Bangladesh faces a skills development challenge

Afsan Chowdhury, senior communications adviser for the non-government organization BRAC, looks at what Bangladesh needs to do to bridge the skills deficit that is revealed in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report. This article was first published in The Daily Star, Bangladesh. 

Education remains a key factor in development now and historically. Studies of institutions show that it’s the educational institutions including the universities that have survived and continued over time. The most advanced countries are also those which have the best universities, by logic the best education systems.

Education and skills are both needed in today’s world and Bangladesh needs to make adequate investment in this regard. Not only should children complete their education but they should also have the necessary skills to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex future.

The report on education and skills training is not a cause for celebration yet. In South and West Asia, over 91 million people aged 15 to 24 have not even completed primary school and don’t have the basic skills for employment and prosperity. “This is equivalent to more than a quarter of the region’s youth population and the greatest number of unskilled young people of any region in the world”, the report says. “One-half of the population in South and West Asia is under 25 years old. As the effects of the global economic crisis continue to be felt, the severe lack of youth skills is more damaging than ever.”

“Few countries in the region are on track to meet the six Education for All goals set in 2000, and some are a long way behind. In South and West Asia, about 13 million are still missing out on primary school and 31 million teenagers are out of secondary school, missing out on vital skills for future employment. There is also a learning crisis: Worldwide, 250 million children of primary school age cannot read or write, whether they are in school or not.”

2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report findings on skills training:

• A quarter (27%) of young Bangladeshis never completed primary school and do not have the skills they need for work. That totals over 8 million 15- to 24-year-olds in the country.
• This problem is not going to be solved any time soon.
• There is no data for Bangladesh out of school children, but it is likely to have large numbers.
• There are 250 million children of primary school age who cannot read or count whether they are in school or not. In Bangladesh, for example, less than 50% of teachers are trained;
• There are 44 million illiterates in Bangladesh alone – the fourth highest rate of any country in the world.
• But there is good news as well. Bangladesh is one of only three low income countries where more girls are in secondary school than boys, largely due to the huge success of stipends for girls in school. Alongside other policies and projects, the programme has been very successful in raising female secondary enrolment rates, from just 25% in 1992 to 60% in 2005.

But more must be done particularly in enrolment which is still very low. One way is to encourage young mothers and pregnant women to return to school – something particularly relevant in Bangladesh where 30% of 15- to 29-year-olds are pregnant.

For Ghana’s young, skills are the test of progress

By Kwame Akyeampong, Senior policy analyst, Education for All Global Monitoring Report

Ghana, which aims to become a middle income country by 2020, continues to receive praise from the international media for its impressive progress. As a Ghanaian who analyses education, I wondered if this progress was offering better educational and work opportunities for disadvantaged youth.

I took the opportunity of a recent trip to the country’s Northern region to see for myself.

After all, what better way to judge efforts to improve Ghanaians’ welfare than to look at whether its most vulnerable and disadvantaged youth are getting education that leads to decent jobs? Indeed, education, skills and jobs have become hot political topics in the run-up to the general election in December.

I was also struck by another debate in Ghana – among young people asking how to ensure education offers a gateway to a prosperous future.

This debate is vital for the numerous poor youth, most of whom are young women living in northern Ghana, who have not benefited from education – as many as 8 in 10 poor 17-22 year old women in Northern Ghana had less than four years of education in 2008.

Ghana, 2008. Population with less than 4 years of schooling, by location, wealth and gender.

I travelled to Northern Ghana to see first-hand how Camfed, an international NGO, was providing opportunities for disadvantaged young women to make a better transition from school to work. Camfed was providing financial literacy and business training, as well as seed money grants and innovation bursaries, to young women to kick start their own businesses right after secondary school.

I came face to face with Suowah (above), who spoke passionately about how her life and that of her immediate family had been transformed as a result of training she had received to install solar panels in homes – training that she wished formal secondary education had provided.  Suowah was earning a decent income from her work, and for her, this was really an example of how education can be put to work, by linking it more closely to work opportunities in her environment.

This encounter set me thinking – if Ghana’s development is to be judged successful, shouldn’t we be asking what it is doing for the disadvantaged rural youth up and down the country? On my way back to Paris, I realised that the best way to judge education’s worth really is to ask if it is giving young people a real chance to make a better future through decent work.

Our responsibility to young people includes not only providing a decent formal education, but also offering work experience during school, and schemes for school leavers that offer assistance to find work or begin a small business.

Ghana’s current progress does offer the promise of brighter, more prosperous future – but only if it invests in its most marginalized and disadvantaged youth to create a more equal society.

Girls’ education in Pakistan: victim of conflict and commitment

by Pauline Rose, Director of the Global Monitoring Report

It is reassuring news to hear that Malala is showing signs of recovery after the senseless shooting in Pakistan a couple of weeks ago. I remember reading Malala’s blog on the BBC when we were preparing the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report on Education and Armed Conflict. The blog brought home to me the shocking reality of girls’ education in places where schooling gets caught in the crossfire of conflict.

In Swat District, where Malala lives, only 1 in 3 girls are in school. But Malala’s plight highlights a far wider problem in Pakistan. As the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report published last week finds, the country has the second highest number of out-of-school children in the world– over 5 million – and the second highest number of girls out of school.

The barriers to education faced by Pakistani girls like Malala are stark in comparison with the rest of South Asia. The poorest girls in Pakistan are twice as likely to be out of school as the poorest girls in India, almost three times as likely as the poorest girls in Nepal and at least six times as likely as the poorest girls in Bangladesh. Even in the wealthier province of the Punjab, more than half of poorest girls have never been to school , while the vast majority of the richest have had the opportunity. These comparisons show that inequalities are far wider in Pakistan compared with other countries in South Asia, as revealed by the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), a new website from the EFA Global Monitoring Report team that shows how factors such as gender, poverty and location affect a child’s education chances.

Conflict in parts of the country is certainly holding back progress in education. But it is not the only reason. The 2012 GMR identifies that Pakistan is one of just a small number of countries that have reduced spending on education, falling from an already low of 2.6% of GNP in 1999 to only 2.3% in 2010. And yet Pakistan spends around 7 times more on the military than on primary schooling. The wide inequalities in schooling opportunities suggest that not only is it vital that the country shows greater commitment by increasing its spending on education, but also that urgent action needs to be target policies towards ensuring that girls from the poorest households have the chance to go to school.

Percentage of children who have never been in school, aged 7-16

Pakistan 2007

 

 

 

Bangladesh 2007

 

 

 

 

Nepal 2011

 

 

 

India 2005

 

 

 

 

For more information, do download our Pakistan fact sheet filled with information taken from our Global Monitoring Reports

 

Skills, jobs and growth: Let’s tell the world about Korea’s success story

The 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report: Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work

By Pauline Rose, Director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Originally published in the Korea Herald.

As the economic crisis continues to squeeze budgets worldwide, the severe lack of youth skills is more damaging than ever. The world’s youth population has never been larger, but one in eight young people are unemployed and over a quarter are trapped in jobs that keep them on or below the poverty line.

What should we do to help these young people? The Republic of Korea’s experience over the past 40 years offers many lessons, as the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Putting Education to Work, points out.

The report, which is the major global survey of progress towards international education goals, focuses this year on the urgent need to invest in skills for youth – and holds up the Republic of Korea as an example of what can be achieved. In developing countries, 200 million people aged 15 to 24 have not even completed primary school and need alternative pathways to acquire basic skills for employment and prosperity. Those who face discrimination and inherited disadvantage, such as young women, the poor, those in rural communities and ethnic minorities are the worst affected.

Pauline Rose is the Director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

So what lessons can Korea’s experience offer? The reportanswers this question by looking at the stark contrast between Korea’s progress and that of Ghana.

In the early 1970s, Ghana was at a similar starting point to the Republic of Korea – but it has lagged far behind since then. The Republic of Korea began to expand its secondary system rapidly in the 1970s, but in Ghana secondary education stagnated for another 30 years.

Ghana’s lack of progress in education was partly the result of economic problems. But it was also because of insufficient investment in education or linking of economic planning with skills development policies. In the early 1980s, Ghana’s spending on education was less than 2% of GDP per capita, compared with around 4% in the Republic of Korea at the time.

Even though Ghana embarked on education reforms from 1987, the quality of education and its relevance to the labour market have remained poor. Technical and vocational education has not been well enough linked with the economy. And although access to education has expanded, by 2008 almost one-third of 15- to 19-year-olds were still not making it through lower secondary school, with some not even completing primary school.

Investing in the future of our youth

The 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report: “Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work”

Guest blog by Dr. Qian Tang, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education, originally published in China Daily.

Twenty years ago there were 183 million illiterate adults in China; 183 million people missing out on the chance to best support themselves and their families, and improve their lives. Today that figure has dropped by 66% – an achievement to be proud of. No wonder countries in Africa now look to China and other East Asian economies to learn how to help their young people lacking the most basic of skills.

As today’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report, published by UNESCO reveals, weak education systems are leaving one in five young people in developing countries without the skills that completing primary school offers.

Apart from producing the skilled workforce that our businesses need, as UNESCO has been advocating since its conception, a solid education also confers dignity and the potential for self-realization. China recognized this in the 1970s. By not only upgrading skills for industrialization, but also focusing on productivity for smallholder farmers and non-farm self-employment, the number of those living below the poverty line fell dramatically. The reward of this investment was strong and sustained economic growth.

Dr Qian Tang is UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education.

This investment also benefits young people through better earnings. In rural China, wages are significantly higher for those involved in non-farm work who have at least some post-primary education. This has global implications too: the Education for All Global Monitoring Report calculates that for every $1 a country spends on a child’s education, it will yield $10-$15 in economic growth over that person’s working lifetime.

Once in school, teaching our children to prepare themselves for work also goes beyond learning to read and write as well, vital as those skills are. China – the host of an international congress on technical and vocational education and training convened by UNESCO in May – has set a target of 50% technical and vocational enrolments in secondary schools by 2020, which will mean young adults are practically equipped for a wide range of jobs. China also recognizes the need to teach people transferable skills – not those taught from a textbook, but the ability to solve problems, take initiative and communicate with others well. Problem solving is now a key feature of the school curriculum.

But there is still much to be done. All governments need to focus more on the disadvantaged in our society. Too many people are still barely scraping a living and need skills to find prosperity. The average Chinese farm can now only feed three people. Young poor farmers need skills like the richer in the country to push through. Children in the country’s rural areas are far less likely to attend preschool than those in urban areas too – and if they do, then they attend for one year rather than two or three.

Skills for young women: Development that lasts

Pauline Rose is the Director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

The 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report “Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work” is now available from our website.

Travelling through rural areas in countries like Ethiopia, as I did last year, you frequently meet young women who have never been to school. If a young woman in a poor rural area has completed education, you can be sure she will have overcome huge obstacles. Early marriage, ensuing childbirth and pressures of running a household can be enough to diminish her opportunities for education and prosperity.

This lack of education and resulting lack of skills affects both girls and boys. Today, the new Education for All Global Monitoring Report shows us that 200 million young people never even completed primary school. This means 20% of young people in developing countries – a large segment of the world’s youth population – are ill-equipped to find work.

Young women, however, bear the worst burden of all; one in four are affected, while among young men the ratio is one in six. In countries where fewer overall have been to school, young women make up even larger majorities. This is true even in some middle income countries. In rural areas in Turkey, 65% of young women do not complete lower secondary school, compared with 36% of young men.

The 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work was published today.

Aamina*, a young woman I met during my visit to Ethiopia, explained how the disadvantages felt in accessing an education continue into the labour market: “Usually the work environment as a daily labourer is not comfortable mostly for females. As a result of this, females usually do not get the type of job they want. And to get hired in an office they always require paper and more skills. Otherwise no one will hire you and it will be very difficult. And youth like us who have dropped out of school after grade 8 or 9 can never get any paper. So we don’t even try to go to such places and apply for a job.”

Rural areas host the  over 70% of the world’s poor. Remoteness, the effects of climate change, and stunted economic opportunities leave many in desperate situations. As the young people I met in Ethiopia lamented, land is being sold off, leaving youth today with farms that are too small to make a living. This is true in other parts of the world too. The average-sized farm in China today can feed just three people in a household, for example. Even in India, farms on average can feed a family of six but no more.

But there is good news for these young people. The EFA Global Monitoring Report this year offers a well-signposted way out. Young women like Aamina can and should get another chance. Although there is a skills deficit now, the report identifies skills development programmes that are succeeding in overcoming even the worst disadvantages.

Bichera Ntamwinsa, 23 picks berries from her coffee plants in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Farmer field schools and agricultural cooperatives can help smallholder farmers gain skills while strengthening their common voice.
Photo © UNESCO/Tim Dirven/Panos

The non-governmental organization BRAC, for example, helps women living on less than $0.35 a day in countries with widespread rural poverty, such as Bangladesh. The organization gives rural women assets such as a cow, along with training in business and marketing skills so they can make the most out of their new asset. The combination of skills and micro-finance brought lasting change for those who benefited from the programmes; income per household member nearly tripled between 2002 and 2008.

Other programmes are tackling social stereotypes faced by women directly. In Egypt in 2008, a fifth of rural women aged 17 to 22 had less than two years of schooling. Many are likely to marry young. Ishraq, another NGO, supports these young women with skills training, while educating rural families and local leaders about the needs of women in their communities. Over nine out of ten of the first graduates of these programmes passed their final exams.

Because I am a Girl: The State of the World’s Girls 2012 – Learning for Life

Because I am a Girl: The State of the World’s Girls 2012 – Learning for life

Guest blog by Sharon Goulds, Project Manager of the Because I am a Girl Report, and Anita Reilly, Education Advisor, Plan UK.

“Girls meet a lot of challenges and because I am a girl I would like to fight for my rights and girls rights too. We are also human beings who need to be respected.”

Elizabeth, secondary-school student from Malawi.

Published by Plan International on 11 October , this year’s State of the World’s Girls report focuses on girls’ education and is particularly concerned with what happens to girls when they reach adolescence. It highlights that behind the success of global parity in primary education enrolment figures lies a crisis in the quality of learning. As the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report finds, 250 million children of primary school age cannot read or count whether they are in school or not. As such, enrolment figures tell us nothing about real access to education or the quality of what is being taught, or learnt. The statistics mask national level gaps and one of the key groups missing out are adolescent girls, particularly if they are poor, live in isolated rural areas or are marginalised by ethnicity, language or disability. This was highlighted in the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) produced by the EFA Global Monitoring Report.

Every girl has the right to education, but according to the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, there were 39 million 11-15 year-old girls out of school in 2008. Plan’s report this year explores the lives of these girls and investigates the push and pull factors keeping them out of school.  14 year old Talent from Zimbabwe has not been to school since 2009. She is the head of her family. She works all day in the fields to feed her brothers and sisters and struggles to make ends meet. Her 7 year old brother helps her with household chores. She dreams of the day she may be able to return to school, “To pass all my subjects and have a better job and a better life”.  13 year old Munni from Uttar Pradesh is kept at home by her family, “Nobody at home supports my studies…If others also did housework then I would have time to study”.

Once she reaches adolescence, a daughter’s domestic and reproductive role takes precedence over her right to education and in many families girls, who may sometimes have only started school at 10, can be pulled out as they reach puberty, 2 or 3 years later. Notions of protecting girls, the burden of household chores and early marriage means that, in adolescence, when for boys life may be opening out, for many girls it does the opposite, confining them to a life in the domestic sphere. When poor parents make a decision about which child is more likely to gain from education, which is a long-term investment, a girl’s immediate usefulness as a caretaker, her worth as a bride, or her contribution through domestic or other labour can be deemed more valuable than an uncertain and unproven return from her education in the future.

Speaking from experience: youth voices on youth skills

The tenth EFA Global Monitoring Report, Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work, will be launched on October 16.

To mark the 10^thanniversary of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, we have looked back at all our previous reports in this blog series. Today, a week before we launch the 2012 Report “Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work“, Sam Mountford from GlobeScan gives an insight into what young people themselves say about the need to give young people skills for work.

When it comes to understanding the issue of education and skills and the way they affect young people, economic data and detailed policy analysis are vital – but so is an insight into people’s first hand experiences.

To support this year’s Global Monitoring Report, GlobeScan was commissioned by UNESCO to convene and analyse a series of focus group discussions among marginalised young people who had missed out on lower secondary, and some on primary education around the world.  Over six weeks during the Spring of 2012, we talked in depth to

Sam Mountford is GlobeScan’s Director of Global Insights. Before joining GlobeScan in 2006, he headed the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Research and Evaluation Unit.

more than a hundred of them across six countries. What was their experience of making their way in the job market, we wanted to know? How well had they been served by the education system? What sort of skills were in demand by employers? What did they feel was holding them back – and who were they most inclined to turn to for help?

We already knew that education, skills and jobs were of pivotal importance – GlobeScan’s regular tracking of public attitudes through our multi-country surveys reveals that they are among the global issues that most preoccupy people around the world, particularly in countries like India. The focus groups amply bore this out.

[Our] biggest problem is of unemployment, in the absence of employment what can poor people do for a living?

India, Panipat, Male

But perhaps inevitably, what really came through in the discussions was the sense of the interconnectedness of the problems that young people excluded from the labour market face. In several of the countries we studied, the state was barely present as a force in people’s lives. State education was often woefully underfunded, and teachers demotivated – but this was in a context where public infrastructure was often skeletal. If there was a consistently held view that the state should step in to help young people make their way in the job market, there was very little faith – particularly in countries like Ethiopia – that it would do so. The young people we spoke to largely felt that they were ‘on their own’.

For me I have no one to help me. I do everything by myself. And unless I plan to better myself in away there is no one for me to help me.

Ethiopia, Male

It was telling that the young people we spoke to rarely perceived their own problems in securing stable employment as being primarily as a result of a lack of skills. Some, certainly, felt that lack of sufficiently good English or computer skills was holding them back, but more often saw the barrier as a lack of work experience in itself. They felt themselves caught in a catch-22 situation whereby potential employers were only willing to consider candidates with extensive and highly specific experience in their own particular sector – and the only way to acquire this experience was in a job.

How many teachers does the world need?

To celebrate World Teacher’s Day, 5 October, we invited Albert Motivans from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics to provide some insights into how the lack of teachers affects progress towards Education for All.

Massive teacher shortages are quietly looming over countries struggling to provide every child with quality primary education by 2015 as laid out in the sixth of the Education for All goals. These shortages lead to outright exclusion from education while posing a serious risk to education quality. Large class sizes – especially in the early grades – can seriously compromise children’s opportunity to learn. Moreover, some school systems are lowering teaching standards in order to expand their teaching forces and meet the demand for primary education.

Albert Motivans leads the section responsible for education indicators and data analysis at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

To reach the goal of universal primary education (UPE), at least 1.7 million new teaching positions must be created in just a few short years to accommodate the growing demand for primary education, according to new estimates from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). In addition, countries will have to recruit another 5.1 million teachers to make up for teachers currently in the workforce who will retire or leave the profession. So in total, 6.8 million teachers should be recruited by 2015 in order to provide the right to education to all primary school-age children.

These projections are featured in the UNESCO eAtlas of Teachers, released in advance of World Teachers’ Day. which allows one to visualize the gaps in the supply of and demand for teachers at national and regional levels. Through maps, charts and ranking tables, it is possible to explore the data in order to answer key questions such as: where are the most new teachers needed to respond to the rising demand for primary education? How do working conditions (e.g., salaries) for teachers compare across a subset of countries? And to what extent are women represented in the teaching workforce?

According to UIS estimates, over one-half of the world’s countries (114 out of 208 countries) need to increase the size of their teaching workforces in primary education between 2010 and 2015. Severe shortages are found across sub-Saharan Africa, which will need to create almost 1 million new primary teaching positions in just a few short years. Some countries in the region will need to recruit more than 10% of their current teaching workforces in order to provide UPE. Some countries have shown that they were able to expand teaching forces rapidly, but that they still face an uphill climb in order to keep up with growing youth populations in addition to addressing those who are underserved by education.

Conflicts are one of the biggest barriers to Education for All

The devastating effect conflicts have on education was the focus of the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report. As part of our 10^th anniversary countdown to the launch of the 2012 report on October 16, we asked Prof. Alan Smith from our 2011 Advisory Board to look back at last year’s report.

The 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report reported that 28 million children are out of school in conflict-affected countries, 42% of the world total. Children in conflict affected countries are twice as likely as children in other low income countries to die before their fifth birthday. Refugees and internally displaced people face major barriers to education, and conflict-affected countries have some of the largest gender inequalities and lowest literacy levels in the world.

Prof Alan Smith is UNESCO Chair in Education at the University of Ulster Northern Ireland. He was an advisor to the 2011 GMR on Education and Armed Conflict and is currently working with UNICEF on a new global initiative on education and peacebuilding.

Yet education remains a low priority in situations of conflict – it accounts for just 2% of humanitarian aid and only 38% of emergency aid requests for education are met. Whilst development assistance to basic education has doubled since 2002 to US$4.7 billion, current aid levels fall far short of the US$16 billion required annually to close the external financing gap in low-income countries. So we need to ask why 21 of the world’s poorest developing countries continue to spend more on military budgets than primary education – redirecting just 10% into education could put almost 10 million additional children into school. We also need to question the priorities of donor governments whose military spending is US$1029 billion per year – yet 6 days of this would meet the funding gap required to achieve EFA.

Conflict presents huge challenges for education provision, but there have been some encouraging developments in the short time since the GMR report was published. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has launched an initiative and secured $1.5 billion to put Education First supported by an impressive array of high profile advocates, including Special Envoy and former UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. The initiative places a particular emphasis on securing the right to education for children in conflict-affected countries, and argues that education should get at least 4% (up from 2%) of humanitarian aid budgets. Progress in such environments requires careful analysis of the drivers of conflict and the development of education responses that progressively address challenges on three broad fronts:

• Education as a humanitarian response. The challenges include the need to protect children during violent conflict and ensure their right to education. Initiatives such as the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack have emerged. By maintaining a commitment to education during conflict we can not only protect from physical, social and psychosocial damage, but also provide the means by which societies can recover. Agencies such as UNHCR Education Strategy have included an explicit commitment to use conflict analysis as part of its response to displacement situations and working with communities recovering from conflict.
• Conflict sensitive education. The past decade has seen growing awareness of the ways in which education may be used and abused to exacerbate conflict. Unequal access to education is often one of the most powerful ways in which dominant groups maintain unequal access to power and wealth between groups within conflict-affected societies – often reproduced from one generation to the next. Tensions can be further exacerbated by exclusionary practices or policies related to language of instruction and identity issues – many of these are structural features that could be addressed as part of education reform processes.  Since the GMR an increasing number of agencies have made an explicit commitment to conflict-sensitive education, for example, one of the three goals of the new USAID Education Strategy will bring considerable resources to bear on ‘increased equitable access to education in crisis and conflict environments for 15 million learners by 2015’.
• Education for peacebuilding. In conflict-affected societies people want to see an end to violence that also brings benefits (so called ‘peace dividends’), partly in terms of access to quality education provision, but also in terms of greater safety and security, involvement in political processes that work for the public good, an economic future that provides sustainable livelihoods and cooperative relations between diverse groups within society. This is a transformative agenda, yet in many countries education systems are geared to reproduce, rather than transform the conditions that generate conflict. One new development is a UNICEF Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy Programme that has received significant funding from the Netherlands to work on these challenges in more than ten conflict-affected countries over the next four years.

On all of these fronts education can play a constructive role – whether it be by providing protection in response to crisis and conflict, tackling inequalities in access or bias in education provision, or by contributing to transformation and change as part of peacebuilding processes. However, it is clear that these challenges will not be addressed successfully if we limit our efforts to solely to basic education. The GMR highlighted research evidence that suggests a link between the risk of conflict and a high youth population, especially unemployed youth with few years of secondary education. The Global Partnership for Education (formerly the EFA Fast Track Initiative) has a particular role here since it is the only multilateral mechanism focused on funding education from early primary through secondary and this will become increasingly important post the current MDGs. However, the research tends to emphasise youth as a ‘risk to conflict’, rather than a ‘resource for peacebuilding’, which is why the UNESCO IIEP Youth Policy Forum, Plan With Youth will explore how to engage constructively with youth in conflict-affected countries. The event coincides with the launch of the 2012 GMR and will examine the role of youth in peacebuilding, civic engagement and the development of skills for employment and sustainable livelihoods.