Learning for All

Education is fundamental to development and growth. Access to education, which is a basic human right enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights and the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child, is also a strategic development investment. The human mind makes possible all other development achievements, from health advances and agricultural innovation to infrastructure construction and private sector growth. For developing countries to reap these benefits fully both by learning from the stock of global ideas and through innovation they need to unleash the potential of the human mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than education. The new strategy focuses on learning for a simple reason: growth, development, and poverty reduction depend on the knowledge and skills that people acquire, not the number of years that they sit in a classroom. At the individual level, while a diploma may open doors to employment, it is a worker's skills that determine his or her productivity and ability to adapt to new technologies and opportunities. Knowledge and skills also contribute to an individual's ability to have a healthy and educated family and engage in civic life. At the societal level, recent research shows that the level of skills in a workforce as measured by performance on international student assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) predicts economic growth rates far better than do average schooling levels. For example, an increase of one standard deviation in student reading and math scores (roughly equivalent to improving a country's performance ranking from the median to the top 15 percent) is associated with a very large increase of 2 percentage points in annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita growth. To achieve learning for all, the World Bank Group will channel its efforts in education in two strategic directions: reforming education systems at the country level and building a high-quality knowledge base for education reforms at the global level.