BRIEFLY: UNESCO awards 2012 literacy prizes

Literacy programmes in Bhutan, Indonesia, Colombia and Rwanda have won UNESCO’s literacy prizes for 2012. The winners will receive $20,000 each, as well as a diploma and a medal when UNESCO celebrates World Literacy Day on September 6. The awards are part of the organization’s commitment to support effective literacy policies and programmes around the world.

There is very varied progress towards the Education for All Goal on literacy in the four countries where the prize winning  programmes are based. In Bhutan, only just over half (53%) of youth and adults are literate – a number that is projected to increase to 64% by 2015. Rwanda has 71% literacy, while Indonesia and Colombia both have 93% literacy.

Literacy leads to better lives. It empowers people to become active in their societies and to learn more. By contrast, illiteracy is a poverty trap that hinders development of both individuals and countries. In our upcoming 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report on youth, skills and work, we will examine how having poor literacy skills often means being less employable. It is also a large barrier to learning more job-specific skills. The report will be launched on October 16.

Will boys and girls have equal access to education in 2015?

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

As the 2015 deadline draws near, is the world on track to give its boys and girls the same chance to get a good education? This week we look back at the 2003/2004 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Gender and Education for All – The leap to equality, as part of our countdown to the launch of the 2012 report on October 16.

When the six Education for All goals were agreed upon in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000, the urgency of Goal 5 was clearly expressed. As well as its 2015 deadline for achieving gender equality in education, the goal was the only one of the six to have an additional, earlier, deadline: by 2005, gender disparities in primary and secondary education were to be eliminated.

In hindsight, that goal was too ambitious. When our 2003/2004 report Gender and Education for All – The leap to equality was published, it was already becoming clear that it would be difficult to reach. By 2005, it was missed by a wide margin: only 59 of the 176 countries with available data had reached gender parity in 2006. The ambition of gender equality in education by 2015 is more realistic, however. Only 73 countries have not yet achieved parity, and 13 of them are already on track to do so by 2015, according to the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report. However, progress must speed up if girls and boys around the world are to have the same chance of going to school in 2015.

In primary schools in 2009, there were 96 girls for every 100 boys enrolled around the world, an increase of four girls per 100 boys since 1999. However, such global figures hide countries where progress is not fast enough. In 14 countries in 2009, there are fewer than 90 girls per 100 boys in primary schools. It is still true that girls around the world are less likely to have equal access to primary education.

Looking particularly at secondary school, in sub-Saharan Africa there has been a marked increase in female enrolment since our 2003/2004 report on gender. However, this improvement was from a low base, and has not been strong enough to make a significant change in gender parity in the region. In the Arab states, progress towards gender parity in secondary school is still lagging behind the progress that has happened at primary level. Furthermore, in many countries, particularly upper middle income and high income countries, it is boys rather than girls who are less likely to enrol in secondary school and to do as well once they are there. This problem – and different solutions – is among the gender topics examined in the forthcoming 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report.

Education for All: Is the world on track a decade on?

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

Ten years have passed since the first Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Is the World on Track?, was released in 2002. And there are now just ten weeks before the launch of our next Report on October 16. Following our series of posts by former directors of the Report, a new series starting today features former and current contributors to the Report and experts in the sector sharing their thoughts on a decade of progress towards Education for All.

As we count down the weeks to the launch of the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report posts will recap the findings of previous Reports and reflect on progress since their publication, covering topics such as early childhood care and education, gender parity, literacy and conflict.

In 2000, over 1,000 participants at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, adopted six goals for achieving Education for All.  The focus of the first EFA Global Monitoring Report, in 2002, was on how governments and donors were concretely committing to the new targets that were set. It needed to begin the task of analyzing how and whether this summit meeting had changed children’s chances of going to school.

In 2002, when we published our first statistical tables, over 100 million children of primary school age were out of school. In the ten years before that date, the world had managed to improve that figure by under 3 million. A decade after that date, however, the number of out-of-school children had dropped to 61 million. This suggests that the Dakar decade has been successful in mobilizing efforts to address the large-scale problem that has faced many of the poorest countries around the world.

The decade’s progress has not been consistent, however. The largest gains occurred in the years immediately after Dakar, when leaders went back home buoyed by the energy of the summit. In the last three years, by contrast, the number of children out of school has stagnated, as we recently highlighted in a policy paper published together with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Much of the stagnation is due to trends in sub-Saharan Africa. Although enrolment in the region continues to rise, it has not kept pace with population growth. As a result, the number of children out of school has actually increased by 1.6 million.

Education and jobs: hot topics for International Youth Day

With one in eight young people out of work, education and employment are urgent topics of discussion for this year’s International Youth Day on August 12.. Education’s crucial role in providing young people with the skills they need for solid employment and better lives is also the focus of the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR), which we will launch on October 16.

It is misguided to write and talk about youth skills without listening to the voices of young people themselves. This is why, in time for International Youth Day, UNESCO’s International Institute for Education Planning (IIEP) has launched the website Plan with Youth. The website is a space for young people to discuss how education can be made more relevant for work. Their voices will contribute to the preparations being made in advance of the IIEP’s Policy Forum in October, on the same day as the launch of the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report.

To influence our new report being published in just over 10 weeks time, we also set up a blog to encourage young people to discuss openly the subject of Youth, Skills and Work. Since its conception 9 months ago, voices from young bloggers around the world have highlighted the many different aspects behind the need for skills and exposed trends behind concerns they face in the transition from school to work.

The most recent blog post was from Armande Désirée Koffi-Kra in Côte d’Ivoire. She summed up today’s skills deficit for young people. “It is no longer enough just to take learning from books; training must match the needs of the labour market. Here, the system hasn’t made a plan B for young people who have failed at school or university. The common thread between young people in poor and rich countries is that we all want the same thing: work. For this we need fewer policies existing solely on paper about helping young people and more action in favour of building a richer education that is more thorough and flexible and adapts to the needs of the job market!”

John Bya-Mungu Muzinga from the Democratic Republic of the Congo writes that if young people “were taught a few trades instead of being given flour and beans – of short-term assistance only – they could survive and earn a living throughout life.”

In South Sudan, many girls are missing out on school

Today, July 9, South Sudan celebrates its first anniversary. Since independence, education has been a key priority for the government. But many challenges remain – especially girls’ access to education.

It’s been a rough start for the world’s youngest country. South Sudan is currently host to about 175,000 refugees according to UN estimates. On Thursday, the UN Security Council decided to extend its peacekeeping mission – UNMISS – for another year, given the insecure environment. The relationship with Sudan remains tense; in January, South Sudan decided to cut its supply of oil to the North, a decision that meant losing 98% of the country’s annual revenue.

In such an unstable environment, it is vital that education remains a high priority. The young country still has a long way to go. As we found in our policy paper on South Sudan, there are over 1.3 million primary school age children out of school, and enrolment in secondary education is the lowest in the world. Young girls face extreme disadvantages in access to education. There are just 400 girls in the last grade of secondary education in the entire country. As a result, South Sudan has one of the lowest female literacy rates in the world.

“Our parents look at us and see hundreds of cows,” Winny Nyilueth Athian, a South Sudanese eighth grader told the website The Niles. The cows she refers to are the dowry parents receive for marrying off their daughters. “They see the education of girls as of little use and they also think schooling devalues their cultural beliefs.”

BRIEFLY: Grassroots support for education in conflict zones

The 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education was recently highlighted in two feature articles by Voice of America (see Part I and Part II). As we described in the Report, conflict has a devastating effect on education. But parents and communities in conflict zones see maintaining children’s access to education as a high priority.

One example of this comes from Afghanistan, where communities created schools in camps and abandoned buildings when they could no longer use traditional school buildings. “Some of the community schools started as girls’ schools that were literally in people’s houses,” Pauline Rose, director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, told Voice of America. “Some women would set them up with girls in the community – they would obviously need to hide away from the Taliban at that time. Then, as they became more widespread, they became more established and started to get external support.  Now they have become part of the formal education system.”

Telling the truth and shaping a vision for education

To celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, we have invited the Report’s previous directors to share their views on progress and prospects for Education for All.

By Kevin Watkins

Was it really three years? When I think back to my time as Director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, the period fades into a blur of deadlines and launch events, liberally interspersed with the missives from irate governments unhappy at our failure to pay due respect to their country’s record. After each report, as I recall, there was a moment of quiet team reflection. We would firmly resolve to plan for a less pressurized report cycle, before proceeding to repeat the pattern of previous years.

Kevin Watkins was Director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report from January 2008 to July 2011. He is a non-resident senior fellow with the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

There is much to celebrate on the 10^th  anniversary of the EFA Global Monitoring Report. One of them is the fact that the reports have appeared! Looking back over the nine volumes, it is extraordinary that such small teams have produced such high quality reports over what are exceptionally short research cycles. More than any other report (OK, I admit to personal bias), the Global Monitoring Report plays a pivotal role in holding governments to account and setting the agenda on education.

That role can be traced back to the very early years. The report was created with the express purpose of monitoring progress towards the EFA goals adopted in Dakar and, by extension, the Millennium Development Goals. And it was created independent. Unlike the institutional reports that have to pass through an official censor and avoid all criticism of governments, individual donors and international institutions, the Global Monitoring Report has the privilege of editorial independence – and the associated privilege to tell it like it is.

When it comes to monitoring, independence matters. In education, as in other areas, governments around the world have an unhealthy habit of signing up to bold declarations, adopting ambitious targets, and then carrying on business as usual. From the outset, the Global Monitoring Report has challenged this tradition by providing the data against which to measure performance, and an authoritative voice to report on what has – and has not – been achieved.

Part of the Report’s remit is to act as an advocate for the Education for All agenda. It is easy to overlook how effective it has been in this area. Some of the earliest reports – on gender and the quality of education – helped to put widely ignored issues at the centre of policy dialogue. As more recent evidence has underlined, the report on the importance of early childhood education was in many respects ahead of its time. The 2010 report on marginalization turned the spotlight on the failure of governments to tackle the inequalities in education. In 2011 we turned our attention to the conflict-affected states that now account for over 40 per cent (and rising) of the world’s out-of-school population.

Create jobs, yes – but give us the skills to do them

It’s good that job creation is at the top of the agenda at the G20 summit in Mexico today. But young people need the right skills to do those jobs – and now they’re demanding that world leaders finally give serious attention to developing skills.

At the G8 and G20 Youth Summits in Washington this month, a key message was that the unemployment crisis must be combated through education.

Last time G20 leaders met to discuss global growth and jobs, that key ingredient was missing. Without making sure young people get the skills they need, creating jobs won’t be enough, as Director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Pauline Rose, pointed out on this blog in November.

To prepare for the 2012 Global Monitoring Report, which will focus on skills development, we invited young people to discuss these issues on the blog Youth, Skills & Work. Many have expressed frustration over governments’ failure to provide the right skills.

“Nowadays, we have to develop our own way to learn and to be ready for the job market, because university doesn’t teach ‘the jobs-skills-required’ course”, one blogger wrote. Many more young people around the world do not even make it to university, and have even less of a chance of getting skills needed for decent jobs.

Beyond 2015: Continuing and complementing the GMR

To celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, we have invited the Report’s previous directors to share their views on progress and prospects for Education for All.

By Nicholas Burnett

At 10 years, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report is now on the map as an indispensable tool for the international education community. I am proud to have played a small role in this – and one that was so enjoyable, if very demanding. Managing the GMR was one of the best jobs I have had.  A great inheritance from Chris Colclough, a strong analytical team, the theme of Education for All which is so fundamental to development and social justice, global attention, a supportive advisory board, a generally supportive host in UNESCO, a fiercely protected independence, wonderful successors in Kevin Watkins and Pauline Rose – who could ask for more?

Nicholas Burnett directed the Education for All Global Monitoring Report from 2004 to 2007. He was UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education from September 2007 until October 2009 and now leads the education group at the Results for Development Institute, Washington.

Well, I would ask for more.  I would ask, as we head towards the Education for All and Millennium Development Goal target date of 2015, for more impact. This is not necessarily up to the GMR but involves rather the goals themselves, an improvement in how the GMR is used,  and, above all, the need for effective accountability mechanisms.

Let us reflect briefly on progress since 2000, on what has worked and what has not in terms of the international educational goals. Achievements in terms of primary enrolment, gender parity and public spending on basic education are well known, as are disappointments including that the primary education goals will not be met everywhere by 2015, that enrolment has not been matched with learning, that adult literacy remains elusive, that early education is still relatively rare (especially for the poorest who would benefit the most), that the skills of school leavers do not match employers’ expectations, and that aid for basic education has only gone up insofar as overall aid overall has increased and is still not necessarily allocated to the neediest countries.  The GMR has told most of these stories – and told them very well.

If the period since 2000 represents remarkable progress but also a very large number of disappointments, what can we do now to ensure future success and avoid further disappointment as the international community starts to think about the post-2015 world? Four steps are essential:

1. Any new goals must be as universally endorsed and as universally applicable as possible. One of the major difficulties in building a global consensus around the current goals is that they are largely perceived as applying to low-income countries and so also relevant to aid donors.  Middle-income countries, where the bulk of the world’s poor but also the bulk of the new global middle class now live, have not fully engaged with them, while high-income countries have not engaged at all except with regard to aid.

Let’s not forget 61 million out-of-school children at Rio+20

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.

On the eve of the Rio+20 conference, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics are urging policymakers to put out-of-school children on the agenda.

According to newly released data, an estimated 61 million children of primary school age are being denied their right to education. As we outline in a new policy paper, failure to reduce this number condemns these girls and boys to poverty, poor health and lack of opportunity, while weighing heavily on efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

While the global out-of-school figure has declined over the past 15 years, falling from 105 million in 1990, data show that progress began to slow down in 2005 and has stagnated between 2008 and 2010, with the number remaining at  61 million.

To coincide with the release of the new data, the UNESCO Institute of Statistics has launched the UNESCO e-Atlas of Out-of-School Children. The eAtlas lets you explore and adapt maps, charts and ranking tables for indicators covering children of primary and lower secondary school age. Indicators are disaggregated by sex to better evaluate educational inequalities faced by girls and boys. UIS is also featuring on its website a slideshow of infographics displaying the new data on out-of-school children.