Protecting education aid is more vital than ever

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.

Christopher Colclough, who directed the EFA Global Monitoring Report from its inception in 2002 until 2005, is now Commonwealth Professor of Education and Development at the University of Cambridge.

By Christopher Colclough

Much has been achieved over the dozen years since the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal. The proportion of primary age children who are in school has increased from around 82% to 88%, while the number of children not in school has been reduced by about 40 million. Gender disparities in enrolments have greatly narrowed, and transition rates from primary to secondary school have increased. These are considerable accomplishments.

At the same time, the high hopes for meeting the development goals for education by 2015 will turn out to have been too optimistic. The fundamental goal of achieving universal primary education by that date will be missed by a considerable margin. It seemed, some years ago, to be achievable, even in the world’s poorest countries, but going by current progress, the number of those out of school may increase again over the next few years.

The overall enrolment tally hides many imbalances that need to be tackled if enrolments are to get back on track. Dropout rates from school remain high in Sub-Saharan Africa – often because children enrol late and the quality of schooling they receive is low, making it difficult for parents to justify their continuation. Furthermore, gender parity of enrolments remains off target in almost 70 countries. The absence of girls from primary school in these cases represents a huge loss to the individuals involved, and reduced benefits for the next generation.

Many of these imbalances are caused by primary systems being of such low quality that those enrolled do not learn enough, or do not learn quickly enough, to make staying on worthwhile. Yet leaving school after five or six years without having achieved basic literacy and numeracy is a tremendous waste of financial and human resources, and sets up losses for society that extend for years ahead.

Literacy rates are rising – but not fast enough

New data released by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics show that literacy rates for adults and youth are continuing to rise. But 775 million adults still cannot read and write – and many countries are unlikely to meet the Education for All goal of halving adult illiteracy by 2015.

The new data show that the strongest literacy gains were for young women aged 15-24. Women still lag behind, however. In 2010, 87% of young women had basic literacy skills, compared with 92% of men. The UIS website features interactive illustrations of the new data by country, gender and in relation to GDP.

Some countries with large illiterate populations, such as China and Kenya, are on track to achieve the EFA literacy goal. But many countries are far off track. At their current rate of progress, Bangladesh and India will get no more than halfway to the 2015 target, while Angola, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will fall even further short, according to the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report. In total, 33 countries with literacy rates below 97% are unlikely to reach the literacy goal.

The benefits of having a literate population are immense. Literacy increases people’s self-esteem and creates opportunities to escape poverty. It equips women with the knowledge and confidence to participate in decisions that affect them. Literacy programmes also promote equity when targeting populations with a history of marginalization.

Measuring and improving skills – the new ‘global currency’

The OECD Skills Strategy, launched this week at the OECD Forum, underlines the importance of our focus on the marginalized in the forthcoming 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, on youth, skills and work. While those who are in education or work gain skills throughout their lives, the OECD finds those who are neither in education nor in work actually lose their skills as they get older.

“Skills have become the global currency of the 21^st century, but this currency can depreciate if it isn’t used” said Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education at the OECD, at the OECD Forum on Thursday. .

The 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report will focus on how skills development programmes can improve young people’s opportunities for decent jobs and better lives. It is now possible to explore data on this topic from the perspective of OECD countries and policy at the new skills.oecd web portal, launched as part of the OECD Skills Strategy.

The strategy aims to help countries build the right skills and turning them into better jobs and better lives. It suggests three policy areas to guide countries in their efforts to increase and better use the skills in their populations: First, developing relevant skills by encouraging learning, fostering international mobility of skilled people and promoting cross-border skills policies. Second, activating the skills supply by encouraging people to offer their skills to the labour market and retaining skilled people in the labour market. Third, using skills effectively by creating a better match between skills and job requirements, and by increasing the demand for high-level skills.

From education to the economy, malnutrition threatens Africa’s progress

By Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva

Anyone who has gone without food for a couple of days knows the debilitating effects of hunger. For many of us, the experience is transient – we fail to eat during a trip or a long working day, for example – and infrequent. But for 220 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, hunger is a daily threat. And it often has permanent consequences.

Hunger in Africa – and the role that food security plays in people’s current and future opportunities – is the focus of the first Africa Human Development Report, which was launched in Nairobi on Tuesday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Those familiar with the work of UNDP know that its Human Development Reports have long been making key contributions to national, regional and international development debates.

It was about time for the first HDR for Africa. I’ve covered the main messages of the report elsewhere. In this post, I focus on a specific topic: African children are at particular risk of suffering the long-lasting burdens of malnutrition – especially while in the womb and during the first two years of life. As the Africa HDR says:

“Hungry children with weakened immune systems die prematurely from communicable diseases such as dysentery, malaria and respiratory infections that are ordinarily preventable and treatable. They start school late, learn less and drop out early. Malnourished mothers are at greater risk of dying in childbirth and of delivering low-birthweight babies who fail to survive infancy. Undernourished babies who make it through infancy often suffer stunting that cripples and shortens their lives. As adults they are likely to give birth to another generation of low-birthweight babies, perpetuating the vicious cycle of low human development and destitution.”  

Malnourished people are less efficient and productive, so their wages fall and they struggle to meet their food needs. The cycle then starts over, trapping people in poverty and malnutrition; if it is ignored, it could pose a serious threat to the recent upturn in economic growth and human development experienced by many African countries.

One of the first casualties of malnutrition is education. Poor nutrition leads to poor performance in school. Undernourished children do worse on tests of cognitive functioning, have poorer psychomotor and fine motor abilities, suffer from low activity levels and interact less with their peers. Children are slower to acquire skills. Undernourishment is correlated with lower enrollment rates, and fewer grades of  schooling.

Food crisis is also an education crisis

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

Hunger and malnutrition are urgent development problems, despite the fact that the world has the capacity to feed everyone. They also have devastating effects on education, robbing millions of young children of the opportunity to develop healthy bodies and minds, as we highlighted in our recent policy paper on early childhood care and education.

With a severe food crisis affecting 16 million people in West Africa and millions more in the Horn of Africa, the Group of 8, which has pledged at previous G8 summits to improve food security, has more reason than ever to follow up on its promises when leaders meet on May 18 and May 19 at Camp David, Maryland.

The development community and others are turning up the heat on the G8 leaders with a storm of #DearG8 tweets on Twitter that point out the shocking scale of the problem, as we did in our policy paper:

• Every year, malnutrition is directly implicated in the deaths of over 3 million children and more than 100,000 mothers. About 28% of all children under age 5 in the developing world are stunted (short for their age) because of malnutrition.
• Poor nutrition devastates immune systems (making children more susceptible to disease), increases the risk of anaemia and prevents proper brain development – all of which hold children back from developing the cognitive, linguistic and social skills they need to thrive.
• Children with high rates of malnutrition, especially in the first few years of life, are less able to learn. For instance, iron-deficiency anaemia consistently reduces children’s test scores. Malnourished children are also more likely to start school late and drop out early.

The G8 leaders have an opportunity to take decisive action at Camp David. Of all the issues they must consider, none is more urgent than the needs of those threatened by the food crisis in Africa, which is jeopardizing the learning prospects of millions of young children.

Follow Pauline Rose on Twitter: @Pauline_RoseGMR

Photo: A villager in Kyauk Ka Char, in Myanmar’s Shan State, unloads a bag of rice provided by the World Food Programme. (Mark Garten/UNPHOTO)

Africa Progress Report calls for big push on education

Urgent action is needed to tackle a “twin crisis” in access to education and the quality of teaching, according to the 2012 Africa Progress Report, Jobs, Justice and Equity: Seizing Opportunities in Times of Global Change, which was launched on Friday at the World Economic Forum on Africa, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

“With 30 million children out of school and many of those in school failing to master basic literacy,” the report says, “Africa is ill-equipped to generate jobs and take its place in a knowledge-based global economy.”

Calling for a stronger focus on education, along with better funding mechanisms, the report says African governments and their development partners should make a “big push” towards the 2015 development goals, “focusing on the most disadvantaged countries, children who are being left behind and the need to improve learning achievement.”

To illustrate how disadvantages linked to wealth, gender and location reinforce one another in limiting opportunities for education, the report refers to the Deprivation and Marginalization in Education database developed by the GMR team for the 2010 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Reaching the marginalized. As the figure on Nigeria reproduced in the Africa Progress Report shows (below), poor rural Hausa women aged 17 to 22 average less than one year in school, compared with over nine years for urban males from wealthy households. According to the Africa Progress Report, the number of those aged 0-14 is set to increase in Nigeria by more than 25 million over the next decade, magnifying the the challenges for education and youth employment.

BRIEFLY: Skills for work on the agenda in Shanghai

With high youth unemployment making headlines around the world, it is more crucial than ever to give young people a chance to learn the skills that employers need. Policy makers and education specialists from around the world will tackle these issues when they meet in Shanghai for the Third International Congress on Technical and Vocational Education and Training, which runs from Sunday, May 13, until May 16.

The congress is organized by UNESCO, whose web pages about technical education and training (TVET) spell out the meeting’s aims: “The Congress will provide a unique global platform for knowledge sharing, reflection and debate on the changing landscape of TVET, as well as its future, and more generally on the advancement of skill-development systems. In addition, the Congress will look for ways to ensure that TVET meets individual, national, regional and global development objectives and aspirations.”

We will be addressing some of these issues in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, on the theme of skills and work for marginalized young people. The GMR team will be participating in the Congress, presenting during a session on “Promoting equity and inclusion through TVET.”

Art contest winner announced

We are proud to announce that the winner of the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report art contest is Khalid Mohamed Hammad Elkhateem, 23, from Sudan, whose entry “In the middle of nowhere” is shown here.

We asked young people around the world to help us visualize the themes of our upcoming report on youth, skills and work through their art. We received many submissions – making it hard for the jury to pick their favourites.

Khalid “Shatta”, as the winner is known as an artist, will receive a trip to Paris to participate in an event publicizing the artwork and meet with the EFA Global Monitoring Report team. The artworks will be displayed in an online gallery around the time of the launch of the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report, and some will be used for the 2012 Report. In the meantime, the winner and the honorary mentions are displayed on our website.

BRIEFLY: Measuring education quality in Africa

To improve the quality of education, first you have to be able to measure it, but education quality is notoriously difficult to define and measure, as was pointed out on this blog last week. The UNESCO Institute of Statistics has taken a step forward in developing a new regional data collection to monitor progress on selected indicators to assess quality of education in sub-Saharan Africa.

Quality is often estimated by looking at pupil/teacher ratios, on the basis that the more pupils there are per teacher, the less each pupil gets. But quality of education goes beyond that. The new UNESCO data collection measures other factors that determine quality, articulated in the African Union’s Second Decade of Education, such as class size, textbook availability and access to basic services that can affect learning.

This new evidence shows great variations. While 13 pupils have to share one mathematics textbook in Cameroon, pupils in Benin, Niger, Cape Verde, Rwanda and Mauritius have access to one book each. In Niger, 85% of schools have no potable water and 75% no toilets. In Mauritius and Rwanda, all schools have such facilities. The findings are brought to life with some eye-catching infographics on the UNESCO Institute of Statistics’ website.

More children are in school – but are they learning?

By Susan Davis, president and chief executive, BRAC USA

With the Education for All goals and the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015 on our minds, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about measurements of educational quality, rather than a simple push for increased student enrollment in developing countries.

Most public schools in the developing world fail to prepare students for the 21^st-century knowledge society, according to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of the Bangladesh-based non-government organization BRAC, whose US branch I lead.

Sir Fazle, who was last year awarded the inaugural WISE Prize for Education, has called for an end to teaching methods such as rote memorization, moving towards a focus on critical thinking and creative problem solving. As the largest private secular education provider in the world, BRAC is uniquely positioned to move the issue of quality education from discussion to implementation. With 24,000 primary schools and 4.6 million graduates in Bangladesh alone, BRAC ran more schools in 2011 than the entire English school system, according to the BBC.

It’s an alternative schooling model that inculcates a joy for learning in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We’re now deploying that same approach in other countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. For instance, BRAC currently partners with the American Institutes for Research and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning on a teacher training programme that helps children develop fundamental skills for life effectiveness. Through this initiative, in partnership with the NoVo Foundation, BRAC has provided such training to education staff in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Uganda.