More than 50 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established education as a fundamental right for all, under-investment in education is still a main cause of global poverty and inequality. Failure to meet the education targets agreed at the 1990 World Conference on Education for All by the year 2000 resulted in a revised target date of 2015. Can national governments generate enough political will to ensure that educational progress does not fall short of the United Nations’ aspiration?

The Oxfam Education Report, which surveys the scale of the education crisis in developing countries, identifies its underlying causes, and sets out an agenda for reform. The Report demonstrates that free, universal, good-quality primary education is affordable, given a change of priorities by governments in the north and south.

This report discusses the central challenges facing the international community in the effort to ensure good, quality basic education for all. It uses a new analytical tool - the Education Performance Index - to assess the rate of progress towards universal primary education. It concludes that the Framework for Action developed at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000 provides good principles for a workable strategy to achieve the 2015 education targets. But whether the strategy translates into progress on the scale required ultimately depends not on the availability of resources, but on the political will of governments, north and south.

Research findings include:

• Developing country governments have failed to prioritise education in their national budgets.
• Northern governments and multilateral organisations have failed to honour their commitments to debt relief, increased development assistance, and the reform of structural adjustment programmes - all of which impact on the attainability of educational targets.
• Gaps in educational opportunity between rich and poor countries are increasingly shaping the distribution of global wealth. But large educational inequalities also exist within countries - the most important sources being poverty, gender-based inequity, rural-urban divisions, and ethnicity.
• Decentralisation of education has the potential to generate benefits in terms of accountability and service provision, but it also been associated with widening inequalities based on wealth.
• Increasing privatisation of educational services reflects the under-performance of public education, and offers little real hope of meeting the 2015 targets of universal primary education.
• Despite free universal good, quality primary education being achievable by 2015, if current trends continue, none of the education targets, quantitative or qualitative, will be met.

Policy implications include:

• IMF programmes must be reformed to reflect the financing requirements for achieving the international development targets for education, and the wider development goals defined in national poverty reduction strategies.
• Post-Dakar, the challenge is to develop more effective strategies and policies at the national level, and through international action, to provide the financial resources necessary to ensure that such policies succeed.
• While national strategies must be developed in a way that takes account of local realities, there is tremendous scope for learning from, and adapting good practice.
• National action plans should not become token exercises designed solely to meet donors' reporting requirements, nor should they be used to create another layer of bureaucracy.
• As with existing sectoral planning, new national education plans will not succeed unless they are built on genuine partnerships, with local communities having a voice in their design.
• Whether the strategy translates into progress on the scale required will ultimately depend not on the availability of resources, but on the political will of governments.

Source(s):
‘The Oxfam Education Report' Oxfam GB by Kevin Watkins (2000) Full document.

Funded by: Oxfam UK

id21 Research Highlight: 1 February 2002

Further Information:
Helen Bowers
Oxfam Publishing
274 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7DZ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1865 311 311
Fax: +44 (0)1865 312 600
Contact the contributor: publish@oxfam.org.uk

Oxfam

Other related links:
'Hitting the target: doubling primary enrolments in sub-Saharan Africa by 2015'

'Better health and education for Ethiopia: unachievable ambition?'

CIDA reports on Basic education - Ensuring opportunity for all

Refer to the Development Goals for Education

SD Dimensions focuses on Education

World Education Forum aims towards Education For All