The Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank has decided in favor of allocating extra €90 million to continue modernizing and equipping schools and improving the quality of education of school students as part of the project designed to modernize the Belarusian education system.
Thanks to additional funding the project’s scope will be expanded. As many as 65,000 school students in small towns and villages all over Belarus will be able to go to renovated schools and use new lab equipment. Apart from that, innovative education centers will be set up in some schools to promote cooperative learning and encourage scientific education.
In particular, the project will help Belarus evaluate how successfully the kids tackle the curriculum, specialists believe. Thanks to the assistance of the World Bank in 2018 Belarus took part in the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The extra funding will allow Belarus to continue participation in PISA in 2021 and 2024 in addition to more thoroughly analyzing the results of the testing. Previous investments and education programs backed by the World Bank in Belarus already demonstrate positive results.
In 2015 Belarus used a grant from the World Bank’s Institutional Development Fund (IDF) in order to test school financing per student. Taking into account the experiment’s success in 2019 the Belarusian government started assimilating this model of financing in secondary schools all over the country.
