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.

Inequality: Pakistan has some of the widest education inequalities in the world. As Malala’s shooting last year highlighted, in many districts communities do not expect or allow girls to attend school. The poorest girls in Pakistan are the most disadvantaged: over half have never been to school.

Funding: Pakistan’s spending on education is very low – in 2010, the country allocated only 2.3% of its GDP to education. In comparison, the government spends more on subsidies for Pakistan International Airlines, Pakistan Steel and Pepco (its energy company) than on education. As we noted in an earlier post on this blog, it would take only one-fifth of Pakistan’s military budget to pay for every child to complete primary school.

Pakistan is well endowed with natural resources that could help to get its children into school. Reko Diq in Chaghi district of Balochistan has one of the world’s richest deposits of gold and copper, estimated at an astounding US$3 trillion. But the region is among the poorest in the world in terms of access to school: as many as two in three of the poorest girls in the province have never been to school. The newly elected government needs to use innovative financing mechanisms to tap these resources, and should spend a fair share of the resulting revenues on improving education access and quality, and reducing education inequalities.

The new government must target education reform at the groups who need it most: girls and the poor, especially in rural areas. Some of the other problems frequently mentioned during the election campaign also have a crucial bearing on education, including violence and infrastructure. Safe schools with electricity and running water are essential to create an environment where children can learn.

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.

Many low income and middle income countries have been unprepared to deal with the sudden discovery of an oil field or ore deposits. As a result, their governments have often struck poor deals with multinational companies. Others have been unable to maintain a steady flow of revenue through good and lean years.

Many countries have mismanaged the natural resource revenue, either through corruption or misguided spending choices. It has also often been used to finance armed conflict, such as the ‘blood diamonds’ that fuelled civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. To transform natural resources from a curse into a blessing, governments must maximize their revenue from extractive activities, manage them transparently and invest the wealth in sectors like education that will generate higher, equitable benefits for the population.

The current high prices for non-renewable commodities mean that potential revenue for governments from these resources is greater than ever. In the region furthest from reaching the EFA goals, sub-Saharan Africa, potential profit per capita from non-renewable natural resources tripled between 1998 and 2008. While commodity prices are vulnerable to economic crises such as that of 2008–2009, they have been following an overall upward trend. Of the 17 countries included in the analysis for the Policy Paper, 13 are in sub-Saharan Africa. Better management of their natural resource revenue, and allocating 20% of this to education, could mean that 9.4 million more children would be in school.

A first step towards translating natural resource wealth into development outcomes is for governments to obtain a fair share of the profit, whether they enter into partnerships with private companies or grant them concessions. Botswana has maximized revenue through a partnership: around half of its diamond exports translate into government revenue, compared with 20% on average for other mineral-rich countries. Not only has it achieved universal primary education but its secondary gross enrolment ratio stands at 82%, double the average for the continent. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has also recently announced a proposal to earmark all revenue from oil for education.

Transparency in the use of natural resources is vital to achieve the desired results. But the natural resources extracting industry has been characterized by opacity, with details of contracts between states and companies often shrouded in secrecy. Recently, however, the international community has been pushing for norms of transparency for resource extraction and revenue generation. At the time of writing our new paper, fourteen countries fully complied with its standard for ‘companies to publish what they pay and for governments to disclose what they receive’, and a further twenty-two countries had taken steps to adhere to them.

To encourage fair and productive use of natural resource revenue, our paper recommends that education advocates should concentrate on three fronts.

1. First, they should support transparency and fair taxation measures, pushing all governments to comply with their standards.
2. Second, they should get involved in national debates on the use of natural resource revenue, and make the case for education as a long-term investment essential to diversify the economy and avoid the resource curse.
3. Third, each country should ensure that the recommended 20% of their national budget is allocated to education.

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.

The first half of the paper reviews empirical studies of primary education’s economic, social, and political benefits, underscoring its role in breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty and building stable, equitable societies. In addition, it summarizes emerging evidence that primary education can help to mitigate climate change and the effects of natural disasters – issues that will also be highlighted in the 2013/14 EFA Global Monitoring Report. The paper then quantifies the economic cost of large out-of-school child populations for six countries: Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Mali, Pakistan and Yemen. Based on labour market data and education data from UIS, it is estimated that if today’s out-of-school children are not able to complete primary school, this will result in large income gaps in these countries – from 1.3% of GDP in Pakistan to 6.8% of GDP in Côte d’Ivoire, equivalent to $1.6 billion.

The challenge in achieving global primary education lies in reaching marginalized and remote populations, and accelerating efforts in the countries where out-of-school children remains a systemic problem. While the study does not discuss the mechanics or financing of the necessary education sector interventions, our findings confirm that efforts to enroll out-of-school children are extremely cost-effective. On average, the six countries spend 3.8% of GDP per year on their entire public education systems. The incremental investment in primary education systems, along the order of millions of dollars, needed to reach out-of-school children is far less than the economic gain the countries are estimated to achieve from enrolling out-of-school children, measured in billions of dollars.

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.

The International Council for Adult Education also believes that with 9 in 10 adults in sub-Saharan Africa and India working outside the waged economy, targets for skills training for workers in subsistence economies should be developed.

Out of the six Education for All goals established in 2000, adult learning has received the least attention. At the heart of this failure was the difficulty in measuring. We need regular household surveys backed by disaggregated data, so that the needs of poor and underrepresented groups can be clearly identified. There is a key role for civil society in using data generated to identify groups missing out on development, and to advocate with and for them.

So far the process leading to new global development goals is profoundly opaque. There are lots of places to say what you think, but no clarity at all about how agendas are to be decided. Advocacy for impoverished organisations defending the interests of the global poor deserve better. We need transparent processes to know when and where to make a fuss. After Dakar, and despite the generous and open nature of its debates, I am no clearer about how best we should go about defending adult learners’ interests.

Alan Tuckett is president of the International Council for Adult Education and a visiting professor at the universities of Nottingham and Leicester.

A new report from Save the Children,

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.

Gaps in learning are likely to be even greater for the children we know are most marginalized – including those living in conflict-affected areas, disabled children and those facing disadvantage because of their ethnicity or their mother tongue.

We know more about how marginalized these groups are in terms of access to school, not least because of the important work by the EFA Global Monitoring Report team and their World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE). But we know relatively little from national data about how much children in these groups suffer from hidden exclusion.

Save the Children is acutely aware, however – from its extensive experience working with some of the most disadvantaged children – that they face particularly large barriers to learning and tend to learn much less once in school. They are often the first generation in their families in school and will have less support in the home, might be asked to learn in a language other than their mother tongue and often live in areas with poorly resourced schools and the least trained teachers.

Narrowing learning gaps requires ambition and boldness

So what does this mean for the post-2015 development framework? Save the Children believes that tackling hidden exclusion demands an overall improvement in education quality: the overarching goal we have proposed is that all children “receive a good quality education and achieve good learning outcomes”. But critically we must avoid one of the main pitfalls of the current MDGs – a failure to explicitly target most inequalities.

That is why we must underpin an easily articulated overall goal with an ambitious target to substantially narrow the learning gaps between the poorest and best-off children. Our specific proposal is that this target should be:

“Narrowing the gap in literacy and numeracy learning outcomes achieved by aged 12 between the poorest and richest quintiles.”

Some will argue that this should be more ambitious: that is definitely an option. We could, for example, set a more explicit target of reducing the gap by 50%. There would certainly be a case for having more specific targets like this. But the absolutely critical point is to have a clear “gap narrowing” target of some form in the post-2015 framework.

Without such a target, we could ensure 100% enrolment in primary school in the coming years, only to let millions continue to suffer from a damaging hidden exclusion.

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.

Teachers must not only master their subjects; they must also develop strong teaching skills. Unfortunately, teacher training often does not provide teachers with the appropriate skills to teach reading to young children. A study of six sub-Saharan Africa countries found that teacher trainees received very little introduction to teaching early grade reading. In most countries, teachers were not prepared for multilingual classrooms. In addition, many of the training programmes did not offer classroom time with supervision and support, resulting in many new teachers starting without any practical experience.

Some countries have already put ambitious reforms in place to address the need for good teachers with solid training behind them. Our research has seen excellent results from a USAID project in Central America and the Caribbean training 3,400 teachers in reading and writing, for example, and from a distance learning programme for 25,000 teachers in Ghana. These kinds of reforms and teacher training programmes are needed on a much larger scale in order to overcome the learning crisis.

As noted by leaders at last week’s Learning for All Ministerial meeting, the current Millennium Development Goals for education focus only on access; quality of education and learning should be a priority for any new goals after 2015. And, if we want to help an additional 250 million children to learn the basics, we must start by attracting and training the best teachers.

There are only 1,000 days to go until the deadline for the Education for All goals, but there are still 61 million primary school age children out of school. Half of those children live in just eight countries. The Learning for All Ministerial is bringing together their ministers of finance and education with leaders from development partner organizations in Washington on Thursday, to discuss how to accelerate progress, building on the momentum of the UN Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative launched last September.

Many of the children not in school in those countries – Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nigeria, Yemen and South Sudan – miss out because of inequality linked to factors such as where they live, poverty, conflict, gender and ethnicity. We highlight those patterns of inequality in graphic form in a new booklet featuring fresh data from our World Inequalities Database on Education (WIDE), released this week to coincide with Learning for All Ministerial meetings in Washington.

Our data show that the factors keeping children out of school are different in each country – and that some countries have made much greater progress than others, demonstrating what can be achieved when effective policies aimed at reaching the marginalized are backed by political commitment.

Bangladesh, for example, has made great progress in getting children into school, and in gender parity. In most low-income countries, more boys than girls attend school, but in Bangladesh it’s the other way around, partly thanks to a successful cash stipend programme for girls.

Nigeria, by contrast, is a wealthier country than Bangladesh but has the world’s highest number of out-of-school children – 10 million. Nigerian children’s chances of entering and completing primary school vary hugely depending on where they live, and on whether their family is rich or poor. In northeastern Nigeria, almost three-quarters of the poorest children aged 7 to 16 had never been to school in 2008, whereas almost all of the richest children had.

Similar divides show up in Ethiopia, despite considerable progress in getting children into school over the last decade – and in rural areas, the nomadic lifestyle of pastoralists makes them particularly vulnerable, as our new data show. In Addis Ababa, the capital, almost all children now start school. By contrast, almost six out of 10 of the poorest children living in Afar, a predominantly pastoralist region, have never had a chance to go to school.

Ethiopia, 2011: Never been to primary school, aged 7-16

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the most striking gap is between those who live in conflict zones and those who don’t. Almost all children aged 7-16 in the capital city, Kinshasa, have been to school, whether male or female. In the conflict-affected region of Katanga, the richest children have a similar chance of going to school as those in Kinshasa. But one in three of the poorest children have never been to school. The poorest girls in Katanga are the worst off of all: 44% have never been to school, compared with 17% of boys in the region.

Putting education first means that ministers of finance need to work together with ministers of education to tackle disparities such as these. The Learning for All Ministerial meeting, which will be co-hosted by Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group; Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general; and Gordon Brown, the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, are an opportunity to ensure this happens before the 2015 deadline for getting every child into school.

While much of the current attention to Syria’s immediate needs focuses on housing and feeding refugees, UNICEF is protecting education as much as possible, by rebuilding damaged schools, supplying teaching and learning materials, and supporting “school clubs” that give children a chance to catch up on lessons.

“Being in school makes children feel safe and protected and leaves parents hopeful about their children’s future”, said Youssouf Abdel-Jelil, the agency’s representative in Syria, told UNICEF. “That’s why so many parents we talk to single out education as their top priority.”

As we highlighted in the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education, it is vital not only that humanitarian responses include education needs, but also to make sure that there are long-term plans to protect and reconstruct the education system as the conflict drags on and after it ends.

Worldwide, with just 1,000 days to go until the deadline for meeting the Education for All goals, there are still 61 million children out of school – and more than a third of them are in conflicted-affected countries, as we found in the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report. Education often gets forgotten in humanitarian emergencies such as violent conflicts, but what is happening in Syria shows that these are the countries where education needs the most urgent help.

The UNICEF report draws attention to many of the damaging effects of conflict on education that we analysed in our 2011 Report. Children are being kept out of school not only because their schools have been damaged or destroyed, but also because they are being used to shelter displaced people. Some schools have been taken over for use by armed forces. More than 110 teachers and other education staff have been killed, and many teachers are no longer reporting for work.

“Syria once prided itself on the quality of its schools,” Mr. Abdel-Jelil told UNICEF. Now it’s seeing the gains it made over the years rapidly reversed.”

New aid figures released this week by the OECD make for sombre reading. Globally, aid has fallen since 2010, with poor countries hardest hit. This is worrying news for children worldwide as it further jeopardises the Education for All goals, which are already in danger of not being met by 2015. If funds for education become scarcer, access to education will continue to stagnate and the quality of schools will decline, denying the most vulnerable children in the world’s poorest countries the opportunity to learn. Given that 250 million primary-school aged children are not learning even the basics, this downward trend in aid needs to be reversed urgently.

The new OECD figures show that total aid stagnated in 2010, and has fallen since then – by 2% in 2011 and by a further 4% in 2012. As we showed in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, aid to education generally follows the same pattern as overall aid flows. When aid to development stagnated in 2010, it led to a stagnation of aid to education too. Subsequent declines in aid mean that the prospects for children and adolescents who are out of school do not look good.

Palestinian boy walking by his school’s damaged wall during break time at Tuni public school in the Beitlahia area of northern Gaza strip
(c) UNESCO/ Eman Mohammed

It is also of concern that bilateral aid to less developed countries has declined severely, falling by 12.8% in 2012. As we showed in the latest EFA Global Monitoring Report, poor countries rely heavily on aid to keep their education systems afloat. In nine sub-Saharan African countries, we estimate that aid accounts for a quarter of the education budget, contributing to faster education progress. In a context of economic downturn, reducing aid to these countries now will only mean one thing: fewer children in school and learning.

The EFA Global Monitoring Report has recently calculated that the finance gap for education has grown by $10 billion over the past three years. Our analysis showed that this increase is primarily because aid donors have not kept their promises. The total finance gap for basic education now stands at $26 billion a year. With just 1,000 days to go until the 2015 deadline for the EFA goals, the news that aid is falling leaves little hope of bridging this substantial gap.

In 2000, EFA partner countries promised that no country committed to the EFA goals would be left behind due to lack of resources. The failure to deliver on that promise is partly due to a lack of specific funding targets within the eighth Millennium Development Goal on a global partnership, and within the Education for All framework. For the sake of the education of the world’s children, we cannot afford to make the same mistake again. It is vital that a new education finance goal forms part of a comprehensive set of post-2015 education goals that also emphasize equity and measurability.

It is hardly surprising that countries suffering the most from the current economic hardship, such as Greece, have cut aid the most. But in such a climate, it is heartening that nine countries have increased their development aid, and that a new donor has joined the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee – Iceland. It is essential that donors do their utmost to maintain the levels of aid given to education in poor countries.

The outcomes of the youth campaign have been compiled into a multimedia report, which will be delivered to ministers of education around the world.  Click on the image to flip through the pages of messages, photos and videos from youth around the world to governments.

In addition to this multimedia report, young people have also prepared a youth version of the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report which has been widely disseminated at launch events around the world. Although the launch in Cairo marks the end of the official youth campaign for the 2012 Report, the GMR is continuing to engage with young people to listen to their voices on the theme of the  2013/14 Report on Teaching and Learning for Development.