Public expenditure tracking surveys in education

Public expenditure tracking surveys (PETS) allow policy makers to diagnose how incentives and accountability systems are working in practice and how they can be improved. Among the results provided by PETS are estimates of leakage, data on the percentage of funds spent at each level of the education hierarchy, descriptions of how funding is targeted among different schools and subpopulations, information on school facilities, teacher and absenteeism, school governance and accountability. This book provides three examples of good practice in using PETS to improve transparency and accountability in managing education resources, and describes the approaches to be used in carrying out the surveys. It presents the experience of Peru, Uganda and Zambia and underlines the importance of sharing the information generated to create incentives for making education systems more efficient. In Uganda, it was possible to reduce the rate of leakage of non-salary expenditures drastically thanks to an information campaign based on a PETS.