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Education for All:

Making it a priority

The World Education Forum will take place in Dakar in April 2000.

We urge Heads of State and European Commissioner Poul Nielson to attend. The attainment of Education For All should be an EU priority for the decade. The EU should focus its support to education in three areas:

·       Support to achieving free and compulsory quality education

·       Support to people living in poverty so that they can actively participate in education system design and implementation

·       Increased resources for basic education to 8% of annual aid budgets

Introduction

Education is a human right yet there are over 125 million children out of school and around 880 million illiterate adults. Two in three out of school children are girls. Ten years ago at the Education for All conference the world’s governments agreed to meet their obligations to provide free education by 2000. That target has been spectacularly missed. Instead, two new international development targets have been established on education; universal primary education by 2015 and the elimination of gender disparity in education by 2005. These are in addition to other development targets on child and maternal health and on halving the number of people living in poverty by 2015. Meeting the education targets is a prerequisite for meeting the other targets.  Literacy and education are building blocks for democracy and good governance. Without a quality education, people are unable to hold their governments to account.

The World Education Forum at Dakar this April represents an opportunity for Southern Governments and donors to develop a practical action plan that, together with the necessary resources, will help achieve these targets. By following up the action plan with National Education Action Plans in each country, Governments, donors and civil society can ensure that their combined efforts contribute more effectively to achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015 and gender equality by 2005. As the largest donor to sub-Saharan Africa and as a significant donor in the rest of the world, the EU has an obligation to assist Southern Governments to achieve these goals. The EC has already made progress with respect to some areas within which these recommendations fall. For example, its lead role in co-ordinating work on education in Zambia is an example of how co-ordination could work in all regions where the Community programme and some of the EU bilateral work in the same region.

1.      Free and compulsory education

Inequitable resource allocation is one of the most important barriers to quality education for the poor. This is because education is proportionately more costly for the poor and the quality of schooling available to them in the public system is often of inferior quality. Even where education is theoretically free people living in poverty pay heavily for poor quality education that does not necessarily improve their work opportunities or quality of life. As a result, drop out rates among poor people are higher while rich people attend private schools. This leads to a fragmented and an increasingly privatised system that is no one’s responsibility.

Since the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programmes, the quality of education has declined in both Africa and Latin America yet the cost to individual households has steadily increased and represents a significant barrier to achieving EFA.  Effective debt relief could make a massive contribution to achieving equitable resource allocation in education. For example, in Tanzania, households currently finance one third of recurrent spending on education. This is a huge burden on individual households but it is equivalent to only 3% of the resources currently spent on debt-servicing. 

Cost-sharing in education represents an even bigger barrier to girls' education. Drop-out rates for girls are higher than for boys, and girls are less likely to go on to higher education. In addition to cost sharing, the indirect costs of education, such as contributions towards the maintenance of school buildings, the requirement to wear school uniform and the expectation that pupils will perform domestic tasks for teaching staff, all have a greater impact on girls than boys. Inadequate water and sanitation, long distances between home and school, poor transport facilities and few efforts to ensure girls' security are also barriers to their attendance in schools.

Research shows that poverty and underdevelopment are major factors in maternal mortality.  In addition, HIV/AIDS now affects a higher level of women than men in Africa.  Maternal deaths and HIV/AIDS are clearly associated to the level of education that women have received.  In those countries where female literacy is lowest the maternal death rate is highest; where female literacy is high, the maternal death rate is low.[1]

Recommendations

The EU should:

·        Support government efforts to meet their obligations[2] to provide free education through the allocation of resources on an equitable basis of equal spending per child, for example, through deeper, faster debt relief;

·        Make closing the gender gap in education by 2005 a priority in its basic education programmes, not only because it is a human right but because education for girls acts as a catalyst for economic growth and achieving a wide range of human development goals;

·        Support urgent measures to close the gap between urban and rural, public and private schools by improving the quality of schools serving the poorest people;

·        Encourage transparent, redistributive education budgeting at national level;

·        Improve the quality and relevance of education programmes by prioritising investment in teacher training, especially for female teachers, improving the learning environment, targeting women and girls from disadvantaged groups, and adapting to local contexts.

2. Participation and ownership

Equity issues are inseparable from issues of democracy and accountability. People living in poverty have little say in shaping public spending priorities and few avenues of complaint when spending is unevenly distributed and services are poorly run. People living in poverty tend to lose out in public spending rounds because they lack the information, resources and the organisation to promote their own interests.  Southern governments should be empowered to democratically represent all their citizens, in a fruitful dialogue with them, including people living in poverty.

EU policy rhetoric emphasises the need to involve 'relevant social actors' in dialogue, but the role they should play in practice is very unclear. Up until now developing and implementing the mechanisms for involving them has been seen as the sole responsibility of local governments rather than for the EU with patchy results. The new ACP-EU agreement recognises civil society as an official actor in the development process by making provisions for its role in a separate chapter for the first time. This agreement in principle needs to be carefully monitored in practice to ensure that the commitment to involve civil society is realised and that it becomes a feature of all EU development co-operation agreements with other countries and regions.

In parallel with the EU’s new approach to involving civil society in development, other important development actors such as the Bretton Woods institutions are negotiating new strategies in partnership with Southern Governments with the aim to increase ownership. These should build on national poverty eradication strategies developed following the World Summit for Social Development in 1995. All these initiatives need to be cohered into a single, manageable national development plan that is elaborated by government in partnership with civil society. External support, such as that envisaged by the World Bank and IMF in their Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP), must be developed out of a participatory process in which all stakeholders are meaningfully consulted and in which there is real national ownership.   There should be no interference of donors in this process, nor should the outcome of such plans be used as a condition for granting loans.

Recommendations

The EU should:

·        Allocate aid in support of National Education Action Plans, which should be developed by Governments in partnership with stakeholders in the national education system. National Education Action Plans should set out how to achieve the national education goals within the broad framework of the 2015 targets, should be framed in the context of Poverty Reduction Strategies, and should be completed by 2001. They should contain clear and binding mechanisms for ongoing consultation with civil society organisations, ensuring their active role in the design, implementation, and monitoring of national education plans.

·        Ensure a greater poverty focus, by shifting the direction of aid to education to the poorest people in line with EC and Development Assistance Committee (of the OECD) (DAC) objectives, with targets agreed at Jomtien on education, at Copenhagen on Social Development and Beijing on gender equality. This can be achieved by reducing support for technical assistance and increasing efforts to foster national ownership. Such efforts require a more participatory development process.

·        Use their combined and co-ordinated influence to ensure that IMF and World Bank policies do not undermine equity and accountability in education, nor adequate funding to achieve their objectives. The EU should influence the development of PRSPs to ensure that agreements entered into with the International Financial Institutions cannot undermine national government attempts to meet the 2015 education target agreed at the World Summit for Social Development and to ensure that national development plans are developed with the full involvement of civil society.

3.         Resource mobilisation

Donors average around 2% expenditure on basic education. The latest figures for EC aid show that the Community committed 5.2% of its aid to all education in 1998[3].  What is really spent is likely to be much lower since actual payments tend to be lower than commitments. In addition, this global figure of 5.2% gives no indication of how much is devoted to basic education support as opposed to other sectors within education.  The EU should double its appropriations for the overall education budget.

All donors should increase their aid to basic education until it amounts to at least 8% of the annual aid budget. This figure will ensure that donors meet their share of the estimated $8 billion per annum for ten years required to achieve Universal Primary Education. This should ensure that no government committed to delivering Education for All is prevented from doing so by lack of resources. Resource mobilisation should be in support of National Education Action Plans.

Public sector debt continues to block the aspirations of many Southern countries to provide Education For All. During the first half of the 1990s debt transfers from Sub-Saharan Africa amounted to approximately $10 billion per annum - twice the level of regional spending on education. Honduras spends five times more on debt servicing than on basic education. In Niger, one of the world's poorest countries, spending on primary education is less than half of government spending on debt. Despite commitments from some EU Member States and the European Commission to forgive debt under the HIPC initiative, major creditors are still doing too little too late to increase the number of countries eligible for debt relief and to develop and implement fast track procedures for debt relief linked to increased investment in basic social services.

Recommendations

The EU should

·        Champion a Global Action Plan that will ensure that no government committed to providing free and compulsory basic education for all by 2005 is prevented from so doing because of resource constraints.  EC aid to education should be doubled from its current level.

·        Urge governments to guarantee public resource provision to basic education, as part of the Global Action Plan. Governments should commit a minimum proportion of GDP (e.g. 4 per cent of GDP in low-income countries) to be allocated to basic education. Spending on education should be protected from World Bank/IMF imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) that have forced governments to cut public expenditure on basic social services in the past.

·        Increase overall aid to basic education to provide sufficient aid to help fill the resource gap. It should ensure that at least 8% of EU bilateral aid, and the Community’s aid budget per annum contribute to the estimated $8 billion per annum for ten years needed to achieve Universal Primary Education. The EU must ensure that there are sufficient disbursement allocations available to meet the commitment appropriations to basic education.

·        Step up efforts to provide quick and generous debt relief, through the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Country initiative (HIPCII). Resources for debt relief must be additional to aid flows, and linked to plans that put basic education at the heart of achieving poverty reduction and promoting economic growth.

·        Work to minimise the detrimental impact of aid tying on the education sector; shortages of relevant, low cost books for use inside and outside school continue to undermine the provision of good quality Education for All. African publishers continue to be at a disadvantage in an economic context which tends to favour the import of books from abroad at the expense of those published in-country.

MEPs should bring pressure to bear on both the Commission and Member States to ensure that:

·        the Dakar framework for action contains meaningful and achievable targets and establishes mechanisms for reporting on progress;

·        the EU commits to making the resources available to ensure that the 2015 goals are achieved;

·        the Commission and all the Member States report data on aid to education to the DAC that is disaggregated by different levels of spending (i.e. basic, secondary, tertiary etc.);

We urge MEPs to support the urgency resolution during the April plenary session on the World Education Forum.

3 April 2000

[1]  WHO 1996; Female Literacy, UNESCO 1996.

[2] As detailed in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and in many national constitutions.

[3] ODI, The European Community External Co-operation Programmes, 1999

Updated on 11 April 2000
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