By Nicola Winter
22 January 2010 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The international launch of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010 took place Tuesday, 19 January at UN headquarters in New York. The focus of the report this year was “reaching the marginalized” and how to bring basic education to the world’s most forgotten people. Speakers at the launch event included UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, and Kevin Watkins, Director of the Report.
The report showed that while steady progress has been made in improving worldwide education, there is still significant work to be done. The second Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is to guarantee that by 2015, all boys and girls are able to be able to complete primary school education. Currently, there are some 72 million children not enrolled in school. While this number has dropped by 33 million since 1999, the report concludes that at the current pace, the world is set to miss the education MDG by about 56 million children. However, the report also shows that the number of children not enrolled in school is still decreasing, and the gender gap in education is narrowing in many places, with the number of girls out of school decreasing by 4 percent since 2000. Some unexpected countries have also made amazing progress. Tanzania, for example, had one of the highest rates of children not in school in 1997, around 50 percent. Today, Tanzania has a primary education net enrollment of 98 percent, and is on target to achieve the education MDG.
Children learn at a school in Dharamsala, India. Photo by Nicola Winter.
Watkins stated that the main responsibility of increasing global education falls on national governments, and the report puts forth suggestions as to how governments can translate their stated commitments into real action and equal opportunities for education. Some of these include investing more in schools in marginalized areas, like slums, providing incentives for ethnic minorities and girls to enroll in school, and further integrating education into poverty reduction strategies. Bokova supported this, presenting parts of the report that found that “where governments abolish school fees, enrollment surges, [and] where governments build schools close to villages, and hire female teachers, girls benefit.” Yet if the international community is really going to make education available to all, and meet the education MDG, two things are needed: a commitment to inclusion, and political recognition and the prioritization of education by governments.
A commitment to inclusion starts with identifying who exactly is being left behind. This year’s report introduced a new data set, called Deprivation and Marginalization in Education (DME). This seeks to provide governments, policy makers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and researchers with a better picture of who is being excluded from access to education. The report also addresses the impact the global financial crisis has had on efforts to expand education. Bokova said that the crisis could “create a lost generation,” as many donor countries are breaking their education aid commitments. The effects of the financial crisis are hitting the education systems of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) especially hard. For example, spending per student in 2010 in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be 10 percent lower than what was estimated prior to the financial crisis. The speakers at the UN launch event all voiced that governments must be held accountable for the commitments they made in 2000, despite the financial crisis, and Ban asserted: “This crisis was generated entirely in the financial markets of the developed world. It cannot be right that money earmarked for aid to the world’s poorest people should be reduced as a result.”
Tanzania is well-poised to reach the MDGs’ educational goals by 2010. Here a young girl learns at a Step-Up center. Photo by Nicola Winter.
At present, there is an annual $16 billion financing gap between what is being provided and what is needed to achieve universal primary education by 2015. To put this in perspective, $16 billion is less than 2 percent of what the US and UK mobilized for the financial bailout, and 2.25 percent of US military spending in 2008. Therefore, on an international scale, $16 billion is not an unreasonable sum. What is lacking is political will. Watkins told MediaGlobal that education needs to “be put at the center of development,” and if financed sufficiently, would “show real results on the ground,” which would attract more investment. Watkins sited how those working for international health have been more effective in attracting aid and investment, as they have been able to establish health as an integral part of development, such that the effects of the availability of health care, or lack there of, are much more immediately apparent than with education. Watkins followed up saying that if education is lacking, it can be just as detrimental as the lack of healthcare, citing that “child death rates in sub-Saharan Africa are one fifth the number for women who have had secondary education” than for those women with little or no education.
As Ban stated during his opening remarks, “education is a fundamental human right,” not just a privilege of the rich. The international community has the tools to achieve the education MDG by the 2015 deadline, but the political will to do so is lacking, and spurring governments to act remains the greatest challenge.
