992 to 2020. World Bank and OECD report documents to answer four fundamental questions related to the impact of school finance inadequacies on the quality of public primary schools in Mali. First question: what are the Malian public primary education main sources of funding? Second, what are the financial discrepancies of the public primary schools in Mali? Third, what are the effects of these financial discrepancies on the quality of education in public primary schools in Mali? Fourth, is the current budget allocated to primary education adequate to offer a mass and quality education? Our results indicated that: 1) The government is the leading funder of public primary education in Mali, followed by external donors and local funders. 2) Insufficiency and mismanagement of funds are the main financial discrepancies. 3) Those discrepancies have resulted in poor quality education (low completion rate, high school dropout, poor performance, low learning outcome.). 4) No. The current budget allocated to public primary schools is not sufficient enough to have a mass and quality education.

Public Expenditure, Education Funding, Education Quality

Sidibé, A. , Gao, W. and Jaiteh, L. (2022) Assessing the Funding and Quality of Education in Public Primary Schools in Mali. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 10, 487-501. doi: 10.4236/jss.2022.101036.