World Bank says continuous education is key to economic growth and cutting poverty

October 9, 2002 - Developing countries will have little success boosting economic growth and reducing poverty unless they can close a growing ‘knowledge’ or education divide between themselves and richer countries, warns a new World Bank report released today, on the eve of a global education summit in Stuttgart, Germany.

Citing numerous examples of countries, such as Chile, Finland, Mauritius, Vietnam, and Lithuania, which have prospered because of their strong commitment to a process of continuous education, the new report-Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education-says that lifelong learning spurs economic life, reduces poverty, and encourages open and cohesive societies.

A process of continuous education creates a country’s intellectual and economic foundation, and its ability to acquire and use the new hi-tech knowledge and skills increasingly demanded by the global economy.

The global economy now relies primarily on the use of ideas and technology in devising cheaper and smarter ways of working and doing business. Companies can make better-quality products more cheaply while constantly producing new goods and services by using advanced science and technology.

Expanding on the new report, World Bank President James Wolfensohn said that a widening education gap between wealthy and poor countries explained why 4.8 billion people, who live in developing and transition economies, received only 20 percent of global GDP.

Together with the Prime Minister of the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, Erwin Teufel, the host of the Stuttgart conference, Wolfensohn said that helping these countries join the global knowledge economy was therefore essential to closing the gap between themselves and OECD countries. The key to bridging the knowledge divide was a seamless learning system that moved people from primary and secondary school, through university, to updating their skills in the workplace.

"Everyone agrees that the single most important key to development and to poverty alleviation is education. This must start with universal primary education for girls and boys equally, as well as an open and competitive system of secondary and tertiary education . . . Adult education, literacy, and lifelong learning must be combined with the fundamental recognition that education of women and girls is central to the process of development," Wolfensohn said.
Enabling developing and transition countries to integrate well into the knowledge economy requires fundamental shifts in formal education and training systems, where the focus needs to be on teaching people how to learn, and how to use information, as opposed to transmitting facts, the report recommends. Governments then have a responsibility to take the right policy and institutional steps to create a good quality, efficient lifelong learning system. It also follows that a national strategy that knits together different sectors of the economy and government and private agencies is needed in a lifelong learning framework. The overall objective must be to raise people’s motivation to learn.

The Stuttgart conference is organized by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation for Development-Cooperation in cooperation with the World Bank Group and the German State of Baden-Württemberg. Participants will include an audience of approximately 200 composed of senior policy makers from government, the leading private sector, non-government agencies, academics, as well as representatives of key bilateral and multilateral development agencies.