Public Expenditure Tracking Survey in Education 2004
Tanzania, 2004
Identification
TZA_2004_PETS_v01_M
Public Expenditure Tracking Survey in Education 2004
| Name | Country code |
|---|---|
| Tanzania | TZA |
Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS)
A Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) is a diagnostic tool used to study the flow of public funds from the center to service providers. It has successfully been applied in many countries around the world where public accounting systems function poorly or provide unreliable information. The PETS has proven to be a useful tool to identify and quantify the leakage of funds. The PETS has also served as an analytical tool for understanding the causes underlying problems, so that informed policies can be developed. Finally, PETS results have successfully been used to improve transparency and accountability by supporting "power of information" campaigns.
PETS are often combined with Quantitative Service Delivery Surveys (QSDS) in order to obtain a more complete picture of the efficiency and equity of a public allocation system, activities at the provider level, as well as various agents involved in the process of service delivery.
While most of PETS and QSDS have been conducted in the health and education sectors, a few have also covered other sectors, such as justice, Early Childhood Programs, water, agriculture, and rural roads.
In the past decade, about 40 PETS and QSDS have been implemented in about 30 countries. While a large majority of these surveys have been conducted in Africa, which currently accounts for 66 percent of the total number of studies, PETS/QSDS have been implemented in all six regions of the World Bank (East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa).
In a joint effort with various donors and the World Bank, the Government of Tanzania launched the Primary Education Development Plan (PEDP) in order to boost student enrollment and to raise the quality of primary education. Large increase in funding for primary education, together with the abolition of school fees and other levies in 2001, resulted in significant improvement in enrollment (1.6 million children against the target of 1.5 million in 2002).
Two revenue sources compensate the schools for the abolition of fees and other levies: community initiatives that provide either in-kind or cash contributions, and capitation and investment grants from the PEDP fund. The capitation grant allows the local government authorities to finance recurrent costs of schools. This grant is US$10 per pupil, including US$4 for textbooks, and US$6 to support other teaching and learning materials, and school operation and administration. In addition, the schools will receive an investment grant, covering costs for construction of new classrooms and major rehabilitation of existing buildings.
A Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) evaluates the flow of resources through different administrative hierarchies in order to determine how much of the originally allocated funds reach each level. It is therefore useful as a device for locating and quantifying leakage of funds or problems in the deployment of human resources and in-kind supplies, such as textbooks.
The Public Expenditure Tracking survey in Primary Education in Tanzania had two broad objectives. First, it was designed to generate new type of information on pro-poor public expenditures on primary education for policymakers in the central and local governments to help them improve resource allocation, access, quality, and learning outcomes in the sector. Second, the PETS can help empower parents, pupils, and watchdog organizations by providing them with relevant information and hence by equipping them to better monitor service providers and demand for better services.
The research focused on three main flows of resources: capitation grants (cash and books), development grants and capacity building grants for school committees. From February 27 to April 20, 2004, information was collected at the central government, council and school levels. Data covered years 2002 and 2003. Two hundred and ten primary schools from seven regions were surveyed.
Sample survey data [ssd]
Scope
| Topic | Vocabulary |
|---|---|
| Education | World Bank |
| Primary Education | World Bank |
Coverage
Regions: Dar es Salaam, Kilimanjaro, Coast Region, Mara, Mbeya, Rukwa and Singida
Producers and sponsors
| Name |
|---|
| World Bank |
| Ministry of Finance |
| Ministry of Education and Culture |
| President's Office - Regional Administration and Local Government |
| Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania |
Sampling
Seven regions were selected for the study, Dar es Salaam, Kilimanjaro, Lindi, Mara, Mbeya, Rukwa, and Singida, according to a stratification based on the Human Development Index (URT (2003c)). Due to bad weather conditions, the Coast Region replaced Lindi. Within each region, three councils were sampled according to their proximity to the regional headquarters and within each council 10 schools were sampled. Hence, in total, the study covered 210 schools throughout Tanzania.
A stratified sampling of the schools was conducted by dividing them into three categories based on distance to the council headquarters; (a) schools in walking distance from council headquarter, (b) schools in intermediate distance from council headquarter and (c) remote schools. In each council, four schools were randomly sampled from category (a), four schools from category (b) and two schools from category (c). The exact definitions of these three categories varied somewhat between regions, and in Nkasi researchers excluded from the sampling procedure some schools along Lake Tanganyika that only could have been reached by boat.
Due to bad weather conditions, the Coast Region replaced Lindi.
Survey instrument
For this study, four different questionnaires were designed:
- Questionnaire for the central level on disbursements to councils,
- Questionnaire for the sampled councils on aggregate inflows from the central level and aggregate outflows to the schools in the council,
- Questionnaire for the sampled councils on disbursements to sampled schools,
- Questionnaire for the sampled schools (in Kiswahili) on received funds.
Data collection
| Start | End |
|---|---|
| 2004-02 | 2004-04 |
| Name |
|---|
| Research on Poverty Alleviation, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania |
The fieldwork was conducted in the period February 27- April 20 by two groups of researchers (twenty research assistants and two supervisors). Before the field study, there was a one-day training session for the field workers and a pilot study in Kibaha DC. On the basis of this pilot, the final versions of the questionnaires were prepared.
One research assistant visited each school; whereas the supervisors collected data from the council headquarters. The collection of data at the council headquarters frequently involved more than five respondents from different departments (District Education Officer, Statistics and Logistics Officer, storekeeper in the education department, revenue accountant, expenditure accountant and cashier). The same office did not necessarily manage both the capitation grant and development grant. Similarly, the Statistics and Logistics Officer did the procurement of books whereas the storekeeper had all the information on distribution and handling of books.
The senior researchers were in charge of the data collection at the government level and had a number of meetings with representatives from the various ministries in the period March 1 - April 15, 2004. In all cases, the aim was to establish more than one source of information for every reported disbursement, by comparing information received from the ministries, Accountant General, budget books, etc.
Data processing
In the final stage of this study, from April 20 - June 2, the senior researchers, together with some of the field researchers, worked extensively on quality checking the data. All councils were requested to provide further information, in many cases several times. This was mainly done by phone or fax, but some of the nearby councils were also visited a second time. Some schools were also contacted for clarifications, both by phone and physical visits, though it was more difficult to reach the school by phone, because most of them do not have a phone.
In total, two senior researchers and two field researchers spent almost two months on data cleaning. This was necessary in order to establish a robust and representative dataset. In this process, two schools were removed from the dataset due to poor records at the school level. The final dataset therefore contains 208 schools.
Data Access
Public use file
The use of this survey must be acknowledged using a citation which would include:
- the identification of the Primary Investigator (including country name)
- the full title of the survey and its acronym (when available), and the year(s) of implementation
- the survey reference number
- the source and date of download (for datasets disseminated online).
Disclaimer and copyrights
The user of the data acknowledges that the original collector of the data, the authorized distributor of the data, and the relevant funding agency bear no responsibility for use of the data or for interpretations or inferences based upon such uses.
Contacts
| Name | Affiliation | |
|---|---|---|
| Hooman Dabidian | World Bank | hdabidian@worldbank.org |
| Cindy Audiguier | World Bank | caudiguier@worldbank.org |
Metadata production
DDI_TZA_2004_PETS_v01_M
| Name | Affiliation | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Antonina Redko | DECDG, World Bank | DDI documentation |
2011-10-20
Metadata version
v01 (October 2011)