Sustainable development begins with education

By Pauline Rose, director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report

As the post-2015 goal-setting process continues, education has increasingly been discussed as not only a development goal in its own right, but also a key way of reaching other development goals. And for good reason: a country that provides free access to quality education for all its citizens is far more likely to reduce poverty, promote economic growth, lower child and maternal mortality and achieve social inclusion. Two recent consultations highlight the importance of education and learning.

Our online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

The recent draft Executive Summary for the United Nations World We Want Post-2015 Global Consultation on Education positions education as both a human right and the foundation for development. The summary, which is open for comments until May 27, calls for new goals to focus not just on access, but also on quality of learning. The focus on quality is welcome: as we found in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report, education systems must address the fact that 250 million young people – including many who are in school – lack basic literacy and numeracy. The World We Want summary identifies the crucial role that teachers play in providing quality education, which will be a major topic in our upcoming 2013/2014 EFA Global Monitoring Report, on teaching and learning for development

The draft Executive Summary does an excellent job of framing the urgent need for equitable education. However, ultimately a clearer goal will need to be defined to ensure that progress toward quality Education for All is clear and measurable. The Executive Summary uses the proposed goal from the expert meeting in Dakar several months ago, “Equitable quality lifelong education and learning for all”, as its proposed overarching education goal. As I mentioned in an earlier post after the Dakar meeting, the terms “lifelong education” is open to different interpretations, and thus lacks the clarity necessary for the international community to adopt and measure progress toward this goal. We must ensure that post-2015 education goals are clearly and simply stated, measurable and have equity at their heart.

Pakistan’s elections highlight education challenges

By Nicole Comforto, EFA Global Monitoring Report

The candidates in Pakistan’s election last week frequently cited quality education as one of their top priorities and committed to increase government spending on education, for good reason. Pakistan has the world’s second-highest number of children who are not in school and the education system faces a wide range of challenges, including wide inequalities and poor funding, infrastructure and teacher training.

Education is such a major concern for Pakistan that in 2011 the government declared an “Education Emergency” and a task force produced a report highlighting the urgent need for educational reform. In a recent poll conducted by Al Jazeera, voters listed education as their most important election issue.

Pakistan’s newly elected government – taking over after the country’s first transition from one democratically elected government to another – faces a number of major challenges in the education sector. Here are just a few of the most pressing issues that require urgent reform:

Learning: There are currently 5.1 million children out of school in Pakistan, over 3 million of whom are girls. In addition, many of those in school are not learning the basics due to lack of infrastructure and teacher training. Teacher absenteeism is also a major problem. In total, 49.5 million adults are illiterate, the third-largest number globally.

Turning the ‘resource curse’ into a blessing for education

Maximizing the income from natural resources such as oil and minerals could provide an education to 86% out-of-school children and 42% of out-of-school adolescents in 17 developing countries, according to calculations by the EFA Global Monitoring Report team. Our new policy paper, ‘Turning the ‘resource curse’ into a blessing for education’, shows that these 17 countries could make huge progress on closing remaining education gaps before 2015 by managing their resource revenues better and devoting a significant share to sending children to school.

Several of the countries that are furthest away from achieving the Education for All goals are rich in oils and minerals. However, they have failed to generate enough revenue from their natural resources, have not managed them efficiently, have not struck beneficial deals with extractive companies or have not invested revenue in productive sectors like education. As a result they are losing out on funds which could help reach Education for All and bring sustainable change to their countries.

Released a few days before the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, our new policy paper shows the potential of these natural resources to raise funds for social good. In all 17 countries, total extra funding for education from well-managed natural resource revenue could reach US$5 billion a year – two and a half times the amount that these countries received in aid to education in 2010. Ten of the 17 countries, including Ghana, Tanzania, D.R. Congo and Zambia, would be able to use their additional funds to send all their children to school.

Here are a few examples of the revenue that natural resources could bring to education:

• In Uganda, following recent oil discoveries, the government’s total budget is set to almost double by 2016. This could lead to a doubling of the education budget and send all primary and lower secondary school-aged children to school.
• In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the value of copper and gold this year is expected to be worth more than double its value in 2008, enough to double their education budget and almost achieve universal primary education.
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo receives less than 10% of the income from its minerals with the remaining 90% going to extracting companies. Striking a better deal with these companies and keeping more as government revenue could likely send all of its children to primary school.

The urgency of reaching out-of-school children for economic and social development

Nicholas Burnett is managing director at Results for Development Institute, where he manages the Education portfolio.

New analysis from the Results for Development Institute sheds light on the cost to countries’ economies from out-of-school children. Among the most alarming revelations is that, if unaddressed, out-of-school children can cost as much as 7% of a country’s GDP, depending on the country and the size of the out-of-school population.

Great strides have been made towards realizing universal primary education, with the global number of out-of-school children declining from over 100 million in 2000 to 61 million in 2010, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Still, the most recent Education for All Global Monitoring Report  reveals that progress in reducing the number of out-of-school children has stalled in some countries, notably in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Now is an opportune time to reconsider the wide-ranging benefits of primary education and the economic costs borne by countries with large out-of-school child populations.

At this week’s High Level Strategic Meeting to Accelerate Efforts to Reach Out Of School Children, held in Doha by Educate A Child (EAC), I presented a paper (“A Moral Obligation, An Economic Priority: The Urgency of Enrolling Out-of-School Children,” commissioned by EAC) that explores these two aspects of the global out-of-school children problem.

After Dakar: How does adult learning fit into post-2015 education aims?

Language education for adults at KAN in Amsterdam. (Photo: Sake Rijpkema © UNESCO)

By Alan Tuckett, president of the International Council for Adult Education

When education policymakers overlook the importance of adult learning, it doesn’t just let down adults who could benefit from a greater commitment to their needs. It also fails to exploit a key argument for education’s central place in the wider development agenda. Both omissions were on show last month at the global meeting on post-2015 education aims in Dakar, Senegal.

Anyone looking at the wording of the proposed post-2015 education goal agreed at the Dakar meeting would think that the learning needs of adults were well recognized: “Equitable quality lifelong education and learning for all” covers a commitment to lifelong learning, and for everyone. However, the document summarizing the consultation event failed to mention the learning needs of adults, despite the insistence by participants that all phases of education– from early years to adult life – are intimately connected.

Our new online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

At the same meeting it was lamented that education had been overlooked at the Bali High-Level Panel meeting on the broader post-2015 development agenda in March. But no one was putting two and two together.

However effectively educators resolve internal debates about priorities among themselves, they are failing to persuade the rest of the development community of the key role education plays in the wider development process.  Yet it is clear that progress on HIV/AIDS, clean water and sanitation, democratic participation, maternal deaths and the survival of small children all involve adults understanding the issues and changing behaviour.

As well as being a powerful catalyst in the achievement of other goals, adult learning is a fundamental human right. Despite the Education for All process, 775 million adults still lack literacy skills, two in three of whom are women – a reduction of just 12% since 1999, whereas the EFA target was a 50% reduction. And since we know that children do better in school when their mothers read and write, ignoring adult literacy has an impact on young people too.

It was made clear at Dakar that successor targets to the Education for All goals will be adopted at the World Education Conference in South Korea in spring 2015. One of them should be to secure universal literacy by 2030, with the number of adults without literacy halved in every country by 2020, and halved again five years later, with an immediate priority given to eradicating the gender gap in access to literacy.

Ending education’s ‘hidden exclusion’

A new report from Save the Children, Ending the Hidden Exclusion: Learning and equity in education post-2015, offers a detailed assessment of the challenges facing global education. The report’s key argument is outlined here by four Save the Children education experts from around the world: Desmond Bermingham, Gerd-Hanne Fosen, Will Paxton and Dan Stoner.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and much policy thinking in recent decades have rightly focused on an obvious and invidious exclusion – the large number of primary school age children who are still out of school.

But now we need to focus much more on a “hidden exclusion”: children who are in school but learning little or nothing.

Our new online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

Though less obvious, this form of exclusion is also both incredibly damaging for each child’s life chances and detrimental for achieving a fairer society. That’s why a post-2015 global education goal must include the explicit objective of not only improving overall learning, but also narrowing gaps in learning between the best off and the poorest, most disadvantaged children.

The scale of the challenge should not be underestimated. The chart below, adapted by Save the Children from work by the University of Stellenbosch’s Nicholas Spaull, distinguishes between “simple” enrolment – merely being in school – and “effective enrolment” – where children are in school and gaining basic literacy and numeracy skills.

In South Africa, for example, almost 100% of children are enrolled, but only around 70% are “effectively” enrolled; almost 30% are suffering from “hidden exclusion”. For many other countries – such as Malawi, Zambia or Namibia – the gap between simple and effective enrolment is even greater.

‘Simple’ versus ‘effective’ enrolment in literacy and numeracy of Grade 6 students in select eastern and southern African countries

Source: Based on data from Spaull and Taylor (2012) ‘Effective enrolment’ Stellenbosch Economic Working Papers 21/12.

The poorest and most marginalized are hit hardest by this hidden exclusion. In Uganda, for example, children from the best off households are 20 percentage points more likely to be in school and learning (measured using literacy at the end of primary school). In South Africa the gap is a shocking 33 percentage points. There are similar, though slightly less stark, differences between children in urban areas and those in poorer rural areas.

Every child needs a good teacher, especially in the early grades

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

Worldwide, 250 million primary school age children are not learning the basics – even though almost half of them are in school. Studies in several countries have shown that many children spend two or three years in school without learning to read a single word. That is why the 2013-14 EFA Global Monitoring Report will focus on recruiting and training effective teachers, who are vital to overcoming the learning gap and providing equitable education for all.

Photo Ethiopia Copyright UNESCO/Petterik Wiggers/Panos Pictures London UK
Design by Nicolas Gros – Wild is the Game.com

“Every child needs a teacher” is also the theme of this year’s Global Action Week, organized by the Global Campaign for Education. Teacher shortages are one of the main reasons for the learning crisis. In some sub-Saharan African countries, there are over 100 students per teacher. But as our latest policy paper explains, lack of teachers is not the only problem. Every child needs a good teacher. Unfortunately, many teachers lack training, especially in the poorest areas – where they are needed most.

Our new paper, Addressing the crisis in early grade teaching explains the importance of ensuring that the best trained teachers are allocated to children in the early grades, where they can have the biggest impact on the weakest students. Reaching children at this young age can prevent them from dropping out before they have even learnt to read or write; it brings huge benefits to their learning potential later in life.

A good teacher needs to have a good level of education. In many countries, however, this is not the case. In northern Nigeria, for example, 78% of 1,200 basic education teachers were found to have “limited” knowledge of English after taking a reading comprehension test and correcting sentences written by a 10-year-old. In Kenya, grade 6 teachers were given a mathematics test based on the primary school syllabus. The average teacher score was only 60%, with some teachers scoring as low as 17%. Not surprisingly, their students also received low scores on the same test, averaging around 47%. Clearly, students cannot be expected to learn subjects that their teachers have not mastered themselves.