Ending Poverty Through Education: The Challenge of Education for All

by Koïchiro Matsuura

The world made a determined statement when it adopted the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000. These goals represent a common vision for dramatically reducing poverty by 2015. They provide clear objectives for significant improvement in the quality of people’s lives.

Learning and education are at the heart of all development – and consequently of this global agenda. MDG 2 aims to ensure that “children everywhere, boys and girls, will be able to complete a full course of good quality primary schooling”. MDG 3 sets a target to “eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and at all levels of education no later than 2015.” Indeed, learning is implicit in all the MDGs: improving maternal health, reducing child mortality and combating HIV/AIDS can simply not be achieved without empowering individuals with knowledge and skills to better their lives. In addition, MDG 8 calls for “more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction.”

The MDG goals on education echo the Education for All (EFA) goals, also adopted in 2000. However, the EFA agenda is much broader, encompassing not only universal primary education and gender equality, but also early childhood education, quality, lifelong learning and literacy. This holistic approach is vital to ensuring full enjoyment of the human right to education, and achieving sustainable and equitable development.

What progress have we made towards universal primary education? The 2008 EFA Global Monitoring Report entitled “Education for All by 2015: will we make it? presents an overall assessment of progress, at the halfway point between 2000 and 2015. There is much encouraging news:

• Between 1999 and 2005, the number of children entering primary school for the first time grew by 4%, from 130 million to 135 million, with a jump of 36% in sub-Saharan Africa - a major achievement given strong demographic growth in the region.

• Overall participation in primary schooling worldwide grew by 6.4%, with the fastest growth in the two regions farthest from achieving the MDG on education, sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia.

• Looking at the net enrolment ratio (NER), which measures the share of children of official primary school age who are enrolled at this level, more than half the countries of North America and Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean have rates of over 90%. Ratios are below those in the Arab States, Central Asia, and South and West Asia, with lows in countries of those regions of 33% (Djibouti) and 68% (Pakistan). The challenge is greatest in sub-Saharan Africa where more than one-third of countries have rates below 70%.

• The number of children out of school has dropped sharply, from 96 million in 1999 to around 72 million by 2005, with the biggest change in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia, regions which continue, however, to harbour the largest percentages of children not in school. South and West Asia is the region with the highest share of girls out of school.

The MDG on education specifies that both boys and girls should receive a full course of primary schooling. The gender parity goal set for 2005, however, has not been achieved by all. Many countries have made significant progress. In South and West Asia, one of the regions with the widest disparities, 93 girls for every 100 boys were in school in 2005 – up from only 82 in 1999. Yet, globally, 70 out of the 188 countries with data had not achieved gender parity at the primary level in 2005. There is much more to do, particularly in rural areas and urban slums, but there are strong trends in the right direction.

This overall assessment indicates that progress in achieving universal primary education is positive. Countries where primary school enrolments rose sharply generally increased their education spending as a share of GNP. Public expenditure on education climbed by over 5% annually in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. Aid to basic education in low-income countries more than doubled between 2000 and 2004.

Progress has happened through universal and targeted strategies. Fourteen countries have abolished primary school fees since 2000, a measure that has promoted enrolment of the most disadvantaged children. Several countries have established mechanisms to redistribute funds to poorer regions, to target areas that are lagging in terms of access to education or to offset economic barriers to schooling for poor households. Many – including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, India and Yemen – have introduced specific strategies to encourage girls’ schooling: community sensitization campaigns, early childhood centres to release girls from caring for their siblings, free uniforms and learning materials. These strategies are working and they reflect strong national commitment to achieving universal primary education.

Enrolment, however, is only half the story – children need to stay in primary school and complete it. One way of measuring this is the survival rate to the last grade of primary education. Although data are not available for every country, globally the rate of survival to the last grade is 87%; this masks wide regional variations, with medians of over 90% in all parts of the world except South and West Asia (79%) and sub-Saharan Africa (63%). Even then, some children drop out in the last grade and never complete their primary education, with some countries showing a 20% gap between those who enter the last grade and those who complete it.

One of the principal challenges is to improve the quality of learning and teaching. Cognitive skills, basic competencies and life-skills, positive values and attitudes – all these are essential for development at individual, community and national levels. In a world where the acquisition, use and sharing of knowledge are increasingly the key to poverty reduction and social development, the need for quality learning outcomes becomes an essential condition for sharing in the benefits of growing prosperity. What children take away from school, and what youth and adults acquire in non-formal learning programmes, should enable them, as expressed in the four pillars of the Delors report Learning: The Treasure Within (1996), to learn to know, to do, to be, and to live together.

Governments are showing growing concern about poor education quality. An increasing number of developing countries are participating in international and regional learning assessments, and conducting their own ones. Evidence from several finds that up to 40% of students do not reach minimum achievement standards in language and mathematics. Pupils from more privileged socio-economic backgrounds and those with access to books consistently perform better than those from poorer backgrounds with limited access to reading materials.

Clear messages emerge from these studies. In primary education, quality learning depends first and foremost on the presence of enough properly trained teachers. But pupil/teacher ratios have increased in sub-Saharan Africa and in South and West Asia since 1999. Eighteen million new teachers are needed worldwide to reach universal primary education by 2015. Other factors have a clear influence on learning: a safe and healthy physical environment (including, among others, appropriate sanitation for girls), adequate learning and teaching materials, a child-centred curricula and sufficient hours of instruction (at least 800 hours/year). Initial learning through the mother tongue has a proven impact on literacy acquisition. Transparent and accountable school governance, among others, also affects the overall learning environment.

What, then, are the prospects for achieving universal primary education and gender parity? The 2008 EFA Global Monitoring Report first puts countries into two categories depending on their current NER: 80-96% or less than 80%. For each category, it then assesses whether current rates of progress are likely to enable each country to reach the goal by 2015. Noting that 63 countries worldwide have already achieved the goal, and that 54 countries cannot be included in the analysis due to lack of adequate data, the status is as follows:

Out of the 95 countries unlikely to achieve gender parity by 2015, 14 will not achieve it in primary education, and 52 at secondary level. A further 29 countries will neither achieve parity in primary nor in secondary education.

The international community must focus on giving support to those countries that are currently not on track to meet the MDG and EFA goals and to those that are making progress. On current trends, and if pledges are met, bilateral aid to basic education will likely reach US$5 billion a year in 2010. This remains well below the US$9 billion required to reach UPE alone. An additional US$2 billion are needed to address the wider context of educational development. Ensuring that adults, particularly mothers, are literate has an impact on whether their children, and especially their daughters, attend school. In today’s knowledge-intensive societies, 774 million adults are illiterate – one in four of them are women. Early learning and pre-school programmes give children a much better chance to survive and succeed once they enter primary school, but such learning opportunities are few and far between across most of the developing world, except in Latin America and the Caribbean. Quality secondary education opportunities and ongoing learning programmes provide motivation for students to achieve the highest possible level of education and to view learning as a lifelong endeavour.

The goals towards which we are striving are about the fundamental right to education that should enable every child and every adult to develop their potential to the full, so that they both contribute actively to societal change and enjoy the benefits of development. The challenge now is to ensure that learning opportunities reach all children, youth and adults, regardless of their background. This requires inclusive policies to reach the most marginalized, vulnerable and disadvantaged populations − working children, those with disabilities, indigenous groups, linguistic minorities and populations affected by HIV/AIDS. Globally, the world has set its sights on sustainable human development, the only prospect for reducing inequalities and improving the quality of life for present and future generations. In this perspective, governments, donors and international agencies must continue working jointly towards achieving universal primary education and the broader MDG agenda with courage, determination and unswerving commitment.


Koïchiro Matsuura
Director-General of UNESCO

• Source:UN Chronicle (Vol. XLIV Number 4)
• 01-10-2007