World Bank Loan to Finance Education Transformation

Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Hon Audley Shaw, and the World Bank’s Sector Director for Latin America and the Caribbean Region, Evangeline Javier, signed a US$16 million dollar (approximately J$1.435 billion) loan, to co-finance the EducationSystem Transformation Programme, Thursday (March 4).
The loan has a repayment period of 26 years, with a grace period of five (5) years and a current interest rate of below one percent per annum. The executing agency will be the Ministry of Education.
The Projects aims to bring greater levels of accountability and improved quality to the Education system through: decentralising decision making; increasing capacity of teachers and administrators; strengthening monitoring and evaluation to provide more targeted support to schools; creating mechanisms to mobilize more resources to meet educational needs.
It also targets critical areas necessary to build the capacity of the key emerging reform agencies, namely the National Education Inspectorate, the Jamaica Teaching Council, the National Education Trust and regional educational authorities.
Critical to the loan disbursement is that the project must disburse the funds against specific targets, which have already been agreed on with Government.
These agreed targets will assist in the monitoring of the agencies’ progress in achieving individual and collective goals, while advancing the Transformation Programme.
The agreement continues the World Banks partnership with the Education Sector over forty (40) years, and is the tenth in the series of loans which total, cumulatively, US$182 million.