Is the World Bank keeping its promise to schoolchildren?

The World Bank made a pledge in 2010 to increase support to basic education by $750 million from 2011 to 2015. This pledge was to make World Bank support to basic education 40 percent higher in the 2011-2015 period than it had been in the preceding five years, 2006-2010.

However, in the last year, there have been some shifting numbers on how the Bank is calculating this increase, so much so that the pledge now actually aims to provide less support to basic education from 2011 to 2015 than it had from 2006 to 2010.

Tony Baker’s recent blog post on the website of the U.S. Chapter of the Global Campaign for Education goes into more detail about the fuzzy math around the Bank’s education pledge. For the full plot twists in this story, see the new RESULTS report Staying the Course? The World Bank’s 2010 Pledge to Basic Education.