Fee waivers, exemptions, and scholarships

From the perspective of safety nets, the main objective of fee waiver, exemption, and scholarship programs is to provide poor people with the financial resources to use health 

Fees of some sort are also widespread in the education sector, even for primary-level education. Fees may be official or unofficial and may cover tuition, textbooks, compulsory uniforms, community contributions for teachers salaries (in Sub-Saharan Africa) and membership in parent-teacher associations (often used to enhance teachers meager salaries), and/or other school-based activities. An informal survey of 79 World Bank client countries shows that fees of some sort were levied for public primary schools in all but 2 of the countries (Algeria and Uruguay) surveyed (Kattan and Burnett 2004).  

The two main types of programs discussed here are fee waivers and exemptions for health 

Fee waivers and scholarships for schooling include a number of forms of assistance to households to meet the costs of schooling, such as stipends, education vouchers, targeted bursaries, and interventions related to tuition and textbooks. The level of benefits ranges from covering some or all of the direct costs of schooling such as fees (as in Zimbabwe and several other African countries), uniforms (India), books (Indonesia), or transport (Colombia) to compensate for a significant share of the opportunity costs of students time. 

FOR PROTECTION AND PROMOTION THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF EFFECTIVE SAFETY NETS 

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Political support for fee waivers cannot be assessed in isolation from the existence of user fees. On the one hand, fees for health care are highly controversial (see Hutton 2004 for a description of the establishment of fees and the need for exemptions), and waiver systems are often not thought to be the solution in relation to health care. On the other hand, fee waivers and scholarships for students are popular, especially among international development agencies, because health and schooling provide the link between short-mn transfer benefits and long-run human capital formation. Therefore countries want to use the fees to improve the quality of the services while finding ways not to exclude the poor. 

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