The G8 must renew its commitment to basic education worldwide

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

Primary education is a fundamental building block of lives and livelihoods – and of wider development. But progress toward universal primary education has stagnated, there are still 57 million children out of school, and aid to basic education has dropped for the first time since 2002, as was revealed in a policy paper published this week by the EFA Global Monitoring Report and the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Leaders of the G8 countries have a chance to do something about that by making a strong commitment to basic education at their summit in Northern Ireland next week.

The fall in aid is particularly bad news for sub-Saharan Africa, home to over half of the world’s out-of-school children: between 2010 and 2011, G8 donors reduced their spending on basic education in the region.

It is especially worrying that aid to basic education to sub-Saharan Africa from the World Bank’s International Development Association – to which G8 countries contribute – has declined dramatically since 2004: in 2011 the IDA gave less than a quarter of the aid to basic education to the region that it gave in 2002.

Reductions in aid jeopardize schooling for millions of children

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, and Albert Motivans, head of Education Statistics at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Millions of children may be denied access to school due to reductions in aid, according to new data released today in a new policy paper from the EFA Global Monitoring Report team and the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS). The paper shows that progress towards universal primary education has stagnated, while international aid to basic education has fallen for the first time since 2002. Less than 1,000 days before the 2015 deadline to achieve universal primary education, 57 million children remain out of school.

Number of out-of-school children by region, 2000–2011

After pledging to achieve universal primary education at the World Education Forum in  2000, the world made great progress in reducing the number of out-of-school children from 102 million to 70.5 million. Progress stagnated in 2005, however, and out-of-school numbers dropped only slightly from 59 million in 2010 to 57 million in 2011. If this rate continues, we will be far from our goal in 2015, as highlighted in a video presenting the latest data.

The greatest progress has been made in South and West Asia, where the number of out-of-school children has fallen from 38 million to 12 million. Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, continues to face significant challenges: the region has nearly 30 million out-of-school children, only 3 million fewer than in 2005. One in five primary school-age children in the region have either never been to school or left before completing their primary education.

Africa’s resource wealth could end illiteracy and build an educated middle class

By Caroline Kende-Robb, executive director of the Africa Progress Panel

A new report from the Africa Progress Panel shows that mineral wealth could transform education in Sub-Saharan Africa, building on the findings of the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, which showed that 17 resource-rich countries could put another 11 million children into school.

The Africa Progress Panel is a group of distinguished individuals, chaired by Kofi Annan, whose objective is to track and encourage progress in Africa and assess opportunities and threats to Africa’s development. A month ago, the Panel published the 2013 Africa Progress Report, Equity in Extractives: Stewarding Africa’s natural resources for all, which outlines the opportunities and challenges linked to the exploitation of Africa’s mineral resources.

While much of the media coverage of the report naturally focused on the losses to African economies from asset undervaluation, tax avoidance and shady deals, I think the opportunities Africa’s mineral wealth provide for the future are the really exciting finding of the report.

Over the past decade, Africa’s economies have been riding the crest of a global commodity wave. Extractive industries have emerged as a powerful engine of economic growth. Surging demand for natural resources in China and other emerging markets has pushed export prices to new highs – and the boom shows no sign of abating. Africa’s petroleum, gas and mineral resources have become a powerful magnet for foreign investment. And this is only the beginning. With new exploration revealing much larger reserves than were previously known, Africa stands to reap a natural resource windfall.

High-Level Panel post-2015 roadmap: Close, but still some way to go

By Pauline Rose, director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report

The just-released Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda is to be commended for putting forward a clear roadmap for the way ahead. Feeding into the on-going processes, the EFA Global Monitoring Report team made recommendations for post-2015 education goals. Here is my assessment on how close the high-level panel’s report comes to meeting our expectations, using a red/amber/green rating (off track/at risk/on track):

Addressing equity in education: green/amber

On track: The report clearly identifies equity as a guiding principle, and it is mentioned specifically in some education targets.

At risk: The overarching goal and all education targets need to include equity explicitly, and equity needs to be put at the heart of the rationale for the education goals.

A strong thread running through the report is the need to ensure no one is left behind this time. It is reassuring to see this reflected in two of the four proposed targets for education – that every child, regardless of circumstance, completes primary school able to read, write and count well enough to meet minimum standards, and that every child, regardless of circumstance, has access to lower secondary education.

However, two of the targets fall short of specifying equity –access to pre-school, and skills for young and adult women and men. The document does pay attention to marginalized groups throughout, and the annex on targets and indicators clearly specifies that it is not enough just to measure average trends, but that indicators need to be disaggregated. But we need to remember the lesson learnt from 2000: the Millennium Declaration mentioned equity as a principle but it was subsequently sidelined because it wasn’t incorporated in the wording of goals, targets and indicators.

BRIEFLY: Children with disabilities should have an opportunity to learn

This year’s State of the World’s Children report by UNICEF focuses on the many challenges that children with disabilities face in accessing their rights to school and other public services, and proposed solutions to ensure that students with disabilities can realize their full potential.

The report discusses the need to gather better data on children with disabilities. Many governments do not collect data on children with disabilities. Internationally recognized standards for disability are still being developed, and what is considered “normal” functioning can vary according to cultural values. Often reporting is left to parents, who may not have the knowledge they need to accurately diagnose their children, or may fail to report children with disabilities due to social stigma.

Despite the lack of accurate data, it is clear that a great number of children – as many as 93 million according to one global estimate from 2004 – require extra services and attention to access their full rights. The report identifies a number of challenges that students with disabilities face including the lack of adequate facilities, supplies and services necessary for learning. In a study of surveys in 51 countries by the World Health Organization, only 51% of boys with disabilities complete primary school, as opposed to 61% of all boys. The figures for girls were even more dismal: 42% of girls with disabilities completed primary school, instead of 53%.

The 2010 EFA Global Monitoring Report discussed how disability leads to marginalization in education. In Burkina Faso, for example, children with disabilities were two and half times less likely to be in school than other children. The type of disability also affected the child’s likelihood to attend school: approximately 40% of children aged 7-12 with physical impairments attended school, compared with only 10% of children with hearing or speech impairments.

UNICEF’s report recommends a rights-based approach to help children with disabilities achieve their full potential. Here are some of the key recommendations related to education:

• Provide school facilities that encourage full participation for students with disabilities, such as wide ramps at entrances and accessible toilets and sanitation facilities.
• Ensure that students have access to necessary supplies and services to help with learning such as prosthetics, hearing aids and sign language interpreters.
• Integrate children with disabilities into schools and classrooms instead of separating them into different schools.
• Enhance awareness of disability among teachers and school administrators in order to fight discrimination.

UNICEF’s report provides an important reminder that learning is not simply a matter of getting children into classrooms, but also of ensuring that they can learn once they are there. Children with disabilities often need extra resources and attention in order to learn at school. We must ensure that these needs are provided so that children can access their basic human rights and become contributing members of society.

BRIEFLY: Malnutrition prevents children from learning

A report released this week by Save the Children UK shows how much malnutrition harms children’s chances of learning. In a study conducted by Young Lives in four countries, malnourished children scored 7% lower in mathematics tests, were 19% less likely to be able to read at age 8, and were 13% less likely to be in the appropriate grade for their age than those who are well nourished.

Nourishment during the mother’s pregnancy and until the child’s second birthday is the most critical period for structural brain development, as the report notes. Adequate nutrition for pregnant mothers and young children is vital to enable children to learn later in life.

The report, which looks at how much malnutrition harms a child’s overall life chances, shows that investing in nutrition at an early age has considerable economic benefits, improving learning, job prospects and earnings. According to other studies, children who were malnourished during early childhood went on to earn as adults as much as 20% less than those who were well nourished. The report estimates that while current childhood malnutrition could cost the global economy $125 billion when today’s children grow up, every $1 invested in nutrition now could bring economic benefits worth more than $100.

These findings confirm analysis in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report showing that investment in learning – through strengthened health and education systems – provides long-term benefits for individuals and societies. Our report found that child malnutrition underlies more than half of all deaths among young children. Progress in early childhood nutrition is improving globally, but requires a stronger commitment and greater investment to reach the 6.9 million children who are still malnourished.

The Scaling Up Nutrition movement, discussed in Save the Children’s report, aims to fill the financing gap for child nutrition. The G8 leaders’ summit in June, co-hosted by the UK prime minister and the government of Brazil, will seek high-level commitments to help 16 countries reduce malnutrition. Given our report’s finding that education is an important way of combatting malnutrition, it is vital that these commitments include increasing support to education.

Read the full report: Food for Thought

Sustainable development begins with education

By Pauline Rose, director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report

As the post-2015 goal-setting process continues, education has increasingly been discussed as not only a development goal in its own right, but also a key way of reaching other development goals. And for good reason: a country that provides free access to quality education for all its citizens is far more likely to reduce poverty, promote economic growth, lower child and maternal mortality and achieve social inclusion. Two recent consultations highlight the importance of education and learning.

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

The recent draft Executive Summary for the United Nations World We Want Post-2015 Global Consultation on Education positions education as both a human right and the foundation for development. The summary, which is open for comments until May 27, calls for new goals to focus not just on access, but also on quality of learning. The focus on quality is welcome: as we found in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report, education systems must address the fact that 250 million young people – including many who are in school – lack basic literacy and numeracy. The World We Want summary identifies the crucial role that teachers play in providing quality education, which will be a major topic in our upcoming 2013/2014 EFA Global Monitoring Report, on teaching and learning for development

The draft Executive Summary does an excellent job of framing the urgent need for equitable education. However, ultimately a clearer goal will need to be defined to ensure that progress toward quality Education for All is clear and measurable. The Executive Summary uses the proposed goal from the expert meeting in Dakar several months ago, “Equitable quality lifelong education and learning for all”, as its proposed overarching education goal. As I mentioned in an earlier post after the Dakar meeting, the terms “lifelong education” is open to different interpretations, and thus lacks the clarity necessary for the international community to adopt and measure progress toward this goal. We must ensure that post-2015 education goals are clearly and simply stated, measurable and have equity at their heart.

Pakistan’s elections highlight education challenges

By Nicole Comforto, EFA Global Monitoring Report

The candidates in Pakistan’s election last week frequently cited quality education as one of their top priorities and committed to increase government spending on education, for good reason. Pakistan has the world’s second-highest number of children who are not in school and the education system faces a wide range of challenges, including wide inequalities and poor funding, infrastructure and teacher training.

Education is such a major concern for Pakistan that in 2011 the government declared an “Education Emergency” and a task force produced a report highlighting the urgent need for educational reform. In a recent poll conducted by Al Jazeera, voters listed education as their most important election issue.

Pakistan’s newly elected government – taking over after the country’s first transition from one democratically elected government to another – faces a number of major challenges in the education sector. Here are just a few of the most pressing issues that require urgent reform:

Learning: There are currently 5.1 million children out of school in Pakistan, over 3 million of whom are girls. In addition, many of those in school are not learning the basics due to lack of infrastructure and teacher training. Teacher absenteeism is also a major problem. In total, 49.5 million adults are illiterate, the third-largest number globally.

Turning the ‘resource curse’ into a blessing for education

Maximizing the income from natural resources such as oil and minerals could provide an education to 86% out-of-school children and 42% of out-of-school adolescents in 17 developing countries, according to calculations by the EFA Global Monitoring Report team. Our new policy paper, ‘Turning the ‘resource curse’ into a blessing for education’, shows that these 17 countries could make huge progress on closing remaining education gaps before 2015 by managing their resource revenues better and devoting a significant share to sending children to school.

Several of the countries that are furthest away from achieving the Education for All goals are rich in oils and minerals. However, they have failed to generate enough revenue from their natural resources, have not managed them efficiently, have not struck beneficial deals with extractive companies or have not invested revenue in productive sectors like education. As a result they are losing out on funds which could help reach Education for All and bring sustainable change to their countries.

Released a few days before the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, our new policy paper shows the potential of these natural resources to raise funds for social good. In all 17 countries, total extra funding for education from well-managed natural resource revenue could reach US$5 billion a year – two and a half times the amount that these countries received in aid to education in 2010. Ten of the 17 countries, including Ghana, Tanzania, D.R. Congo and Zambia, would be able to use their additional funds to send all their children to school.

Here are a few examples of the revenue that natural resources could bring to education:

• In Uganda, following recent oil discoveries, the government’s total budget is set to almost double by 2016. This could lead to a doubling of the education budget and send all primary and lower secondary school-aged children to school.
• In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the value of copper and gold this year is expected to be worth more than double its value in 2008, enough to double their education budget and almost achieve universal primary education.
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo receives less than 10% of the income from its minerals with the remaining 90% going to extracting companies. Striking a better deal with these companies and keeping more as government revenue could likely send all of its children to primary school.

The urgency of reaching out-of-school children for economic and social development

Nicholas Burnett is managing director at Results for Development Institute, where he manages the Education portfolio.

New analysis from the Results for Development Institute sheds light on the cost to countries’ economies from out-of-school children. Among the most alarming revelations is that, if unaddressed, out-of-school children can cost as much as 7% of a country’s GDP, depending on the country and the size of the out-of-school population.

Great strides have been made towards realizing universal primary education, with the global number of out-of-school children declining from over 100 million in 2000 to 61 million in 2010, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Still, the most recent Education for All Global Monitoring Report  reveals that progress in reducing the number of out-of-school children has stalled in some countries, notably in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Now is an opportune time to reconsider the wide-ranging benefits of primary education and the economic costs borne by countries with large out-of-school child populations.

At this week’s High Level Strategic Meeting to Accelerate Efforts to Reach Out Of School Children, held in Doha by Educate A Child (EAC), I presented a paper (“A Moral Obligation, An Economic Priority: The Urgency of Enrolling Out-of-School Children,” commissioned by EAC) that explores these two aspects of the global out-of-school children problem.