Public Expenditure Tracking Survey in Education 1996
Uganda, 1996
Identification
UGA_1996_PETSE_v01_M
Public Expenditure Tracking Survey in Education 1996
| Name | Country code |
|---|---|
| Uganda | UGA |
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).
The Uganda Public Expenditure Tracking Survey 1996 was the first study that applied PETS tools to evaluate the flow of public resources to intended destinations.
The principal motivation for this study was the observation that since 1987 public spending on basic services had substantially increased in Uganda, while several officially reported outcome and output indicators remained stagnant.
The hypothesis for the study was that actual service delivery is much worse than budgetary allocations would imply because public funds do not reach the intended facilities as expected, and hence outcomes cannot improve. Reasons for facilities not receiving the funds could range from competing priorities at various levels of government to misuse of public funds. To test this hypothesis, budgets and actual spending were compared in two selected sectors, primary education and health care.
As adequate public accounts have not been available in many African countries, including Uganda, a field survey of schools and clinics was carried out to collect actual spending data.
Documented here is the Public Expenditure Tracking Survey conducted in Uganda education sector. Researchers gathered data covering the period 1991-1995 from 250 government-aided primary schools in 19 districts. Apart from school income and expenditure, the objective of the survey was to collect data on student enrollment.
The survey famously found that during 1991-1995, the primary schools, on average, received only 13 percent of capitation grants allocated to them by the central government. (The capitation grant for non-wage expenditure was a payment per student enrolled and was viewed as a matching (50 percent) government contribution against the mandated tuition fees which had to be paid by parents). The bulk of the school capitation grants was captured by local officials (and politicians).
Following the dissemination of the findings of the study in Uganda, the government has taken a number of immediate steps to improve its performance by increasing the information flow within the system:
- Monthly transfers of public funds for wage and non-wage expenditure to districts are now regularly published in main newspapers and broadcasted by radio;
- Publication of disbursements of donor funds by district and schools in local newspapers;
- Districts are requested to pay the recently introduced conditional grant for primary education on individual school accounts. The central government's, donors' and NGOs' monitoring effort has increased substantially;
- School based procurement has replaced the highly inefficient central supply of construction and other materials;
- Measures to enhance accountability and dissemination of accounting information were incorporated in the 1997 Local Government Act. The previous statute had no such provisions;
- A renewed effort is underway to put in place basic accounting systems for the public sector, including districts.
The success of Uganda PETS 1996 encouraged researchers to apply PETS techniques in other countries to trace public funds flow and indentify possible delays or leakages.
Sample survey data [ssd]
Scope
The scope of the study includes:
- General Information
- Income/Receipts
- Total Teachers Salary and Allowances
- Expenditure
- Development Expenditure
- Number of Students' Textbooks
- Number of Teachers' Textbooks.
| Topic | Vocabulary |
|---|---|
| Education | World Bank |
| Primary Education | World Bank |
Coverage
Districts: Kampala; Arua, Moyo (Northwest); Apac, Gulu (North); Soroti, Moroto, Kapchorwa (Northeast); Jinja, Kamuli, Pallisa (East); Mukono, Mubende, Kiboga (Central); Bushenyi, Kabale (Southwest); and Kabarole, Hoima, Bundibugyo (West).
Producers and sponsors
| Name |
|---|
| World Bank |
| Economic Policy Research Centre, Makerere University, Kampala |
| Name |
|---|
| Swedish Development Agency |
Sampling
For the sample selection, the country was first divided into regions. In order to bring out regional differences more clearly, the traditional four regions (North, East, West and Central) were reconfigured into seven regions: Northwest, North, Northeast, East, Central, Southwest and West. Kampala was treated as a separate region because it enjoys many advantages over the rest of the country. The 39 districts were then arrayed into three groups, based on the fiscal year in which a particular district first received a separate budget vote under the decentralization program that commenced in 1993. The objective was to pick one district per region in each successive phase of decentralization. In practice, only two districts were selected from the smaller regions. After some other minor adjustments, the following 19 districts were selected: Kampala; Arua, Moyo (Northwest); Apac, Gulu (North); Soroti, Moroto, Kapchorwa (Northeast); Jinja, Kamuli, Pallisa (East); Mukono, Mubende, Kiboga (Central); Bushenyi, Kabale (Southwest); and Kabarole, Hoima, Bundibugyo (West). Kiboga, which is a new district, had to be subsequently dropped due to limited data availability.
Bearing in mind the budget constraint for the survey, the number of schools visited in each district was fixed in the range of 10-20. Among the districts selected, Bushenyi had the largest number of primary schools (399 in 1994), while Bundibugyo had the smallest number of schools (59). In the districts with less than 100 government-aided schools the enumerators visited 10 schools. Where the number of schools was between 100 and 200, they visited around 15 schools, and in the districts with more than 200 schools, they visited 20 schools. The primary leaving examinations results, supplemented by information about school facilities, were used as criteria for the selection of schools within a district. Both good and poor performers in terms of examination results were included in the district sample, which was determined in consultation with the district education officer.
Kiboga, which is a new district, had to be subsequently dropped due to limited data availability.
Data collection
| Start | End |
|---|---|
| 1996 | 1996 |
| Name |
|---|
| Management Systems and Economic Consultants Limited |
Enumerators who collected the data from schools were mainly former teachers. Standardized forms were used. In addition, interviewers made qualitative observations to supplement the quantitative data. Enumerators were trained and closely supervised by a local research team to ensure quality and uniformity of data collection and to assess the standard of record keeping in schools.
At the central government level, data were not available on salaries paid to primary school teachers either by district or by school in 1991-1995. The only data available at the time of the survey was the aggregate salary payments, lumping together payments to teachers in primary, secondary and tertiary levels as well as to non-teaching staff.
The intention was to track public spending through the entire delivery system, that is, the central government, districts and schools. The field survey revealed that the district level records for both non-wage and wage spending were even worse than those at the central government level. The quality of available information both on transfers from the center and disbursements to schools was so poor that districts simply had to be excluded from the expenditure tracking exercise.
On the other hand, school records were found to be relatively comprehensive. Presumably parents, who prior to 1997 contributed substantially to school income, demanded financial information and accountability from the school. Therefore a comparison of budgetary allocations and actual spending could be made between the central government outlays for non-wage spending and the equivalent school income.
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_UGA_1996_PETSE_v01_M
| Name | Affiliation | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Antonina Redko | DECDG, World Bank | DDI documentation |
2011-10-21
Metadata version
v01 (October 2011)