Syria conflict takes a heavy toll on education

The conflict in Syria is causing severe damage to the education system, according to a new report by UNICEF on the country’s two-year crisis. Thousands of children are being kept out of school by the violence. Some have already missed out on almost two years of schooling. And one in five schools have been damaged or destroyed – 2,400 in total.

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.

Shrinking aid flows risk putting Education for All out of reach

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

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.

BRIEFLY: Messages from youth campaigners to governments on the skills deficit

The Arabic version of the 2012 Global Monitoring Report will be launched today in Cairo, at an event hosted by the League of Arab States. As the last of the regional launches of the Report, the event will also mark the end of the official youth campaign, which has gathered the voices of over 1,000 youth from approximately 100 countries. These young people have stressed the importance of governments giving all young people, whatever their circumstances, the opportunity to learn relevant skills that prepare them for rewarding work.

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.

Post-2015 and Bali: Without education for all, we can’t achieve sustained prosperity for all

It was very good news that a global meeting this week seems to have made progress in aligning two competing visions for the post-2015 development agenda – one centred on eradicating poverty and the other on sustainable development. But it is worrying that the communiqué from the meeting failed to mention education, which underpins all other development efforts and transforms them into long-term change.

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

At the meeting, held in Bali, Indonesia, the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda discussed the most neglected of the Millennium Development Goals, “Developing a global partnership for development” (MDG 8), which seems to have been overlooked largely because it lacked specific indicators that could be used to hold leaders to account.

The Bali meeting might have been expected to focus on ways of better measuring progress in global partnerships after 2015. Instead, given the contents of the communiqué, discussions seem to have focused on ways to resolve the false dichotomy that has emerged between the sustainable development framework promoted by the UN Rio+20 conference and one centred on poverty eradication. The communiqué appears to reach a unifying solution: “Our vision is to end extreme poverty in all its forms and to have in place the building blocks of sustained prosperity for all”.

The linking of the two competing agendas is very welcome, particularly as most commentators see a combined people-centred and planet-sensitive development agenda as mutually beneficial. But sustained prosperity for all cannot be built without a good education, whose importance deserved to be mentioned in the meeting’s communiqué. People voting on their post-2015 priorities – whose views were passed on to the meeting in Bali – recognize this, and have so far placed education at the top.

It is very encouraging that the communiqué calls for a “data revolution”, listing as one of its five key areas the need to ensure data availability and better accountability in measuring progress. In line with the EFA Global Monitoring Report’s proposal for education goals, the communiqué reassuringly highlights equity as one of the principles for a renewed global partnership. It identifies the need for improvements in reporting at sub-national levels disaggregated by sex, age, region and other variables (I would specify poverty and disability as key other variables as part of this). The EFA Global Monitoring Report has developed an interactive, user-friendly World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), which allows tracking of progress for different population groups within countries. With improved data, the approach used in our new database could become even more instrumental in holding policymakers to account for commitments that they make after 2015.

Even with the data available, our WIDE database shows that progress in education for the most disadvantaged groups has been too slow over the past decade. Inequalities in other areas will not be reduced without tackling educational inequalities first, as was clearly explained by Will Paxton from Save the Children in a guest blog on this site. “Education” is a word that the panel appear to have skirted away from in writing their communiqué; instead, it should have been included up-front as a key enabler for the principles it endorses.

The world’s poorest children are paying a high price for scholarships

By Nicole Comforto, EFA Global Monitoring Report

For many donor countries, a large proportion of ‘aid’ never leaves their country. Spending this money on education in the world’s poorest countries could go a long way to giving the 132 million out-of-school children and adolescents the chance for a better future.

Our recent policy paper, Education for All is affordable – by 2015 and beyond, shows that we could bridge the $26 billion financing gap if both developing countries and donors prioritized basic education. Currently, donors spend US$3.1 billion per year on university students from poor countries to study in donor countries, equivalent to one quarter of total direct aid to education. This money is spent on scholarships and imputed costs (costs incurred by donor-country institutions when they receive students from developing countries). While higher education is undoubtedly important, allocating aid in this way does little to help the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children and young people.

For each scholarship provided for a student to study at a university in a developed country, hundreds of students in a developing country could receive basic education. One single scholarship for a Nepalese student in Japan, for example, could pay for 229 secondary school students in Nepal.

In 2010, almost 40% of Japan’s direct aid to education went to scholarships for students studying in Japan; the equivalent for Canada was 22%. Germany’s aid disbursements to scholarships and imputed student costs were almost eleven times the amount it spent on direct aid to general secondary education and vocational training in 2010. That same year, France’s aid disbursements to scholarships and imputed student costs were four times as much as was spent on direct aid to general secondary education and vocational training.

Let’s choose post-2015 education goals that reflect countries’ own needs

For post-2015 education goals to achieve real change, they need the widest support possible, argues Ed Barnett, an education adviser at the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. (The views expressed in this blog are the author’s and do not represent official policy.)

Education is both a human right and a necessary ingredient for global prosperity. A quality education can enable people to shape, strengthen and contribute to thriving economies and open, inclusive societies. It’s not just an outcome from development; it’s a foundational building block. But how should education be represented in a post-2015 development framework?

As with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the broader post-2015 debate is seeking to define goals that express global aspirations and motivate action that transforms development and reduces poverty. The framework needs to be universally applicable but it is crucial that countries signing up to it feel the goals are relevant and belong to them. Achieving this sense of ownership is the key to real change.

Learning from and building on the MDGs and EFA goals

Students outside a schoolroom in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Copyright UNESCO / Hofer

The MDGs have stimulated a substantial advance in access to basic education. In the decade to 2008, more than 50 million extra girls and boys were able to enrol. Now the world needs not only to build on the progress made through the EFA goals and MDGs but also to address their shortcomings.

There are still 61 million boys and girls out of school and there is a global learning crisis, which has been well documented in recent blogs. Little progress was made on EFA where measurement was unclear and the MDGs were criticized for not being nationally “owned”; universal targets ignored the fact that each country was starting from a different point.

Whose priorities?

Less often discussed is the significance of demographic change and the increased burden this will place on future education systems. By 2050, most of DFID’s bilateral partners in Africa will see their populations double, and in Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia they are set to triple. In 11 of the world’s poorest countries, half the population will still be aged 23 or younger in 2050.

The massive youth bulge in many low income countries is growing and these young people are increasingly unemployed. What would they choose as their top priorities? In a thought-provoking study commissioned by the ONE Campaign, education comes far behind jobs, economic management and agriculture as pressing concerns felt by people in Africa, East Asia and Latin America. Whose voices are being heard in the UN online survey of what people want in a post-2015 world?

A consensus is growing in the global education community that post-2015 education goals should focus on getting more children into school, reducing inequalities and making sure that children are learning. But how much does this international consensus match countries’ own priorities? And how do these themes translate into measurable action?

Are we on track for a global education goal? Reflections on the global meeting on education post-2015

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

This week I joined 100 education experts from around the world in Dakar, Senegal, to consider the outcomes of global consultations on post-2015 education goals, organized by UNESCO and UNICEF. The wide-ranging discussions reached consensus on the importance of stressing the right to education and, crucially, on the need for post-2015 education goals to focus strongly on access and education quality, with equity cutting across both.

Participants also supported placing greater emphasis on ensuring that no country is left behind due to insufficient finance after 2015, in line with the EFA Global Monitoring Report’s recent proposals.

At the same time, as Vincent Rigby of the Canadian International Development Agency stressed, it is vital to make the case for education’s importance as a gateway to other development goals; The global education community can’t take it for granted that others will consider education as high a priority as we know it is. Gordon Brown’s opening message put this powerfully, stating that if all mothers had at least secondary education, 1.8 million children’s lives could be saved each year.

I was encouraged by the enthusiasm and high ambitions that the education community expressed during the meeting, but I was also left with some concerns. Participants could have made more progress towards ensuring that new education goals are clearly and simply stated, measurable and have equity at their heart. The EFA Global Monitoring Report team, calling on its decade of tracking the EFA goals, has identified these as essential criteria for post-2015 education goals, as I outlined in an earlier blog post.

Participants agreed that the education community needed to identify an overarching education goal that would fit within the broader post-2015 development framework, to avoid the kind of mistake made with the second Millennium Development Goal (universal primary education),which was too reductionist. The document summarizing the outcomes of the Dakar meeting proposes as an overarching goal “equitable quality lifelong education and learning for all”. This proposal will be put forward to the Post-2015 High Level Panel, which will meet in Bali next week.

The wording appears to be a compromise aimed at resolving an emerging tension between two schools of thought in the education community. Should the focus be on the process of ensuring education quality, or on the outcome of learning? The former implies an all-encompassing goal, just as is being proposed for health in the form of a goal on universal health care. The latter is a plea for specificity, emphasized by Amina Mohammed, the UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser on Post-2015 Development Planning, in her opening remarks to the meeting. The proposed goal attempts to incorporate both – in the form of “quality lifelong education” as well as “learning for all”.