In late 2010,USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah commissioned a new Agency-wide Education Strategy to ensure that USAIDís global education investments would be informed by recent Presidential policy guidance; grounded in the most current evidence-based analysis of educational effectiveness; and aimed at maximizing the impact and sustainability of development results. This 2011-2015 Education Strategy was
created to reflect these core principles.
This Education Strategy is premised on the development hypothesis that education is both foundational to human development and critically linked to broad-based economic growth and democratic governance. Research has demonstrated that education raises individual incomes and, in an enabling environment, can contribute significantly to economic growth. Education helps ensure that growth is broad-based and reaches
the poorest. Through its impact on economic growth, education helps catalyze transitions to democracy and helps preserve robust democratic governance. Education also helps improve health outcomes. Access to education is a crucial precondition to educational impact, but what matters most thereafter is the quality of education. Because of these important links to other powerful drivers of development, educational investments should be understood as dynamic and transformational levers of change.