Challenges Facing Education in Turkey

Delivered well, education – along with the human capital it generates – benefits individuals and societies. Specifically, with the expansion of the middle class, demand for higher education and skills are increasing.

Since the lockdown in over 188 countries due to COVID-19, tertiary education institutions have had to move swiftly toward online and remote provision of education services as well as of administrative procedures including enrolments and graduations to ensure continuity of teaching and learning. This transition was comparatively easy for those players and countries that had invested in digitalization; others that had seen decreasing investment are facing significant difficulties in ensuring continuity of operations.

This goes beyond digitalization in the narrower sense and also applies to issues like student financing and private sector investment in tertiary education and vocational training institutes for remote learning and new teaching models. Further, pre-existing gender inequalities including unequal access to digital learning and the burden of unpaid care on women’s participation in tertiary education have been exacerbated due to the pandemic. Therefore, education financing will have to be channeled in a manner that ensures education institutions are able to redress these imbalances.

The Upstream Project

Working Upstream entails both identifying reforms that will unlock more private investment and creating projects that we will offer to potential investors.

The overall objective of this project is to create avenues for IFC to finance quality, affordable tertiary education in emerging markets through existing and/or new FI clients then through them IFC could reach the smaller, quality players which will have a cascading effect on the education sector, improving learning outcomes. 

The main objectives of this project are to understand:

Demand side analysis

• Market constraints and opportunities for education financing in the private education market (to be done along with specific universities, TVETs and Ed Techs)
• Based on the above, select the sub-segment (universities, TVETs and Ed Techs) with the most demand to be financed for each country, identify relevant key stakeholders in the sub-segment, and estimate the size of the market

Supply-side analysis

• Existing supply-side financing structures, their terms and availability to different segments
• Identify what are the market constraints and barriers hindering the supply side (FIs including banks, NBFIs, education finance companies and universities) to provide education financing to the students

Market gaps (Financing, information)

• Based on the demand and supply side analysis, estimate the size of the financing gaps for the relevant sector in each country
• Identify the type of information FIs have and what information would help lenders reinforce their credit analysis for the private education market (especially when it comes to delinquency management and better security)
• Analyze what the macroeconomic and policy barriers that prevent the financing of the education market from growing are

Potential financing solutions

• Explore financing solutions for the most promising sector idnetified (for universities/ TVETs/ Ed Techs and/or students)