Many nations fall short in improving standards

In: International Herald Tribune, Special Report: International Education, pp 15, 18

By Barry James (IHT)
Tuesday, February 18, 2003

PARIS:
In 1950, South Korea and Zambia were roughly at the same economic level. That Korea is one of the world's most economically advanced nations today and Zambia one of the most backward is due almost entirely to a half century of investment in education, development experts say.

"There is a demonstrable connection between education and development," said Steve Packer of the "Education for All Global Monitoring Report," which tracks governments' progress for the UN Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization. "Education forms the basis for economic progress. But it requires sustained investment over time."

However, the report shows that many countries are falling short of promises they made to improve universal education standards, including the provision of free primary schooling to all children within 12 years from now.

At the World Education Forum in Dakar nearly three years ago, nations committed themselves to six specific goals, including two pledges that were incorporated into the UN Millennium Development Goals in 2001. These were:

To ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary education "of good quality."

To eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education no later than 2015.

The Dakar targets also included commitments to improve early childhood care, particularly for the most disadvantaged children, provide equitable access to further education, improve adult literacy and establish measurable standards for literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.

Almost a third of the world's population lives in countries that are unlikely to meet all six goals "unless strong and concerted effort is made to reverse the observed trends," the report said. "Progress towards the six Dakar goals is insufficient. The world is not on track to achieve education for all by 2015."

In 1999, the last year for which accurate figures are available, 112 million children had no access to education at all - nearly all in the developing world and mostly girls - even though the right to education was enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Although enrollments are rising globally, the report identifies 57 countries that are moving away from the goal of universal primary education, or unlikely to reach it by the target year. A large proportion of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, or in the Arab world.

The question of gender equality remains a pious hope in many countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, half the countries remain far from the goal of providing equal education for boys and girls and a quarter are moving away from it.

Other than a failure of political will, one of the main causes for this state of affairs is lack of funding. Faced with pressing needs today, and often with high debt repayments, governments tend to put off investments that will only start generating measurable economic results far in the future.

Working with what they acknowledge are incomplete or inadequate data, the authors of the report estimate a $5.6 billion financing gap, more than twice as high as an estimate made last year by the World Bank. In addition, the report adds, the costs of meeting the early childhood, adult literacy and life-skill goals have not been included in anyone's figures.

The World Bank's study, according to the report, underestimated the likely financing gaps in many of the countries most unlikely to achieve universal primary education because of overly (p 18:) optimistic considerations about their prospects of growth and their ability to carry out necessary reforms.

The promise made at Dakar that no nation would be held back from implementing the educational goals for lack of resources appears to have been forgotten. "Translating the commitments into real resources directed towards priority ends, and turning the language of coordination into real practice, remain some distance away," the report said.

Other factors impeding progress are complex humanitarian emergencies contributing to more than 15 million refugees in the world and the disastrous spread of HIV/AIDS in many developing countries.

In Africa, the loss of tens of thousands of teachers because of AIDS, often within a few years of completing their training, makes it increasingly difficult to meet the Dakar targets. An estimated 860,000 children lost their teachers to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa in just one year, 1999, and the problem has undoubtedly worsened since then.

To take one example, South Africa will have to increase the number of new teachers it trains from 3,000 to 20,000 a year to replace AIDS losses. It is a vicious cycle, because improved education is one of the most effective ways of fighting against the disease. Experts at Unesco are studying new ways of bridging the teacher gap, including the use of distance education techniques to train teachers and splitting the training period into several cycles.

As part of the commitments they made at Dakar, governments were supposed to have drawn up comprehensive national action plans by 2002 at the latest, but these "have not yet materialized widely," the report said, although it does seem that educational goals are gaining higher priority in overall government policies and plans.

The report added that there was not yet much evidence of governments being publicly held to account for failing fully to live up their promises.

The report, the first of its kind, stressed the need for more timely and accurate data. The team was unable to make a detailed and accurate assessment of the progress made toward education for all for the simple reason that most of the firm data at its disposal dated from before the Dakar meeting.

In the absence of a consensus on what constitutes universal primary education, the global monitoring team was further hampered by the difficulty of having to compare apples with oranges. Neither the Universal Declaration on Human Rights or the Dakar framework document specified how long basic schooling should last. It varies around the world from four to seven years.

What is meant by the "good quality" education promised at Dakar also eludes definition. Class size, supplies of books and even the question of whether the school should have a roof are left to the imagination.

Barry James is on the staff of the International Herald Tribune.