Is the world on track to achieve the millennium target of Education for All (EFA) by 2015? Are the six EFA commitments made in April 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar being met? How can we plug gaps in knowledge about schooling and improve EFA reporting, monitoring and analysis?

UNESCO’s EFA Global Monitoring Report 2002 records progress at the national level against each of the six Dakar EFA goals. Assessing the international response to the call for EFA National Action Plans, the engagement of civil society in promoting EFA and the real costs of achieving EFA goals, the report calls for concerted action to sustain post-Dakar momentum.

UNESCO finds much to applaud but also warns that a third of the world’s population (particularly in South and West Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa) live in states unlikely to achieve EFA goals. Post-communist European and Central Asian nations are in danger of falling back from goals that have been attained. Populous countries in East Asia will have to intensify efforts to get back on track. Prospects of meeting EFA goals are not helped by the steady decline in multilateral and bilateral aid flows to education.

Progress in developing national EFA action plans is varied. Statistics remain unreliable – accurate primary-school net enrolment data are unavailable for more than seventy countries. The database on aid to education is plagued by conceptual problems and reporting inadequacies.

Analysis of latest-available data from 154 countries shows that:

• 83 countries have a good chance of achieving the three quantifiable Dakar goals -Universal Primary Education (UPE), gender parity and adult literacy - by 2015; 43 are likely to miss at least one goal and 28 (home to a quarter of the world’s population) are at risk of not achieving any
• 115.4 million school-age children are out of school, 56% of them girls
• education systems with large numbers of over-age students have difficulty in keeping children, particularly girls, enrolled
• 86 countries can be said to have eliminated gender disparities: 49 are currently unlikely to get there by 2015.

Progress towards eradication of illiteracy is slow. The total number of people defined as illiterate in 2000 (862 million) is almost the same as it was in 1980. Two thirds of them are women. Some 60% of illiterate people live in four high-population countries – India, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh – which are likely to be home to the bulk of the 800 million people anticipated to remain illiterate in 2015. More than one in eight of them will be 15-24 year olds.

UNESCO calls for:

• additional investment in the collection and analysis of data and provision of  adequate training for the 15-35 million additional teachers needed worldwide to achieve UPE
• tackling the problems of grade repetition and drop out in sub-Saharan education systems
• incorporating the goal to end gender disparities in education into Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
• greater focus on addressing the impact of HIV/AIDS and conflict on education systems
• developing international consistency on transparent education planning processes involving genuine partnership with those outside of government
• greater realism and donor generosity when plugging gaps in national resource requirements to reach EFA.

Source(s):
‘Education for All: is the world on track? EFA Global Monitoring Report 2002’, UNESCO, 2002 Full document.

Funded by: DFID + SIDA + UNESCO

id21 Research Highlight: 7 November 2003

Further Information:
Christopher Colclough
Centre for Commonwealth Education
184 Hills Road
Cambridge
CB2 2PQ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1223 507133
Fax: +44 (0)1223 767602
Contact the contributor: c.colclough@educ.cam.ac.uk

EFA Monitoring Report Team, UNESCO

Other related links:
See the latest UNESCO EFA Report 2003/2004

'Class struggles: the challenges of achieving schooling for all' Insights Education #2

See id21's links to other sites on acheivement and schooling for all

'Education for all? The challenges of inclusive education'

'Meeting education development goals: simply a question of money?'

'Oxfam education report: avoiding another decade of failure?'

'Basic education at a distance – new strategies for achieving Education For All'