EFA “further off track than we thought”

The new Global Monitoring Report on Education for All will show that “we are much further off track than we thought in achieving Education for All”, the report’s Director told meetings at UNESCO in Paris last week.

Kevin Watkins, Director of the report was speaking to a meeting of the UNESCO/World Economic Forum Partnerships for Education. Kevin said that there was systemic bias in reporting by governments of their progress towards attainment of the EFA targets. Many governments overstate the presence of children in schools, he said.

UNESCO’s analysis corresponds to evidence from EI member organisations. Children may be registered in school, but the statistics do not show those who rarely attend, if at all. Added to this are two other major issues which lie behind the statistics showing progress toward EFA targets. In many countries class sizes are way too large – shockingly so in some cases. And the young people recruited as teachers may not be at all qualified. This is why EI stresses the need for quality education for all.

Kevin Watkins said the financing gap was also much greater than previously thought. Calculations of the cost of achieving EFA from a decade ago were still being used but were not realistic. It had been assumed that the cost of getting all children out of school into education would be of the order 11 billion US$, and that aid would provide around 7 billion, leaving a financing gap about 4 billion US$. But reworking the figures, the real financing gap was more like 15 to 16 billion US dollars, he said, noting that these were preliminary figures as work on the report was still underway.

The financial crisis will exacerbate the problem of education funding. As financial flows to developing countries slow to a trickle, government revenues drop and official development assistance falls. Kevin Watkins said the G20 should put stronger emphasis on the stabilisation of education finance.

This was sobering information from a credible source. Unfortunately, it tends to confirm the warnings given out by EI. Setting of the Millennium Development Goal of primary education for all by the year 2015 was seen as a more serious commitment by the entire international community, compared with earlier efforts, such as the Jomtien Declaration of 1990. But as we near the year 2010 – two thirds of the way to 2015 – there is still a long way to go to achieve Quality Education for All.