https://www.polity.org.za
Deepening Democracy through Access to Information
Home / Recommendations RSS ← Back
Close

Email this article

separate emails by commas, maximum limit of 4 addresses

Sponsored by

Close

Article Enquiry

Missed Opportunity: how could funds lost to tax incentives in Africa be used to fill the education finance gap?


Close

Embed Video

Missed Opportunity: how could funds lost to tax incentives in Africa be used to fill the education finance gap?

 Missed Opportunity: how could funds lost to tax incentives in Africa be used to fill the education finance gap?

14th August 2017

ARTICLE ENQUIRY      SAVE THIS ARTICLE      EMAIL THIS ARTICLE

Font size: -+

  • Missed Opportunity: how could funds lost to tax incentives in Africa be used to fill the education finance gap?
    Download
    0.96 MB
Sponsored by

How much revenue do African governments lose from providing tax incentives, such as giving companies tax holidays and exemptions on paying taxes on import duties and value added tax? And if these precious national budget resources were set aside to fund quality, public education instead, how much greater could education spending be?

These questions are pressing today, as in sub-Saharan Africa alone, 34 million of children (including 18.6 million girls) aged 6 to 11 are out of school. Millions more, receive poor quality education, with low quality of teaching, poor sanitation facilities, unsafe environments and inadequate classroom equipment, making for poor learning outcomes.

Advertisement

Meanwhile, many of our African governments are failing to invest enough in education to ensure quality schooling for all children and are yet to meet targets they committed to internationally, of allocating 6% of GDP and 20% of total public expenditure to education. Governments need to urgently increase the size and effectiveness of their education budgets.

We believe much of the resources are already available to do this. Our research suggests that:

Advertisement

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa may be losing an estimated US$38.6 billion a year, or 2.4% of their GDP, to tax incentives. This is equivalent to nearly half (47%) of their current education spending. Having a much clearer pro-poor policy for granting incentives and using some of these resources to fund education could provide a much-needed and significant boost to education budgets across Africa.

Report by ActionAid

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE      SAVE THIS ARTICLE ARTICLE ENQUIRY

To subscribe email subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za or click here
To advertise email advertising@creamermedia.co.za or click here

Comment Guidelines

About

Polity.org.za is a product of Creamer Media.
www.creamermedia.co.za

Other Creamer Media Products include:
Engineering News
Mining Weekly
Research Channel Africa

Read more

Subscriptions

We offer a variety of subscriptions to our Magazine, Website, PDF Reports and our photo library.

Subscriptions are available via the Creamer Media Store.

View store

Advertise

Advertising on Polity.org.za is an effective way to build and consolidate a company's profile among clients and prospective clients. Email advertising@creamermedia.co.za

View options

Email Registration Success

Thank you, you have successfully subscribed to one or more of Creamer Media’s email newsletters. You should start receiving the email newsletters in due course.

Our email newsletters may land in your junk or spam folder. To prevent this, kindly add newsletters@creamermedia.co.za to your address book or safe sender list. If you experience any issues with the receipt of our email newsletters, please email subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za