Education is our weapon of choice

July 18 is Nelson Mandela International Day, a celebration of Mandela’s work and that of his charitable organizations. Education is a key part of this message for positive change. Going to school is about more than developing skills: it is also the path to peace, as encapsulated in Mandela’s famous maxim: “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

While president of South Africa, Mandela identified education as a pivotal tool for nation-building and reconciliation. Education continues to offer the potential for segregated communities to focus on common goals in South Africa and beyond. It is the key to combat inequality, reduce poverty, tackle preventable deadly diseases, and promote all Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Nelson Mandela, addressing the UN General Assembly in 1999
Credit: Eskinder Debebe / UN Photo

Nelson Mandela was the first in his family to go to school – imagine if he had never had the chance! Our recent policy paper showed that 58 million children were out of school in 2012. Nearly half of those will probably never step foot in a classroom. Among these children are potential world leaders who will not have this chance because they are denied an education.

For sub-Saharan Africa, home to over half of the world’s out-of-school children, Mandela’s call for education is even closer to home. One in five primary school age children in the region have either never been to school or left before completing their primary education. Of the 30 million children out of school, 16 million are girls.

Children still battling to go to school

Sita*, 12 years old, has been living in a makeshift camp for internally displaced people in Sevaré, central Mali, for nine months. She fled her hometown of Gao
when the fighting began in her village and her school was attacked.

A school is supposed to be a safe place for children to learn. It is difficult to imagine that children would be forced to run away from school for fear of attack, much less callously targeted, but this is exactly what happened to Sita, a 12-year-old Malian, and Motasem, a 16-year-old Syrian, whose education was uprooted by fighting. Sita now lives in a makeshift camp for internally displaced people in Sevaré, central Mali, while Motasem is a refugee in Lebanon. They do not know whether they can ever return to school.

To mark the 16^th birthday of Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban as she was on the way to school in Pakistan in October 2012, we have released a new paper today, ‘Children battling to go to school’, in partnership with Save the Children, to show the extent of the crisis these children are facing. The paper shows that Malala, Sita and Motasem, are not alone: 28.5 million children in conflict-affected zones are unable to go to school. These children now make up 50% of those denied an education, up from 42% in 2008, figures that we calculated for the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education.

The progress in getting children into school over the past few years – however slow –has clearly not reached children in conflict-affected countries. The longer these children remain out of school, the lower the probability of them ever returning to school.  As conflicts become protracted these children risk becoming a lost generation.

Of the 28.5 million primary school age children out of school in conflict-affected countries, almost half (12.6 million) live in sub-Saharan Africa, 5.3 million live in South and West Asia, and 4 million live in the Arab States. The majority – 95% – live in low and lower middle income countries. Girls, who make up 55% of the total, are the worst affected, as they are often victims of rape and other sexual violence that accompanies armed conflict.

As we analysed in depth in the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education, countries embroiled in conflict are often overlooked in the international aid structure. The situation has worsened in recent years. In 2012, education accounted for just 1.4% of humanitarian aid, down from 2% in 2009. These funds meet only around a quarter of the amount needed, the largest gap registered for any humanitarian sector, leaving a huge funding deficiency of $221 million.

Supporting Malala’s education fight to get all girls into school

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban last year on her return from school, will celebrate her 16^th birthday on Friday by delivering to the United Nations a set of education demands prepared by young people. Sadly, Malala is far from alone in having to fight for access to education: 31 million girls of primary school age and 34 million of lower secondary school age are out of school.

Slow progress today in getting all girls into school will have lifelong effects: one in four young women in developing countries have not completed primary school (compared with one in six young men), and two-thirds of the 774 million illiterate adults in the world are women.

These numbers are sobering, especially since educating girls is one of the best investments we can make. In addition to the many economic, social and health benefits that education brings, a child born to a mother who can read is 50% more likely to survive past age 5 than one born to an illiterate mother. Educated girls are more likely to marry later and have fewer children, lowering the risks involved with teenage pregnancy, reducing population burdens on the environment and speeding the “demographic transition” to a stable population with low birth and mortality rates.

UN 2013 MDG Report: despite major progress, greater efforts are needed

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

The UN’s 2013 Millennium Development Goal report highlights the gains made so far in achieving the MDGs, but also describes the major challenges that remain. As the report notes, the world is not on track to reach the goal of universal primary education by 2015. Despite a significant reduction in the number of out-of-school children – from 102 million in 2000 to 57 million in 2011 – progress has slowed in the last few years and inequalities remain high.

In monitoring progress toward universal primary education, the MDG report looks at several related challenges, including early school leaving and literacy. It makes the important point that 25% of children who enter primary school leave early, a rate that has not changed since 2000. As our recent policy paper also showed, more than one-third of students in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia will not complete primary school.

In addition, youth illiteracy remains a major challenge: according to the MDG report, 123 million young people are still unable to read or write. According to the EFA Global Monitoring Report team’s own analysis, many children can spend more than 4 years in school and still not emerge literate. Clearly, greater efforts are needed not only to get children into school, but also to make sure that students stay and learn.

One portion of the report needs some clarification, however. The MDG report suggests that gender parity in education has been nearly reached in developing regions overall. This is misleading. When taking a closer look, the report shows that many countries are far from this goal: 36 countries have not achieved gender parity in primary education, with girls at a disadvantage in 30 of them. Gender parity at the secondary level is in a worse situation, with 61 countries off target.

Inequalities are even more striking when considering other circumstances, such as family income or where a child lives. In Ethiopia, Haiti and Yemen, 88% of the poorest young women have not completed primary school, while nearly all rich urban males in the same countries have. It’s important not to give misleading information on gender parity in education: progress has been made, but much work remains to be done.

A final note: the MDG report draws attention to the role of the Learning Metrics Task Force in addressing the global learning crisis, but neglects to recognize the contribution of many other global initiatives. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is expanding its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) model for developing countries, which will make a key contribution to measuring and tracking learning, and will be a crucial tool for policy-makers as they seek to identify solutions. The Global Partnership for Education has a key role to play in working with countries to strengthen the quality of their education systems. And last but not least, the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2013-14 on teaching and learning will address the extent to which children from disadvantaged groups are missing out on learning opportunities. The Report will contain evidence-based recommendations for policy-makers to show how investing wisely in teachers is vital to extend learning for all.

BRIEFLY: UNICEF calls for sustainable development post-2015 to focus on children

UNICEF makes a compelling case for putting children at the centre of the post-2015 sustainable development framework in a new paper, ‘Sustainable development starts and ends with safe, healthy and well-educated children’. Investing in children’s well-being and learning is the most effective way to ensure long-term sustainability, the report argues. In addition, sustainable communities help children learn by providing safer, healthier environments.

Children often fare the worst when communities face social and environmental challenges, from water shortages to violent conflicts. As we have discussed recently on this blog, safe and healthy living conditions are not only basic human rights, but also particularly crucial for children, who need a conflict-free environment and access to nutritious food and clean water in order to learn. When children are prevented from learning, the negative effects are long-lasting not only for children themselves, but also for their communities and society as a whole.

OECD report takes the pulse of education worldwide

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

Which country devotes the highest proportion of its public spending to education?* And which country has the highest percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with upper secondary education?** The answers to these and many other vital questions about education policy can be found in Education at a Glance 2013, the annual education report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The report shows that many countries are still struggling with youth unemployment, and looks at the relationship between education levels and employment. Only 4.8% of people with tertiary degrees in OECD countries were unemployed in 2011, while 12.6% of people who had not completed secondary education were unemployed, according to the report. The OECD countries that provide vocational programmes to help young people learn skills targeted for the labour market are doing better, however: Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Luxembourg have kept youth unemployment below 8% by providing vocational programmes for a high number of graduates. These findings show that education systems need to better prepare students by giving them the skills needed for work, as we highlighted in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report.

To provide the kind of good-quality education that prepares students for employment, schools first need good teachers – and one way to attract good teachers is to pay them well. The OECD report provides an interesting insight into how different countries value their teachers, by comparing teachers’ salaries with salaries in other occupations that require the same level of education.

Sports vs. schools: Brazilians protest government spending

By Nicole Comforto, EFA Global Monitoring Report

Brazil has made great progress in improving its education system in recent years, but the current street protests provide a dramatic reminder that wide inequalities in education and society still need to be tackled. Protesters across the nation are calling for the government to prioritize better services including education, health care and transportation over building football stadiums for the World Cup.

“I love soccer, but we need schools”
– protester quoted by Al-Jazeera English
Photo by Tânia Rêgo/ABr

As with recent protests in Turkey, the Occupy movement in the United States and student demonstrations in Chile, the protests in Brazil are largely driven by students and better-educated youth who are angry over government policies that benefit the rich. Education is often cited by protesters as a key issue, and for good reason: the quality of one’s education profoundly influences employment, income and opportunities throughout life.

Brazil’s education system is a complex case: as we highlighted in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report, the government has reduced educational inequalities significantly since the late 1990s. However, in many cases the reforms have not gone far enough, and many of the poorest still lack access to quality schools.

Education invisible in the G8 communiqué

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

Leaders at the G8 meeting in Northern Ireland this week made progress on many important issues including international trade agreements, tax systems, transparency and terrorism. It is extremely worrying, however, that education was not mentioned at all in the 24-page communiqué from the meeting. As a vital component of tackling global poverty, education should be central to the G8’s goals.

The communiqué highlighted growth and jobs as the G8’s top priority. However, there was no mention of education’s role in solving the youth unemployment problem, despite the fact that one in five young people in developing countries have not completed primary school and lack the skills needed for work.

The meeting pledged US$1.5 billion in humanitarian aid for Syria, which will help to provide education along with other necessities including food and medical care, according to the UK government’s website. But education’s absence from the communiqué does not offer hope that much of this amount will go to schooling, which typically gets a bad deal in emergencies: as the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report found, only 2% of humanitarian aid is spent on education. As a result, millions of children in conflict-affected zones are denied their right to learn.

Is it too much to ask for free quality education for all?

By Antonia Wulff, coordinator at Education International

Education is an inalienable human right – but across the world this right is being undermined by the impacts of inequality, a lack of political commitment and inadequate investment in education. We need to give education its rightful place at the heart of international efforts to improve people’s lives – and current discussions on a new global development framework offer a chance to do so.

Education International (EI) – which represents 30 million teachers and education employees worldwide – welcomes the recognition by the UN High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda of education as a priority in its own right as well as a necessity for reaching other goals. The inclusion of pre-primary and vocational education as well as universal access to lower-secondary education signals a clear ambition to go beyond the MDG framework. However, EI is concerned about the suggested targets being focused on learning outcomes, notably reading, writing and counting, as well as skills for work, and the narrow approach to quality education that these reflect.

The GMR’s online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

Drawing on its knowledge of the experiences of educators, and of the challenges faced in classrooms every day, EI is focusing on three interlinked areas of education where a renewed commitment from governments and the international community is desperately needed.

First, the full achievement of the right to education implies equity. Unequal educational outcomes often reflect deeper inequalities in society that governments and international organizations must address to ensure quality education. The post-2015 framework must overcome all forms of discrimination, including multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, with particular attention to gender.

Spotlight on Africa: who’s going to school?

This Sunday’s Day of the African Child focuses on “eliminating harmful social and cultural practices affecting children” – so it’s an ideal time to reflect on the region’s progress toward universal primary schooling. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than half of the world’s out-of-school children: 22% of children of primary school age in sub-Saharan Africa have either never attended school, or left before completing.

The EFA Global Monitoring Report and the UNESCO Institute of Statistics released new data this week showing that the number of children out of school in sub-Saharan Africa has remained at about 30 million over the last five years, of which 16 million are girls. This stalling of progress is partly because there is unfulfilled demand as the region’s school-age population is increasing. It’s not all bad news, however: some countries are making significant progress towards universal primary education.

Student in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
(Photo: Petterik Wiggers/Panos Pictures London UK © UNESCO)

Six of the 10 countries with the largest number of children out of school are in sub-Saharan Africa. Of these, four have over 1 million out of school. This list is not exhaustive: other sub-Saharan African countries, such as Somalia, are also struggling to provide primary education to every child, but lack data on their out-of-school populations. Let’s look at this in more detail.

Strong progress: Ghana and Ethiopia

Ghana has almost halved its out-of-school numbers in recent years from 1.1 million in 2006 to 0.6 million in 2011. As a result, it no longer figures on the list of the 10 countries with the most children out of school.