Source:
Global Campaign for Education - GCE
Five years ago, the UN Millennium Summit set just one goal for achievement in 2005: gender parity in primary and secondary education. October 2005.
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Target 3: Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
This is by no means the first occasion in which universal primary education is set as a goal. As Michael A. Clemens puts it, “roughly once every two decades since the Second World War, an international gathering of policymakers has solemnly promised to achieve universal primary education in developing countries by about twenty years thereafter”.
Civil society organizations such as Oxfam and the Global Campaign for Education attribute this repeated failure to donor community’s lack of funding and of developing countries’ political will. They argue that this is the most achievable of all the Millennium Development Goals if the agreed recommendations are followed.
A the World Bank Spring Meetings in 2002, the Fast Track Initiative (FTI) was launched. This partnership between rich and poor country aimed at providing the funding necessary to meet this MDG. One year later, in April 2003, the Bank’s Development Committee requested a progress report on the FTI in time for their meeting in Dubai. According to a report by the Global Campaign for Education, there is no progress to report, since donors haven’t kept their promises.
A different perspective is offered by Clemens, from the Center for Global Development, in his paper on international education goals. He challenges the assumption that schooling causes higher income and states otherwise: economic development increases demand for education. According to him, “parental education levels determine children’s school enrolment to a greater degree than education policy interventions”. It points out that focusing, as the MDG approach does, on this kind of interventions mainly through donor funding “is the optimal strategy for governments of rich and of poor countries when neither is accountable to the other”.
Meanwhile, almost all NGOs working in education-related fields keep on claiming that poverty eradication depends on education.
The Global Campaign for Education promotes education as a basic human right, and mobilizes public pressure on governments and the International Community to fulfill their promises to provide free, compulsory public basic education for all people; in particular for children, women and all disadvantaged, deprived sections of society.
Confederation of twelve non-governmental organizations working together in more than 80 countries to find lasting solutions to poverty, suffering and injustice.
Many regions are on track to achieve the target before 2015, but lower levels of achievement and progress persist in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Asia and Southern Asia.
The Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality, an expert advisory group commissioned by the UN Secretary General, has been assigned to take a systematic look at the means to achieve dramatic improvements in education in the developing world. Two comprehensive interim reports are available for discussion.
According to NetAid, this myth is false. Instead, "ensuring that every child has access to education is important to individual development, as well as to local, national and even international growth and progress”.
Following the G8 Summit, GCE campaigners turned their attention to the Millennium +5 World Summit in New York . It was originally conceived as an opportunity for Heads of State to review progress in meeting the Millennium Declaration of 2000, strengthen the UN and commit countries to peace-building measures. October 2005.
In April 2003, the World Bank’s Development Committee requested a progress report on the FTI in time for their meeting in Dubai. They will not get one, because there is no progress to report. Country by country and donor by donor, this GCE “No-progress Report” documents the systematic failure of donors to keep their promise to Southern governments. The report also outlines what must be done to make the FTI effective.
This paper was written for the Spring Meetings 2003. It highlights the steps being taken to address the demand for basic education by governments in a number of developing countries.
This paper argues that efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on school enrolments through changes to education policy and increased funding are unrealistic and misguided. Pdf format.
The year 2005 is crucial for the international agenda of poverty eradication and the promotion of gender equality. The implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action review has just finished in March 2005, and the Millennium Declaration is undergoing a 5 year review process. Actual progress towards the targets outlined in these documents is being measured. Pdf format, March 2005.
