The State of the World's Children 1999
Carol Bellamy, Executive Director, United Nations Children's Fund
Contents
Foreword by Kofi A. Annan, Secretary-General of the United
Nations
Chapter I
Education For All: Making the right a reality
The State of the World's Children 1999 reports on the
efforts of the international community to ensure that all
its children enjoy their human right to a high-quality
education -- efforts that are resulting in an 'education
revolution'. The goal of this worldwide movement: Education
For All.
Towards that end, the work of governments, non-governmental
organizations, educators, communities, parents and children
is informed by a definition of education that includes, but
goes far beyond, schooling. Within this definition,
education is an essential human right, a force for social
change -- and the single most vital element in combating
poverty, empowering women, safeguarding children from
exploitative and hazardous labour and sexual exploitation,
promoting human rights and democracy, protecting the
environment and controlling population growth. Education is
a path towards international peace and security.
This chapter includes examples of initiatives that meet the
child's right to education at the international, regional,
national and local levels. It is divided into three
sections.
The right to education: This section explores the historical
context in which children's right to education has been
repeatedly affirmed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the
Child, the 1990 World Summit for Children and the 1990 World
Conference on Education for All, held in Jomtien (Thailand).
The education revolution: As the world's commitment to the
principle of Education For All is put into practice at the
local level, certain elements have emerged as necessary for
its success: Schooling should provide the foundation for
learning for life; it needs to be accessible, of high
quality and flexible; it must be gender sensitive and
emphasize girls' education; the State needs to be a key
partner; and it should begin with care for the young child.
Investing in human rights: Despite the progress of the last
decade, the education revolution seems in danger of being
cut short by an apparent dearth of resources and growing
indebtedness in the developing world. This section argues
that, despite these obstacles, education is one of the best
investments a country can make in order to prosper. It calls
for the political will necessary to make the vision of
Education For All a global reality.
Chapter II
Statistics
General note on the data
Explanation of symbols
Under-five mortality rankings
Regional summaries country list
Tables
1 Basic indicators
2 Nutrition
3 Health
4 Education
5 Demographic indicators
6 Economic indicators
7 Women
8 The rate of progress
Panels
1 Education in free fall: A region in the midst of
transition
2 What children understand: The Monitoring Learning
Achievement project
3 Beyond the ruler: Competency-based learning in Tunisia
4 Second-hand computer, first-class vision: Thailand's
CHILD project
5 A Tanzanian school welcomes the disabled
6 The floating classroom: School clusters in Cambodia
7 Joyful learning: Empowering India's teachers
8 Which language for education?
9 A new beginning: Education in emergencies
10 In India: Helping the poor choose school
11 Egypt's community schools: A model for the education of
girls
12 The macho problem: Where boys are underachieving
13 Women educators push the limits for girls in Africa
14 Parent education: Supporting children's first teachers
Spotlights
Sub-Saharan Africa
Middle East and North Africa
South Asia
East Asia and the Pacific
Latin America and the Caribbean
Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent
States, and the Baltic States
Industrialized countries
Text figures
Fig. 1 Children out of school
Fig. 2 Net primary enrolment, by region (around 1995)
Fig. 3 Reaching grade five, by region (around 1995)
Fig. 4 International milestones for education
Fig. 5 Net primary enrolment, by region (1960-2000)
Fig. 6 AIDS orphans: A looming education crisis in
Sub-Saharan Africa
Fig. 7 Primary enrolment: Where the boys and girls are
Fig. 8 Education's impact on child mortality
Fig. 9 At a glance: The gender gap in primary education
and related indicators
Fig. 10 Generational impact of educating girls
Fig. 11 Who benefits from public spending on education?
Fig. 12 School mapping
Fig. 13 MEENA: An animated advocate for girls' rights
Fig. 14 Cost of education for all by the year 2010
References
Glossary
Chapter I
Education For All: Making the right a reality
Article 28
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to
education, and with a view to achieving this right
progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they
shall, in particular:
(a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to
all;
(b) Encourage the development of different forms of
secondary education, including general and vocational
education, make them available and accessible to every
child, and take appropriate measures such as the
introduction of free education and offering financial
assistance in case of need;
(c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of
capacity by every appropriate means;
(d) Make educational and vocational information and guidance
available and accessible to all children;
(e) Take measures to encourage regular attendance at schools
and the reduction of drop-out rates.
2. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to
ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner
consistent with the child's human dignity and in conformity
with the present Convention.
3. States Parties shall promote and encourage international
co-operation in matters relating to education, in particular
with a view to contributing to the elimination of ignorance
and illiteracy throughout the world and facilitating access
to scientific and technical knowledge and modern teaching
methods. In this regard, particular account shall be taken
of the needs of developing countries.
-- from the Convention on the Rights of the Child
Article 29
1. States Parties agree that the education of the child
shall be directed to:
(a) The development of the child's personality, talents and
mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
(b) The development of respect for human rights and
fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in
the Charter of the United Nations;
(c) The development of respect for the child's parents, his
or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the
national values of the country in which the child is living,
the country from which he or she may originate, and for
civilizations different from his or her own;
(d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a
free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace,
tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all
peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons
of indigenous origin;
(e) The development of respect for the natural environment.
2. No part of the present article or article 28 shall be
construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals
and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions,
subject always to the observance of the principles set forth
in paragraph 1 of the present article and to the
requirements that the education given in such institutions
shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down
by the State.
-- from the Convention on the Rights of the Child
The right to education
Nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable
to read a book or sign their names -- much less operate a
computer or understand a simple application form. And they
will live, as now, in more desperate poverty and poorer
health than most of those who can. They are the world's
functional illiterates -- and their numbers are growing.(1)
The consequences of illiteracy are profound, even
potentially life-threatening. They flow from the denial of a
fundamental human right: the right to education, proclaimed
in agreements ranging from the 50-year-old Universal
Declaration of Human Rights to the 1989 Convention on the
Rights of the Child, the world's most universally embraced
human rights instrument.
Yet despite these ringing affirmations over the past
half-century, an estimated 855 million people - nearly one
sixth of humanity - will be functionally illiterate on the
eve of the millennium.(2) At the same time, over 130 million
children of school age in the developing world are growing
up without access to basic education,(3) while millions of
others languish in sub-standard learning situations where
little learning takes place (Figs. 1-3). Girls crowd these
ranks disproportionately, representing nearly two of every
three children in the developing world who do not receive a
primary education (approximately 73 million of the 130
million out-of-school children).(4)
Ensuring the right of education is a matter of morality,
justice and economic sense. There is an unmistakable
correlation between education and mortality rates,
especially child mortality. The implications for girls'
education are particularly critical.
A 10-percentage point increase in girls' primary enrolment
can be expected to decrease infant mortality by 4.1 deaths
per 1,000, and a similar rise in girls' secondary enrolment
by another 5.6 deaths per 1,000.(5)
This would mean concretely, in Pakistan, for example, that
an extra year of schooling for an additional 1,000 girls
would ultimately prevent roughly 60 infant deaths.(6)
The implications of the lack of schooling, however, go
further.
Each extra year of school for girls can also translate into
a reduction in fertility rates, as well as a decrease in
maternal deaths in childbirth. In Brazil, illiterate women
have an average of 6.5 children, whereas those with
secondary education have 2.5 children. In the southern
Indian state of Kerala, where literacy is universal, the
infant mortality rate is the lowest in the entire developing
world - and the fertility rate is the lowest in India.(7)
The denial of the right to education hurts people's capacity
to work productively, to sustain and protect themselves and
their families. Those who understand the importance of
health, sanitation and nutrition help to lower their
families' incidence of preventable illness and death, while
increasing their potential for economic productivity and
financial and social stability.
On a society-wide scale, the denial of education harms the
cause of democracy and social progress - and, by extension,
international peace and security. By impairing the full
development of children, illiteracy makes it more difficult
for them to make their way in society as adults in a spirit
of understanding, peace and gender equality among all
peoples and groups.
And there is another, harder-to-measure, consequence: For
the functionally illiterate, the joys and revelations of the
vast world of art and of other cultures - indeed, the love
of learning itself - are largely beyond reach.
Illiteracy begins as a sad fact of daily life for millions
of children who are, more often than not, girls. The reasons
are numerous. For girls, their gender alone may keep them
home, locked in subsistence chores - or so isolated in the
classroom that they become discouraged and drop out. For
tens of millions of children, girls and boys alike,
education is beyond reach because they are full-time
workers, many toiling in hazardous and exploitative forms of
child labour. For others, there may simply be no school for
them to attend, or if there is, it fails to ensure their
right to education. There may be too few qualified teachers,
or a child's family may not be able to afford the fees. The
school may be too far from home. Or it may lack books and
supplies.
Even those children fortunate enough to be enrolled may find
themselves in a cheerless, overcrowded and threatening
place, an environment that endangers rather than empowers
them and crushes their initiative and curiosity.
Over 150 million children in developing countries start
school but do not reach grade five.(8) They are not emerging
with the literacy, numeracy and life skills that are the
foundation for learning throughout life.
The question of quality
It is not enough simply to ensure that children attend
school. The quality of education is also of paramount
concern. How knowledge, skills and values are transmitted is
as important as what is learned.
Children must also be able to participate fully in the
educational process. They need to be treated with dignity
and allowed to develop from their school experience a level
of self-esteem, self-discipline and sheer enjoyment of
learning that will stand them in good stead throughout their
lives.
This applies particularly to girls, who often find patterns
of social discrimination against them repeated in
classrooms, where they are not called on in class, and where
they are shunted into less challenging areas of study and
undervalued by teachers, by male classmates and by the
general school culture.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear: Every
child has the right to quality education that is relevant to
her or his individual development and life. But demands even
for access cannot be assured in much of the developing
world. In many areas, there is little in the way of
resources -- or incentive -- for schools to make themselves
more relevant and appealing to students.
In many countries, particularly the lowest-income countries,
the result is a pervasive grimness in the physical
environment and the intellectual atmosphere of learning
environments. Sometimes there is not even a chalkboard.
Classrooms in rural areas tend to be roughly constructed.
With daylight the only illumination, the rooms are dim.
Conditions are often only marginally better in poor urban
schools.
Overcrowding is common, especially in the early grades and
in urban areas. In a number of countries, only two of every
five pupils in grade one have a place to sit. A teacher in
Bangladesh may have as many as 67 pupils; in Equatorial
Guinea there may be as many as 90.(9) And many still do not
have access.
Massed together, children struggle for space, for a modicum
of attention from an overtaxed teacher, for a glimpse at a
tattered text, often in a language they cannot grasp.
Diseases and pests spread easily. With little to engage the
students, teachers resort to rigid discipline and corporal
punishment. What is taught often has little relevance to
children's daily lives.
Teaching materials frequently reinforce stereotypes,
compounding the physical problems that affect girls, such as
distance from home and the lack of toilet facilities.
The poor quality of education in schools is itself a
depressant on the demand for education, even where access
exists. Child labour experts have found that some children
would rather work than be subject to a school regime that is
irrelevant to their needs.
Assane, a 10-year-old shoeshine boy interviewed in the
Senegalese city of Ziguinchor, made the case clearly:
I don't need to go to school. What can I learn there? I know
children who went to school. Their family paid for the fees
and the uniforms and now they are educated. But you see them
sitting around. Now they are useless to their families. They
don't know anything about farming or trading or making
money ... I know I need to learn to read and write [but]...
if anyone tries to put me in school, I will run away.(10)
Nevertheless, basic education remains the most important
single factor in protecting children from such hazards as
exploitative child labour and sexual exploitation. The case
for this can be found both in the Convention on the Rights
of the Child and in the findings of the 1997 International
Conference on Child Labour, held in Oslo (Norway). In the
developing world, there are estimated to be 250 million
children trapped in child labour, and many of them receive
no schooling whatever.
Schools in many countries have simply not been good enough
to attract or retain children on the scale needed for two
principal reasons: they are chronically under-financed, and
they are too expensive for the majority of the population.
(These and other problems are addressed in 'Investing in
human rights'.)
But the delivery of education itself has also been poorly
organized, from overall management of school systems to the
way lessons are taught in the classroom. The decreasing
enrolment rates at both primary and secondary levels in
Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of
Independent States, where education was once paramount, are
dramatic testimony to this.
Education and child rights
The proclamation of the right to education in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights was the beginning of a broad
effort by the United Nations to promote social, economic and
cultural rights in tandem with civil and political rights
(Fig. 4).
The indivisibility of these rights is guaranteed by the
Convention on the Rights of the Child. As a result, what
were once seen as the needs of children have been elevated
to something far harder to ignore: their rights.
The Convention became binding international law on 2
September 1990, nine months after its adoption by the United
Nations General Assembly; it has now been ratified by 191
countries. No other human rights instrument has ever won
such widespread support in so short a time.
Ratified by all but two nations (Somalia and the United
States), the Convention's acceptance means that 96 per cent
of the world's children live in countries that are legally
bound to guarantee the full spectrum of child rights: civil,
political, social, cultural and economic.
Article 28 recognizes the right of children to education,
requiring States parties, among other things, to provide
free, compulsory, basic, schooling and to protect the
child's dignity in all disciplinary matters, and to promote
international cooperation in educational matters. Article 29
calls on governments to ensure that education leads to the
fullest possible development of each child's ability and to
respect for the child's parents and cultural identity and
for human rights.
Quality education can hinge on something as simple as
providing a child with a pencil where there are none. And at
the most fundamental level, the fact of access itself is a
priceless opportunity for a child deprived of education.
The vision of education enshrined in the Convention and
other human rights instruments recognizes the right of
education as the underpinning for the practice of democratic
citizenship. The Convention is thus a guide to the kind of
education that is essential both to children's development
and to social progress.
The Convention's perspective on quality education
encompasses not only children's cognitive needs but also
their physical, social, emotional, moral and spiritual
development. Education so conceived unfolds from the child's
perspective and addresses each child's unique capacities and
needs.
The vision of educational quality enshrined in the
Convention on the Rights of the Child extends to issues of
gender equality, equity, health and nutrition, parental and
community involvement, and management of the educational
system itself.
Above all, it demands that schools be zones of safety for
children, places where they can expect to find not only safe
water and decent sanitation facilities, but also a
respectful environment.
Articles 28 and 29 of the Convention are buttressed by four
other articles that assert overarching principles of law.
All have far-reaching ramifications, particularly in terms
of what is needed to mould an educational system -- or an
individual school. These are article 2, on non-
discrimination; article 3, on the best interests of the
child; article 6, on the child's right to life, survival and
development; and article 12, on the views of the child.(11)
Article 12, for example, which assures children the right to
express their own views freely in matters that affect them,
requires major policy changes in the many schools that
currently deny children the opportunity to question
decisions or influence school policy.
But the rewards are vast: Schools that encourage critical
thinking and democratic participation contribute to
fostering an understanding of the essence of human rights.
And this, in turn, can make education an enabling force not
just for individuals, but for society as a whole, bringing
to life the entire range of human rights.
The non-discrimination principle as set out in the
Convention on the Rights of the Child has similarly profound
ramifications. It is aimed at assuring that all children
have access to relevant and meaningful education, regardless
of their background, where they live or what language they
speak.
The non-discrimination principle is key to combating gender
discrimination. Schools must ensure that they are responsive
to girls' needs in every possible way, from physical
location to classroom curriculum and practice. They must
also treat gender inequality not as a matter of tradition
but rather as an issue of human rights discrimination that
can and must be addressed.
In addition, schools must consciously promote acceptance and
understanding of children who are different and give
students the intellectual and social tools needed to oppose
xenophobia, sexism, racism and other negative attitudes.(12)
Learning from the past
Education topped the national agendas of many newly
independent countries of the developing world in the 1960s
and 1970s as a core strategy to erase disparities, unify
nations and fuel the engine of development.
"Education," said Julius Nyerere, a former schoolteacher who
became the first President of the United Republic of
Tanzania, "is not a way of escaping the country's poverty.
It is a way of fighting it."(13)
UNESCO, the United Nations organization with specific
responsibility for education, organized a series of
ground-breaking regional conferences in Karachi in 1960,
Addis Ababa in 1961, Santiago in 1962 and Tripoli in 1966.
Out of these conferences came the first clear statistical
portrait of global education levels. It was a dismaying
picture.
In 1960, fewer than half the developing world's children
aged 6 to 11 were enrolled in primary school, compared with
91 per cent in the industrialized world.(14) In sub-Saharan
Africa, where the picture was bleakest, only 1 child in 20
went to secondary school.(15)
The UNESCO conferences set clear, bold targets. All eligible
children were to be enrolled in primary school by 1980, and
by 1970 in Latin America, where existing conditions were
better. The result was dramatic. By 1980, primary enrolment
had more than doubled in Asia and Latin America; in Africa
it had tripled.
However, populations surged over the same period. In
sub-Saharan Africa, for example, it was thought that 33
million extra school places would be needed by 1980. In the
end, 45 million places were provided, but this heroic effort
still left the continent 11 million short of the number
needed for all children of primary school age.(16)
The rapid onset of the debt crises of the developing world,
which earned the 1980s the label of 'the lost decade',
brought progress to an abrupt halt. Crippled by debt
repayments and plunging prices that carried their export
commodities earnings to their lowest levels in 50 years by
the middle of 1987,(17) countries began slashing
expenditures, including their spending on education.
Between 1980 and 1987 in Latin America and the Caribbean,
real spending on education per inhabitant decreased by
around 40 per cent. In sub-Saharan Africa, it fell by a
catastrophic 65 per cent.(18)
As a result, access to education did not increase
sufficiently - and educational quality plunged as well. And
teachers in much of Africa and Latin America found
themselves earning far less in real terms at the end of the
1980s than they had a decade earlier.(19)
Amid these setbacks, a major new United Nations initiative,
the World Conference on Education for All, was convened in
Jomtien (Thailand) in March 1990, with the crucial goal of
reviving the world's commitment to educating all of its
citizens.
The Jomtien conference
The World Conference on Education for All, sponsored by
UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank,* set out to
accomplish for education what the International Conference
on Primary Health Care (Alma Ata, 1978) had achieved for
health. It called for universal quality education, with a
particular focus on the world's poorest citizens.
The Jomtien conference marked a significant shift in the
world's collective approach to education, broadening the
notion of quality 'basic education' along with an
understanding of its delivery. Indeed, it is no exaggeration
to say that Jomtien marked the emergence of an international
consensus that education is the single most vital element in
combating poverty, empowering women, promoting human rights
and democracy, protecting the environment and controlling
population growth. That consensus is why, in 1996, donor
countries committed themselves to the task of helping
developing countries ensure universal primary education by
the year 2015.(20)
Previously, education had been assessed in terms of gross
enrolment rates at primary, secondary and tertiary levels.
At Jomtien, it became clear that as essential as access is,
counting the number of children sitting on school benches is
only part of the picture.
The expanded vision of education that emerged from Jomtien
included emphasis on basic education, early childhood care
and development, and learning through adolescence and
adulthood.
Other key elements included making girls' education a major
priority; the recognition that learning begins at birth; the
importance of children's need for care and stimulation in
their early years; and the acknowledgement that new
partnerships among governments and groups at all levels are
necessary to achieve Education For All.
Modelled on some of the principles that had driven the child
survival revolution that UNICEF had sparked in the 1980s,
the Jomtien conference established six key goals:
• expansion of early childhood care and development,
especially for the poor;
• universal access to and completion of primary education
by the year 2000;
• improvement in learning achievement based on an
agreed-upon percentage of an age group (e.g., 80 per
cent of 14-year-olds) attaining a defined level;
• reduction of the adult illiteracy rate to half its 1990
level by the year 2000, with special emphasis on female
literacy;
• expansion of basic education and training for youth and
adults;
• improved dissemination of the knowledge, skills and
values required for better living and sustainable
development.(21)
The conference managed to recapture some ground that had
been ceded during the 1980s, and after it ended more than
100 countries set their own new education goals and
developed strategies to achieve them.
Jomtien also helped move education back to the centre of the
international development agenda. Each major United Nations
summit and conference since Jomtien has recognized that
education, particularly of girls and women, spans and links
these areas of concern and is pivotal to progress in each.**
Slow progress on key priorities
Progress towards Education For All has, however, been much
slower than those at the Jomtien conference had hoped, as a
mid-decade review in Amman (Jordan) in June 1996 revealed.
The generalized decline and disrepair of the 1980s had been
largely reversed, but there was a sense that a central
priority of Jomtien -- girls' education -- and the
conference's integrated vision of basic education had been
overshadowed by the drive to get all the world's children
into primary school by the year 2000.
During the five years following the conference, all evidence
points to a girls' enrolment rate that is virtually static.
Overall primary enrolment was the brightest sign of progress
by mid-decade, with some 50 million more children in
developing countries enrolled in primary school than in
1990. Discouragingly, however, this figure only managed to
keep pace with the numbers of children entering the 6- to
11-year-old age group over the period.(22)
Regionally, the rates of progress varied. Both the East Asia
and Pacific and Latin America and Caribbean regions neared
the goal of universal primary enrolment, and remarkable
gains were recorded in the Middle East and North Africa in
recent years. But, in South Asia, 50 million children were
not in school,(23) and sub-Saharan Africa still cannot
provide sufficient classroom space for its rapidly growing
population.
In Central and Eastern Europe and many of the newly
independent countries of the former Soviet Union, once
relatively solid and universal access to education is
shrinking in the new era of market economies (Panel 1).
All regions -- the industrialized world included -- share a
concern about the quality of education. The Latin America
and Caribbean region, for example, has higher enrolment
rates than any other in the developing world at the
pre-primary, secondary and tertiary levels -- and is not far
behind East Asia at the primary level. Girls participate at
rates equal to or higher than boys.
But the poor quality of the education provided in most of
the region's countries -- as well as the social and economic
circumstances of many students -- has led to high rates of
repetition and high drop-out rates. The result is that about
half of the students in Latin America do not attain basic
literacy - even after six years of schooling.(24)
Planning for rights-based education
Over the last decade, a consensus has grown concerning why
the objectives of Education For All have been so hard to
achieve - along with the kinds of changes that will be
necessary to improve educational quality.
Educational planning, whether for an entire society or a
single school, must start with child rights and be based on
the best interests of the child. It must strive to ensure an
environment that is free from violence, that fosters
democracy and acceptance and that teaches skills which equip
students for lives as responsible citizens.
What kind of school would result? Part of the picture
emerges from a thoughtful checklist of attributes for
child-friendly, rights-based education, compiled by the
distinguished human rights authority and former Chairperson
of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, Thomas
Hammarberg.
A school, for example, that imparts real-life skills and
promotes the development of the child in all respects --
from the right to nutrition to the right to play -- begins
to meet the criteria.
In Namibia, for example, where the newly independent
Government was determined to root out the disciplinary
violence that the former apartheid regime had imposed, the
school system adopted a completely non-violent approach
called 'Discipline from Within'.(25)
In different projects now being combined in a model for
schools in Thailand, community members are being asked to
define what rights they think their children have and how
such rights might be reflected in their schools. The
community's opinions are compared with the Convention on the
Rights of the Child to obtain a local definition of a
rights-based, child-friendly school, and a school
self-assessment is used to help define what further school
improvement is required. In another project, teachers are
being trained as 'defenders of children' -- a role in which
they, with other members of the community, will work to
identify and protect children at risk.
In Colombia, 35 schools are experimenting with a
child-rights model to improve education. Among the measures
taken are ensuring adequate space, safe water and sanitary
facilities; establishing libraries; and maintaining an
atmosphere of democracy that guarantees dialogue,
participation and the peaceful resolution of differences.
Schools ask children, parents and teachers to respond to a
series of questionnaires and use the responses to ensure
that the school meets and maintains its child-rights
requirements. Children are posed such questions as, "Do my
teachers know who I am and do they call me by my name? Do my
teachers pay attention to what I think?"(26)
In Belém, in Brazil's impoverished northern region, the City
of Emmaus School has taken a different approach aimed at
developing the students' capacity to act as independent
citizens. The school was created in the early 1980s when the
Republic of Small Vendors, an organization that helps
children living or working on the streets, decided to build
a school on the poorer margins of the city that was both
responsive to students' needs and that reflected the rich
local culture. After consulting with the community - mainly
rural migrants of Amazonian Indian origin - school planners
designed a physical plant whose buildings are based on a
circular Amazonian Indian design, with ample open space
inside and outside.(27)
The school's teachers, who are formally employed by the
Government, are retrained from the beginning in a whole new
approach to teaching.
"We had to get them to review their social role and
understand that, unless they changed their approach, they
would be contributing to the very processes that deny the
poorer layers of society their basic rights," said Graça
Trapasso, former school coordinator. "The thrust here is to
awaken children to their rights and responsibilities."
The quality of the relationship between children and teacher
is paramount: Teachers are considered to be facilitators and
guides. Learning begins with the child's own frame of
reference and develops with the child's active
participation.
Such undertakings mark the stirring of an education
revolution guided by the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. It has five key elements, most of which interweave
with and reinforce each other:
Learning for life.
This is the basis of a series of new approaches to teaching
and learning that are designed to make the classroom
experience more fulfilling and relevant. 28 Using these
approaches, teachers are becoming facilitators and guides
rather than dictators of facts, and educational systems are
devising more accurate methods of measuring actual learning.
What will be required are more fundamental changes in
education policies and processes to instil and stimulate a
lifelong love of learning. This will enable people to
supplement or even replace the skills they learned in
childhood to respond to new needs over the course of their
lives.
Access, quality and flexibility.
Schools are reaching out to the children left on the margins
of the educational system (girls, ethnic minorities, child
labourers, the disabled). They are being built nearer the
communities they serve and are more flexible in scheduling
and in learning modes.
Gender sensitivity and girls' education.
The education of girls has become a top priority. The
cultural and political obstacles to gender equality are
being addressed and educational systems at every level are
being made more sensitive and attentive to gender issues.
The State as key partner.
Education For All cannot be achieved without the full
commitment of national governments, which are obligated by
the Convention to ensure that the child's right to education
is met. Their role, however, is changing as they delegate
some authority to district and local levels. While retaining
their normative role, governments are also playing greater
mobilizing and coordinating roles with educators, parents,
entrepreneurs and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as
partners.
Care for the young child.
Learning begins at birth and is enhanced by a holistic
approach that helps ensure stimulation and socialization,
good health care and nutrition, especially in the crucial
early years of a child's life. Such a holistic approach is
increasingly being achieved through low-cost community
alternatives and parental education, as well as through
formal pre-school programmes.
These initiatives, taken together, represent the new concept
of education, shaped by the Convention on the Rights of the
Child, the World Summit for Children and the World
Declaration on Education for All.
People must be educated. Education is not solely a means to
an end, a tool of development or a route to a good job. It
is the foundation of a free and fulfilled life. It is the
right of all children and the obligation of all governments.
To advance into the 21st century with a quarter of the
world's children denied this right is shameful. But those
dedicated to Education For All - educators, development
workers, parents and others - have cause to be both
optimistic and proud. Spurred by deeply involved families
and committed people in thousands of communities around the
world, exciting innovations are taking shape. These efforts
are part of an education revolution that is promising
profound change - and is already well under way.
__________________________________________________________
*UNFPA joined as the fifth UN sponsoring agency, after the
Conference.
**The summits and conferences are the World Summit for
Children (1990), the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development (1992), the World Conference on
Human Rights (1993), the International Conference on
Population and Development (1994), the World Summit for
Social Development (1995), and the Fourth World Conference
on Women (1995).
The education revolution
Over the last decade, consensus has grown about the kinds of
changes needed if learning is to occur. More important
still, these are not ideas dormant in academic papers or
debated at international conferences, but they are being put
into practice all over the world, in pilot projects and at
the national scale. Nor are the resulting success stories
isolated events that would be impossible to replicate in
other contexts or cultures. Rather they are practical proof
of the 'education revolution', whose principles are now
broadly understood and shared and whose central elements are
emerging in varying configurations around the world.
If access to quality learning is one guiding light of this
revolution, the other is child rights. In article 28, the
Convention on the Rights of the Child established the right
of all children, without discrimination, to education. The
Convention also provides a framework by which the quality of
that education must be assessed. If children are required to
sit in an overcrowded classroom mindlessly parroting what
the teacher says, their learning and developmental needs are
clearly not being fulfilled. The Convention guides us,
therefore, in article 29, towards a more child-centred model
of teaching and learning, one in which students participate
actively, thinking and solving problems for themselves, and
in this way developing the self-esteem that is essential for
learning and decision-making throughout life.(1)
A vision of quality in education guided by the Convention
can never be limited to the lesson plans of the teacher or
the proper provision of classroom equipment. It extends far
beyond, into questions of gender equality, health and
nutrition; into issues of parental and community
involvement; into the management of the education system
itself. And the benefits and impact of quality education
also make invaluable contributions to all areas of human
development, improving the status of women and helping to
ease poverty.
The education revolution is reshaping the edifice of
education. Under its aegis, schools must become zones of
creativity, safety and stimulation for children, with safe
water and decent sanitation, with motivated teachers and
relevant curricula, where children are respected and learn
to respect others. Schools and other learning environments
also need to offer young children in the early primary
grades a nurturing experience that eases their transition
into systems all too often not designed to do this. The
elements of this revolution are already changing schools
around the world.
Element 1. Learning for life
Going to school and coming out unprepared for life is a
terrible waste. Yet for many of the world's children, this
is exactly what happens.
Educators around the world have recently begun to focus on
the gap between what is taught and what is learned, and the
large numbers of children caught in that abyss. A World Bank
survey in Bangladesh found that four out of five of those
who had completed five years of primary schooling failed to
attain a minimum learning achievement level, while those who
had completed three years of schooling scored approximately
zero on the same low measure of learning achievement.(2) The
rights of these children are not being met.
Surveys such as these generally assess basic levels of
literacy and numeracy -- levels of reading, writing,
speaking, listening and mathematics -- which, of course, are
critical tools for further learning. The surveys do not even
attempt to measure the success of teaching children skills
necessary for survival, for a life with dignity and for
coping with the rapid and constant change that typifies
modern life.
Learning for life in the 21st century requires equipping
children with a basic education in literacy and numeracy, as
well as the more advanced, complex skills for living that
can serve as the foundation for life -- enabling children to
adapt and change as do life circumstances. A lack or
inadequacy of basic education can seriously jeopardize the
possibility of lifelong learning and can widen the gap
between those who can and cannot profit from such
opportunities.
In this approach to learning, teachers and students need to
relate in new ways so that the classroom experience -- the
very process of learning -- becomes a preparation for life.
As the principles of the Convention on the Rights of the
Child make clear, teaching must be a process of guiding and
facilitating, in which children are encouraged to think for
themselves and to learn how to learn. The classroom must be
an environment of democratic participation.
The learning environment must also be transformed to one
that is active and child-centred. It must be linked to the
development level and abilities of the child learners.
Children must be able to express their views, thoughts and
ideas; they need opportunities for joy and play; they need
to be comfortable with themselves and with others; and they
should be treated with respect. In this kind of environment,
children develop a sense of self-esteem that, when combined
with basic knowledge, skills and values, stands them in good
stead, enabling them to make informed decisions throughout
life.
The physical environment is important too, helping children
feel safe, secure and nurtured. Buildings and furniture
should be child-friendly. Too many children perch on
furniture built for adult bodies in classrooms with windows
and doorways designed by adults for adults.(3)
The comprehensive approach of learning for life enables
individuals to integrate more effectively into the world of
work and society. It calls for a curriculum and a teaching
approach that take into account such factors as gender,
language and culture, economic disparities and physical and
mental disabilities and enable children to deal with them in
a positive way. Learning systems are needed that help
children and societies respond both to their local needs and
the challenges of globalization. The key features of such
systems include emphasis on human rights and the
transmission of knowledge and skills that help each person
realize individual potential and social good, and ultimately
help alleviate and even eliminate poverty.
Within this broader definition of learning to which every
child has a right, the Jomtien conference gave new
prominence to the idea of 'life skills'. The definition of
life skills is evolving to encompass psychosocial skills of
cooperation, negotiation and communication, decision-making,
and critical and creative thinking in preparation for the
challenges of modern life. It is an education in values and
behaviour.
Life skills are those that children need in order to cope
with issues and problems related to the entire spectrum of
their survival and well-being, including knowledge about
health, nutrition and hygiene. A grounding in life skills
prepares children to deal practically and resourcefully with
people and situations they encounter on the streets and in
the fields, helping them manage finances, interact in social
and family dynamics, appreciate their own rights and respect
those of others.
While important in early childhood education and primary
schools, where emphasis is placed on general survival skills
rather than academic ability, life skills become even more
vital in adolescence when the risks of exploitative child
labour, HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy increase, requiring
children to make ever more complex and difficult behavioural
choices. The alarming proliferation of civil conflict in the
developing world has posed an enormous life-skills
challenge. To meet it, training in the techniques of
conflict resolution is being introduced to students in
countries with a recent history of violence, such as
Colombia, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka.
Measuring learning achievement
If the success of education is to be gauged by what and how
children learn, better ways must be found to measure the
quality and relevance of education. The emphasis must be on
assessing how well education systems are meeting their
responsibility to provide for the educational rights of
their youngest citizens in terms of what they learn. Such
information can be used to adjust policy, introduce
realistic standards, help direct teachers' efforts, promote
accountability and increase public awareness and support for
education.(4 )
Unfortunately, most of the mechanisms in place test children
as part of a selection process rather than addressing
whether they have had sufficient opportunity to acquire the
literacy, numeracy, life skills and values needed throughout
life. There are interesting efforts emerging, however. To
date, the joint UNESCO-UNICEF Monitoring Learning
Achievement (MLA) project represents one of the most
comprehensive attempts to devise an international framework
for measuring learning that transcends the traditional focus
on exam results or school enrolment(5) (Panel 2).
The MLA project is not the only initiative. The Minimum
Levels of Learning (MLL) project in India is taking a fresh
look at what kinds of skills can and should be measured both
in and out of school.(6) And in Bangladesh, the Assessment
of Basic Competencies (ABC) project is using the same
techniques as immunization surveys to assess the ability of
children aged 11 and 12 to read and understand a passage of
text, write a letter communicating a simple message, solve
mental arithmetic problems and demonstrate life skills. The
project has successfully shown that meaningful data can be
gathered at local levels and at very low cost. The results
showed a distressingly low level of learning - only 29 per
cent of all children and 46 per cent of those with five
years of schooling satisfied basic education criteria.(7)
There is a growing worldwide movement to discard numerical
rankings and instead describe learning achievement, as in
the profiles teachers do of children's work in the United
States and the reformed school-leaving examinations in
Slovenia. In the outcomes-based curricula used in Australia,
India, Italy and South Africa, learning objectives are
unambiguously stated and understood by both teachers and
students at the outset. Teachers then observe and describe
how well children demonstrate -- verbally, in writing or in
performance -- their grasp of the learning goals.
These developments share a conviction that what is needed is
a focus on what children actually learn, and that
assessments should be used to develop the kind of teaching
that facilitates the learning process (Panel 3).
This concept of learning achievement has economic as well as
educational implications. If class repetitions and drop-
outs -- indicators of inefficiency and poor quality -- can
be reduced, limited resources will stretch much further. A
survey of Latin American education in the 1980s showed that,
on average, a child took 1.7 years to be promoted to the
next grade and that each year 32 million students repeated
grades in primary and secondary schools, representing an
annual waste of $5.2 billion.(8) According to a World Bank
publication, low-income countries spend, on average, four
years' worth more resources to produce a primary school
graduate than they would if there were no repeaters or
drop-outs.(9)
Teachers, policy makers and students in many countries,
nevertheless, still accept it as natural and inevitable for
children to repeat grades because they have 'failed', which
contributes to a vicious circle of low expectations, damaged
self-esteem and further failure. Repetition may even be seen
as evidence of high standards in schools, when the reverse
is probably true.(10)
In recent years, countries have experimented with automatic
promotion -- the norm in most of the English-speaking world.
Myanmar, confronting a serious crisis in education, has
replaced year-end exams with an ongoing assessment of
students' learning achievement. Teaching and management
skills are also being upgraded. As part of the All Children
in School project, schools are given initial incentives, in
the form of chalkboards, toilet facilities and teaching
kits, that are tied to success in meeting annual targets: a
10 per cent increase in enrolment, retention and completion
rates over the previous year's rates as measured by
community members. As a result, in three consecutive
academic years from 1994 to 1997, an average of 65 to 70 per
cent of all project schools managed to meet their annual
targets and received roofing sheets to upgrade or extend
school facilities.(11)
Health and learning
Health and adequate nutrition are pillars of learning
throughout life. But children in most of the developing
world contend with frequent episodes of respiratory illness
and diarrhoea during their school years that can subvert
learning. Even in the state of California (United States),
where standards of water and hygiene far exceed those in
developing countries, gastrointestinal diseases account for
around a quarter of all days lost from school.(12) Other
serious health complaints that plague school age children in
the developing world include malaria, helminths (parasitic
worms), iodine deficiency and malnutrition. Health hazards
like these do not simply keep children out of school,
leading them to underachieve or repeat grades, but can
permanently impair their ability to learn.
"There is a strong link between children's health and school
performance," says Professor Dr. Hussein Kamel Bahaa El-Din,
Egypt's Minister of Education, himself a paediatrician.
"This link between health and education is a major challenge
to educational planners and policy makers. Rapid
interventions and serious preventive measures must take
place. In Egypt, we strongly believe that education is the
vehicle of preventive medicine, which is the medicine of
tomorrow and the medicine of the majority, a true democratic
trend."(13)
Egypt has launched a comprehensive package of reforms aimed
at generating healthy and health-promoting schools. The
package includes:
• regular medical checks for all schoolchildren;
• a school nutrition programme, with special help for rural
areas;
• free health insurance for schoolchildren;
• the integration of health and nutrition messages into the
curriculum;
• child-to-child programmes to promote health in the
community.(14)
Egypt's efforts to make schools and students healthier are
resulting in higher and earlier enrolment, lower rates of
absenteeism and drop-out, and better learning achievement.
Research also shows that improvements in the health of
schoolchildren reduce the transmission of disease in the
community,(15) with children proving to be exceptionally
effective as health promoters themselves, passing on what
they learn to siblings, friends, family members and other
adults.(16)
Findings like these led the World Health Organization (WHO)
to launch the Global School Health Initiative in 1995. The
World Bank has also shown interest in investing in school
health programmes, which it views as one of the most
cost-effective ways of improving public health, noting that
the number of schools and teachers far exceeds the number of
health centres and health workers.(17) It is important to
point out, however, that teachers should not be expected to
fill the role of health workers. Teachers, with demanding
jobs of their own, cannot be expected to succeed where
health centres have failed, especially without extra
resources.
What are the main characteristics of a healthy and
health-promoting school?
• A place of safety. Teachers need to act as protectors of
children, safeguarding their rights within school, not
least the right to be free from sexual exploitation and
violence. Schools must be supportive and nurturing places
for children with special needs, including those with
disabilities or with HIV/AIDS.
• A healthy environment. All schools need safe water and
sanitation. Without these, children are unable to practise
what they learn about hygiene.
• A place where diseases can be detected and often treated.
Some illnesses and unhealthy conditions -- such as
parasitic infections, micronutrient deficiencies and
trachoma -- can be simply and affordably treated by health
workers or teachers. Teachers can also be trained to
recognize children with visual and hearing defects, which
are often mistaken for learning disabilities.
• A school that teaches life skills. Children need more than
information to make healthy choices. They may need to
develop technical skills in first aid or learn to use oral
rehydration salts to treat diarrhoea. They also need to
learn how to make decisions and to negotiate and resolve
conflict -- critical skills in leading healthy lives
outside the school gates.(18)
Education's ripple effect is being demonstrated in many
countries. The Clean and Green Schools programme in
Mauritania calls for teams of students, parents and teachers
to evaluate the state of their local school and draw up
plans to improve it that include health education classes
based on the Facts for Life booklet.* If it proves
successful, the programme could be expanded nationwide at
low cost and could help lower the country's high infant
mortality rates.
In Thailand, schools covered by the CHILD project monitor
the connections between children's learning and health
(Panel 4).
In two Nigerian villages, a 20 per cent gain in life
expectancy occurred when the only intervention was easy
access to adequate health facilities, a 33 per cent gain
when the mother had received schooling but lacked access to
health facilities, and an 87 per cent gain when health and
education resources were combined.(19)(Far from forcing a
trade-off or clash of priorities among competing worthy
goals, joint health and education initiatives work together
to accelerate the education revolution.
__________________
*Facts for Life is an inter-agency publication that presents
practical ways of protecting children's lives and health.
Element 2. Access, quality and flexibility
Children have a right to go to school and to receive an
education of good quality. The conventional education
systems in many countries, however, are too rigid to reach
the children who, because of gender, ethnicity or poverty,
have least access to school. But Education For All cannot be
achieved unless these children are reached. The challenge
for schools is to be flexible enough to adapt to the needs
of the most disadvantaged children while offering education
of sufficient quality to keep all students once they have
arrived. It is no coincidence that the poorest, most
indebted nations are farthest from the goal of Education For
All. On average, nearly half the children in the 47 least
developed countries do not have access to primary
education.(20)
Various cost-effective ways to increase enrolment and
improve the quality of education are being investigated, and
countries need to select approaches that address their
distinct needs. A recent UNICEF study of five low-income
African and Asian countries(21) shows, for example, that
double-shifting (in which a teacher and a classroom serve
two separate groups of children on the same day) to improve
access is already common in Viet Nam and would be useful in
Burkina Faso and urban areas of Bhutan. In Myanmar, however,
it would be inappropriate since there is no shortage of
classrooms, nor are teachers' salaries high. Freezing higher
education subsidies would be a reform worth pursuing in
Burkina Faso and Uganda, which spend a disproportionate
amount on these relative to primary schooling, but would be
of less value in Myanmar and Viet Nam. Other solutions are
being sought in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union, a region of about 115 million
children where disparity in access is a growing problem.
One method of increasing access that could be widely applied
is to reduce the cost of building schools by using locally
available construction materials. A World Bank study of six
African countries showed that building brick-and-mortar
schools to international standards was more than double the
cost of working with local materials.(22) Even this estimate
may have understated the possible savings.
When Malawi launched its policy of universal free primary
education in 1994, it also began discussions with agencies
such as UNICEF and the World Bank on designs for its major
school building programme. The eventual design has proven
both serviceable and sustainable at around one quarter of
the cost of a more standard model.(23) Similarly, with
support from UNICEF, communities in Mali are using a variety
of durable local materials such as kiln-hardened bricks to
build schools that meet Ministry of Education standards but
cost two-thirds less than regular schools.
As ways are explored to meet the needs of unreached
children, the growing role played by education providers
other than governments needs to be kept in mind. Among these
new providers are NGOs, religious organizations, private
schools and communities. These all need to be acknowledged
and accommodated within a new diversified system of
education in which the State plays its essential role by
setting standards.
Reaching the unreached
Access remains a problem for the disadvantaged in any
society. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the
basis for inclusive education systems where no child is
excluded or marginalized in special programmes.
Who are the excluded? Girls are the large majority of
children out of school and they must be a priority for
recruitment. Also, proportionately fewer rural children
attend than city-dwellers, and proportionately fewer
children from ethnic minorities or indigenous groups go to
school than children from the dominant ethnic group. The
disabled are barely even considered (Panel 5). Children
caught in the turmoil of armed conflict or other emergencies
face the loss of years of schooling. Some 8 million children
in sub-Saharan Africa alone will have lost their mothers or
both their parents to AIDS, and many of these orphans will
never enrol or will have to drop out of school (Fig. 6).
And lack of minority access is a problem in many countries,
for example, in Niger, where only about a third of children
enrol. It is a vital issue in China, which comes close to
achieving universal primary enrolment but has to work much
harder to enrol Muslim girls from Ningxia Hui Autonomous
Region than Han Chinese boys in Beijing, for instance.(24)
Distance from the school reduces attendance. Studies in
Nepal have shown that for every kilometre a child walks to
school, the likelihood of school attendance drops by 2.5 per
cent.(25) In Egypt, if a school is one kilometre instead of
two kilometres away, enrolment goes up 4 per cent for boys
and 18 per cent for girls.(26)
To reach unreached children, educational policy makers can
learn much by sharing successes. In fact, one of the most
hopeful aspects of the education revolution is the way in
which creative initiatives are piloted in one part of the
world and applied in another.
Multigrade teaching, in which children of two or more ages
or grades are taught by one teacher, is one example. The
practice has long been a necessity in small village schools
that can only afford one teacher, and it was the norm in
most rural schools of the industrialized world in the early
decades of this century. It tended to be regarded, however,
as an inferior model of education until the Escuela Nueva
schools in Colombia demonstrated how well-designed lesson
plans and teaching materials, bolstered by the support of
the communities, could ensure a positive multigrade
experience.
Rural schools in Colombia in the early 1980s were few and of
poor quality. Some 55 per cent of 7- to 9-year-olds and a
quarter of all 10- to 14-year-olds in the countryside had
never attended school, and one third of all first-graders
dropped out.(27) The Escuela Nueva approach changed these
statistics, and its evident success in a small number of
schools has led the Government to extend the system
countrywide. Multigrade teaching makes it possible for a
complete primary school to be located close to children's
homes in sparsely populated rural areas. Escuela Nueva
teachers benefit from detailed guides and lesson plans as
well as regular training to help them adapt lessons to the
local situation. In keeping with the principles of the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, teachers become
facilitators rather than authority figures.
Another advantage of Escuela Nueva is that children move to
the next grade at their own pace -- when they achieve a set
of objectives -- rather than by passing an exam at the end
of the year. Grades, therefore, are not repeated. Apart from
avoiding the stigma of being 'held back', students who have
been sick or had to work in the harvest can resume their
studies whenever they return. When compared with regular
schools, Escuela Nueva's children not only score higher in
achievement tests but also show improved self-esteem,
creativity and civic-mindedness. Drop-out rates are also
much lower.(28)
A number of countries have been inspired by the Colombian
model and have adapted it to their own circumstances.
Guatemala, for example, employs the Escuela Nueva
methodology in its bilingual primary schools for indigenous
children. In the Philippines, educational planners launched
their own special multigrade demonstration schools after a
visit to Colombia. Multigrade schools had, in fact, existed
in the nation since the 1960s but had a poor reputation --
located in distant, disadvantaged areas, they tended to be
staffed by inexperienced, unsupervised teachers and to have
inadequate facilities.
The country's new multigrade approach, however, has won
approval from teachers, local communities and students.
Thirteen-year-old Adonis Corisay, for example, planned to
give up his studies after grade four, his local school's
highest level. When the new multigrade school at Poyopoy
started offering grades five and six, he was inspired to
continue despite a two-hour walk to school. "Now I would
like to finish high school. Then I will continue on to
college so I can become a mechanical engineer. I would like
some day to assemble my own car, which I will use in the
mountains." The project expanded from 12 schools in 6
disadvantaged provinces in the 1996/97 school year to 24
schools in 12 provinces in 1997/98.(29)
Another way of reaching the hard-to-reach in the remote
mountainous regions of the Cordillera in the Philippines is
the Cordillera Mobile Teaching project, which brings
'school' to the children, carried by a teacher with a
backpack. First tested in 1989 in Ifugao Province, one of
the poorest and most rugged regions of the country, the
mobile teaching approach has not only increased enrolment
but also produced test results matching or surpassing those
of conventional schools. In 1993, it was extended to
mountainous areas throughout the region. 'Ambulant' teachers
now trek into the mountains to divide a week of teaching
between two learning centres, kilometres apart, reaching
children who would otherwise not have access to schooling
and saving other students a hazardous hike across mountains
and rivers.(30) The Cambodian cluster schools are another
example of shared resources in remote areas (Panel 6).
In many countries, children in remote regions have gained
access to learning by some form of 'distance education',
often involving radio. The United Kingdom's BBC pioneered
the transmission of educational radio broadcasts as early as
1924.(31) Since then, radio, television and audio and video
cassettes have become vital educational media, particularly
in developing countries where more expensive technologies
remain out of reach. Through Interactive Radio Instruction
(IRI), a technique developed in Nicaragua in the early 1970s
by a team from Stanford University, students answer
questions, sing songs or complete practical tasks during
carefully timed pauses in the broadcast, with the teacher
acting as facilitator or even participant in group work.
Radio lessons like these must be tailored to the needs of
their audiences and use the full potential of the medium,
including drama, sound effects and music. From the first,
the aim has been to improve quality of education rather than
just provide learning at a distance. And while more
high-tech options now command attention, IRI continues to be
quietly effective on a mass scale. A study in the Dominican
Republic compared children who had 5 hours of radio
instruction a week (plus half an hour of follow-up
activities) with students with 10 or more hours of
instruction in regular schools. The IRI students showed
similar results in reading and writing and significantly
better results in mathematics.(32)
Radio has also proven a highly effective tool for reaching
pre-school children. In Nepal, two series of 20 programmes
have been developed for three- to five-year-olds and their
caregivers. Each programme has been broadcast over national
radio twice a week and is an effective way of conveying
important information to remote mountain communities about
the health, nutrition and stimulation of young children. But
with a cast that includes characters such as a talking bird
and a pet elephant, the programmes can also be used by
community day-care centres or informal family groups.(33)
Flexible and unified systems
The hallmark of all these approaches is flexibility, in
which the approaches adapt to local conditions to meet the
educational needs of all children. This attribute was once
confined only to so-called 'non-formal education' projects
that multiplied in the 1970s, particularly in South Asia, as
concerned organizations tried to fill the myriad cracks in
the education system by reaching out to working children,
the disabled or girls.
One of the most famous of these was launched by the
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in 1985. Long
recognized for its work in rural development, credit and
health, BRAC aimed initially to provide basic literacy and
numeracy to 8- to 10-year-olds (with special emphasis on
girls) in 22 villages, but met with such immediate success
that it expanded at fantastic speed. By the end of 1992
there were 12,000 BRAC schools,(34) and in 1998 some
34,000.(35)
A BRAC school usually comprises 30 children, around 20 of
whom are girls, who live within a radius of two kilometres
and are taught in a simple rented room. Two thirds of the
teachers are female, drawn from the local community and paid
only modest wages. But they are among the most educated
people in the community, having completed 9 years of
education and 15 days of initial training, plus 1 or 2
refresher days each month. BRAC staff visit them weekly.
Parents make no financial contribution but are expected to
attend meetings.
The school is a typical village structure with a thatch or
tin roof and earthen floors. Each has a chalkboard and
charts, and teachers are provided with materials such as
workbooks and teaching notes, picture cards and counting
sticks. Each student receives a slate, pencils, notebooks
and texts. The school aims to help children achieve basic
literacy, numeracy and social awareness.
Students also spend 40 minutes a day on physical exercise,
singing, drawing, crafts and reading stories, activities
that the children love and that thus help boost attendance.
Teachers ask pupils to help each other with assignments, and
comprehension is stressed rather than memorization.(36)
The schedule is flexible; school is held for 3 hours a day,
6 days a week, 268 days per year. But the time of day is
selected by parents, and the school calendar can be adapted
to fit local needs such as the harvest. BRAC school
graduates are eligible to move on to the fourth grade of the
formal primary school system, although not enough of them do
so - many families find they cannot afford the extra costs
associated with the public sector.(37)
BRAC is a significant success, an exception to the general
belief that educational projects aiming simply to fill in
the cracks end up offering inferior education to the poor,
disadvantaged, disabled or girls who need it. And even BRAC
has trouble providing a reliable bridge for its students
into mainstream schools.
Now what is being increasingly advocated in many countries
is a unified system overseen by the State and founded on
state-supported schools but much more responsive to local
conditions and community needs and at times bringing in
partner organizations that open learning opportunities for
children who are not being reached by conventional schools.
The old divide between 'non-formal' and 'formal' education
is thus becoming irrelevant. In such a system, the State's
role is to set standards and ensure that the different
approaches encompassed by the system conform to these
standards.
There are now examples worldwide of public education systems
that:
• adapt the annual calendar and daily schedule of schools to
local circumstances, such as the agricultural seasons in
rural areas, and use shorter school hours more
effectively;
• locate schools closer to children's homes, which
particularly increases girls' attendance;
• involve parents and the local community in the management
of schools;
• make increased use of paraprofessionals and volunteers
from the local community;
• adapt the curriculum to local needs;
• eliminate gender bias in curricula and related materials;
• exercise more flexibility in evaluating and promoting
students to minimize the need for them to repeat whole
years.
In the more inclusive concept of education, diverse
approaches complement each other in the push to achieve
Education For All. The Ugandan Government has taken the bold
step of guaranteeing free primary schooling to four children
from each family. It has also piloted the Complementary
Opportunities for Primary Education (COPE) scheme in four
districts over the last two years, to give older children
who have missed earlier educational opportunities a second
chance at school.
The project embodies many of the good practices from
programmes in other parts of the world that have reached out
to marginalized children. The classes are small (30-40
pupils), and the curriculum is skills oriented and enriched
with life skills, covering only four subjects: mathematics,
science, English and social studies. The timing is flexible
(three hours a day), and teachers assess children
continually rather than in terminal exams. The participation
of parents and the community is encouraged.(38)
The national officer responsible for COPE, George Ouma
Mumbe, believes the project's schools are already changing
the lives of child labourers and other children previously
unreached by the system. "By giving them specially trained
teachers, syllabus and teaching methods, they are able to
pick up quickly because of their superior age," he says. "It
is amazing how fast these kids learn."(39)
Perhaps the most significant element of programmes such as
COPE is that they accommodate and encourage accelerated
learning opportunities, so that children who are over age in
a class can advance quickly through the system to catch up
with their peers. Enormous numbers of overage learners
repeating grades clog education systems throughout the world
as a consequence of system failure. A strategy that aims to
accelerate students' movement through the education system
has enormous potential in terms of both meeting their rights
and increasing the system's efficiency. The full
implications of accelerated learning programmes for
curricula and for pupil flow have not yet been fully worked
out, but they make a very powerful argument for flexibility.
Empowering teachers
Teachers are at the heart of the education revolution, but
many feel under siege. Once viewed as wise, respected
community leaders bringing the torch of learning to the next
generation, their diminished and demoralized status is a
worldwide phenomenon. In 1991, the second International
Labour Organization's (ILO) meeting on the Conditions of
Work of Teachers concluded that the situation of teachers
had reached "an intolerably low point." Working conditions
were drastically eroded, producing an exodus of qualified
and experienced teachers.(40) When UNESCO sought the views
of national authorities for a conference on the role of
teachers in 1996, only a handful of wealthy industrial
countries (notably Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany and
Switzerland) differed from the majority view that the
standing and pay of teachers were cause for anxiety.(41)
The profession was hit hard by the financial austerity of
the 1980s in the developing world. When governments cut
public spending as part of structural adjustment programmes
required by the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), education budgets (comprised largely of teacher
salaries) suffered. Over the 1980s and 1990s, teachers in
Africa and in Latin America experienced a general lowering
of real income, with rapid and substantial reductions in
some cases.(42)
The erosion in salaries in Africa, for instance, has meant
that primary school teachers often receive less than half
the amount of the household absolute poverty line.(43) Many
teachers have been forced to supplement their meagre incomes
by offering private lessons or running their own businesses,
to the detriment of their regular attendance and performance
in schools - a phenomenon that has spread now to countries
in Eastern Europe, and in Central and East Asia. Even when
resources are abundant, governments are more likely to spend
on expanding schooling than on wages.
Teaching conditions need to be improved worldwide to halt
the vicious circle of demoralization and decline. But the
social standing of teachers will not recover until the
quality of the educational experience they provide improves.
One route to this goal is their readiness to alter classroom
practice in line with the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. Another lies in society's responsibility to offer
both the conditions that will encourage more highly
qualified candidates to enter the profession and the kind of
education for teachers that prepares them for the
child-centred classrooms of the future.
In Togo, for example, more than a third of primary teachers
only have a primary education themselves, and 84 per cent of
secondary teachers have not completed a teacher education
course. In Uruguay, one of Latin America's more prosperous
nations, only a third of secondary teachers have completed
university; 70 per cent have had no teacher education.(44)
In the United States, more than 12 per cent of newly hired
teachers enter the classroom without formal courses in
education, and another 14 per cent have not taken enough
such courses to meet state standards. Some teachers are
recruited on the basis of tests that do not evaluate
teaching processes and methodologies but instead examine
basic skills and general knowledge -- criteria that offer no
insight into their abilities as educators.(45)
In the past, wealthier governments have viewed teacher
education as a lengthy process of theoretical study in
college. Developing countries faced with the impossibility
of financing this industrialized world model have often
resorted to crash courses resulting in only minimal exposure
to educational methods for teachers already poorly
prepared.(46) Between these two extremes is a new model of
teacher education that forms an essential component of the
education revolution. Part of this is a revision of the
concept of school supervisors and inspectors who are trained
to serve as pedagogical advisers -- experienced
professionals who can guide teachers and help resolve
problems in a continuing process rather than evaluate
teachers in a judgemental way.
No workable education system can stop at the primary level.
The focus of the Jomtien decade was understandably on
guaranteeing universal primary education, but as more
children complete the first years of schooling, the greater
the need for secondary school, especially since it is from
the latter pool of students that future teachers should be
drawn. Teacher training costs as much as 35 times the annual
cost per student of a general secondary education.(47) This
experience of secondary education must mirror the
participatory, gender-sensitive, child-centred model set out
by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as teachers
are overwhelmingly likely to replicate the educational model
they themselves experienced in school.(48)
Those who do not complete secondary school will still,
however, need preparation for their role as teachers, and
innovative models of teacher education are springing up
throughout the world. One major strategy -- little
replicated elsewhere but proving that effective teacher
education can be delivered at relatively low cost -- is
ZINTEC (Zimbabwe Integrated Teacher Education Course).
Emerging from Zimbabwe's need to deliver on its promise of
universal primary education, ZINTEC offered recruits four
months of intensive, residential education at the beginning
of a four-year programme, three years in-service education
using a distance-mode package coupled with supervision by
college lecturers and other regular school supervisors, and
a final four months' residential course.(49)
In India, teacher education initiatives have aimed to
counteract old patterns of teacher-pupil interaction and
inspire people with a sense of classroom possibilities
through the Shikshak Samakhya (Teacher Empowerment)
programme in Madhya Pradesh state. Here, teachers experience
an explosion of ideas, knowledge, skills and interactive
activities, a wide range of colourful and attractive
teaching-learning materials, different methods of teaching,
collegiality and peer-group support.(50) This alternative
participatory education method involves teachers working
with one another, with the aim of empowering them to make
their own decisions. Shikshak Samakhya has succeeded in
overturning the low morale endemic among teachers in Madhya
Pradesh. It has also moved the teacher education process
closer to the active, participatory environment embodied in
the 'Joyful Learning' initiative that is transforming the
classroom experience in 11 Indian states (Panel 7).
In 44 schools of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,
the Active Teaching/Interactive Learning project has changed
traditional classroom practices by facilitating
teacher-student-parent partnerships. Children's ages and
aptitudes form the basis for the planned work, writing tasks
are varied, and readings encompass a wide range of
purposes.(51)
And in Bangladesh, where most primary school teachers
require students to learn by repetition, some classrooms are
benefiting from the Intensive District Approach to Education
for All (IDEAL). This project, a partnership between UNICEF
and the Government, educates teachers about the different
ways in which children learn - each according to individual
strengths. For example, some children learn better by doing,
others prefer to listen, still others to visualize. To make
the classroom environment more friendly, enjoyable and
sensitive to students, especially girls, IDEAL teachers use
participatory methods. The value of this approach has been
obvious to many teachers: "I have been dreaming of this sort
of classroom organization for the last 35 years," said Abdul
Majid Mollah, head teacher of a primary school in Jhenaidah.
"My dream has come true."(52)
The Bangladesh educators are not alone in discovering the
magical interaction with children who want to learn. "We
were very worried when we started the course, but now we
know we can teach the new way and we enjoy it," said a
teacher learning new techniques in the Lao People's
Democratic Republic. "It's more fun to teach now," he adds.
"Things run more smoothly when the children enjoy it."(53)
In bringing learning alive for children in their care,
teachers are recovering their own sense of self-esteem and
mission. "I came because I am tired of what happens in my
school," said a teacher explaining why he had attended the
Talleres de Educación Democrática (Democratic Education
Workshops) in Chile. "Tired of always doing the same things,
of working alone, of the fear to change. I try to do many
things. I have always been in favour of change. I would like
to believe that all of us walk together towards the same
goal."(54)
Language barriers
Another major obstacle to children's access to schools is
that, in many countries, lessons are still conducted in the
former colonial language -- for example, in many of the
English-, French- and Portuguese-speaking African countries
that have the lowest levels of primary enrolment in the
world. If the medium of instruction in school is a language
not spoken at home, particularly when parents are
illiterate, then learning problems accumulate and chances of
dropping-out increase. On the other hand, there is ample
research showing that students are quicker to learn to read
and acquire other academic skills when first taught in their
mother tongue (Panel 8). They also learn a second language
more quickly than those initially taught to read in an
unfamiliar language.
In the 1990s, several Latin American countries modified
their education laws to affirm the rights of indigenous
peoples, leading to participation by the indigenous in
educational decision-making as well as in planning,
implementing and evaluating educational policy and
programmes. In Bolivia, for example, indigenous
organizations developed an intercultural bilingual education
programme, and in Andean and Amazon Basin countries,
indigenous groups participated in the development of human
resource training programmes. A case study on the Bolivian
programme documented girls' and women's enthusiasm about
bilingual education as a means to intercultural
communication. The Latin American experiences in general
have also demonstrated that involving the ethnic groups
themselves can strengthen solidarity among people and raise
awareness about gender and other kinds of
discrimination.(55)
There are also innovative bilingual education programmes
providing replicable models all over the world. In Viet Nam,
the Kinh majority comprises 87 per cent of the population.
The remaining 13 per cent is composed of 53 separate ethnic
minorities who live in remote hill regions and coastal areas
with the lowest school-enrolment rates in the country. Since
1991, the Government has been trying to extend primary
schooling to the hill regions via a multigrade teaching
project. The language of instruction is Vietnamese, but
fast-track training is offered to potential teachers from
ethnic minorities. UNICEF and the World Bank have also
sponsored the development of bilingual books in ethnic
minority languages, such as Bahnar, Cham, H'Mong and Khmer,
and are setting up special literacy production centres that
will employ local teachers, writers and illustrators who
speak and write the local languages.
The model for this effort is the Intelyape project, which
developed Arrernte literacy materials with Aboriginal
Australians in the town of Alice Springs - another example
of how the education revolution applies innovations from one
part of the world to another.(56)
Emergency measures
The impact of armed conflict on children is so deep and
all-encompassing that it is almost impossible to measure
fully. We can estimate the deaths in a decade (2 million)
and serious injuries (6 million), the numbers orphaned or
separated from their families (1 million), and those left
homeless (12 million)(57). But we cannot know the exact
numbers of children who are spiritually scarred and
emotionally damaged by the violence they have seen and, in
some cases, been forced to take part in; by the massive
disruptions in the social fabric of their lives; and by the
increasingly frequent experience of being the targets of
attacks.
In armed conflict, education can serve both to heal and
rehabilitate. Keeping schools open, or reopening them as
soon as possible, provides children with structure and some
sense of normalcy in the midst of chaos. Teachers and other
professionals can attend to the psychosocial and emotional
effects of violence on children. They can teach about
survival and safety and monitor for human rights abuses.
In an effort to restore and protect children's right to
education in emergencies, UNESCO and UNICEF developed the
'Edukit' concept, in which educational and teacher training
materials are sent to the affected areas as rapidly as
possible. Children get pens and paper, chalk and erasers,
notebooks and exercise books. Teachers receive curriculum
guides, teaching materials and textbooks. And disrupted
communities gain a start on rebuilding. First used in Rwanda
and Somalia, Edukits have been sent to Afghanistan, Ghana,
Iraq, Liberia, Mali, the Republic of Moldova, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.
There are also programmes to help make schools places where
peace is practised and learned. In Lebanon and Sri Lanka
(Panel 9), educational approaches born in conflict have
become part of the national curricula. Children are taught
problem-solving, negotiation and communication skills and
respect for themselves and others; they come to know that
peace is their right. The goal is to reconcile divided
communities and prevent future conflicts.
In Croatia, where children have endured bitter civil war, an
innovative project offers children in primary schools 20
weeks of training that aims to address psychosocial stress,
increase bias awareness, promote conflict resolution and
teach ways of achieving peace. It is one of the various
approaches being used to help mitigate the effects of
conflict on children, as well as to address their very
special educational needs.
A collaboration between UNICEF, CARE, Canada's McMaster
University and the Croatian Ministry of Education, the
project was begun with fourth-graders during 1996 in one of
the four war-affected areas of the country with the purpose
of helping children resolve everyday problems, build their
self-esteem and improve their communication skills. As of
the 1997/98 school year, the project was in place in all
four war-affected areas, with Mali Korak (Little Step), a
local NGO, handling the teacher education component.
Successful results include reduced psychosocial stress,
improved classroom atmosphere and positive attitudes towards
school, parents and life in general. The hope is to extend
this kind of training to teachers and students in all eight
grades of primary school and to adolescents in youth
associations.
Countering child labour
The majority of out-of-school children are likely to be
working. The ILO estimates that there are 250 million
children working full or part time in the developing world
(58). Work prevents many children from gaining or benefiting
from education, but it is equally the case that education
systems fail to take into account the special circumstances
of working children. Most working children want to go to
school. To attract out-of-school working children into
school, to retain all children there to an appropriate age
and level of learning, and to reintegrate children who have
dropped out, education must be structured to fit the
specific needs of working children, their families and
communities (Panel 10). In particular, agricultural and
domestic labour, the most hidden forms of child labour,
which impact disproportionately on girls, must be addressed.
To transform education from being part of the child labour
problem into a key part of the solution will entail
considerable innovation and the use of non-traditional
techniques. It will involve upgrading teacher education and
school materials, and introducing greater flexibility and
creativity into education management, teaching and learning
methods, curricula, school schedules and locations. It means
mobilizing civil society, especially children. Children are
participating in planning their own school activities more
regularly, for example, in Escuela Nueva in Colombia, where
children's councils are commonly held as part of education
for citizenship.
UNICEF is cooperating with governments on a number of
approaches to meet the educational needs of working
children. Scholarship programmes in Brazil have provided
education grants to the poorest families as an economic
incentive to reduce the drop-out rate. For example, the
Bolsa Criança Cidadă, a federal government programme in
regions of the country where child labour is prevalent,
gives grants to families and to municipal education
secretariats to expand sports, cultural activities and
school tutoring when child workers are in school. Working
children in the Federal District are targeted by the
Bolsa-Escola programme, which provides the equivalent of a
minimum wage (about $100 a month) to their families, a
subsidy lost when their child's attendance falls below 90
per cent during the school year. Linked with efforts to
improve the quality of primary education, the programmes
have reduced drop-out rates.
In Bangladesh, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) has been
both a rapid and creative response in developing non-formal
approaches for children formerly working in the garment
industry. Signed by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and
Exporters Association (BGMEA), ILO and UNICEF in July 1995,
the agreement stipulates that children under 14 be removed
from the workplace, placed in schools and given a monthly
stipend. Lessons learned from the MOU have been incorporated
into a basic education programme for hard-to-reach urban
children.(59)
Element 3. Gender sensitivity and girls' education
'Growing tomatoes' is the topic of today's agricultural
lesson in the al-Akarma community school in Upper Egypt. In
the middle of the lesson, Nagwa raises her hand. The teacher
gives her permission to speak, and Nagwa very politely but
assertively corrects the teacher's information on how and
where tomatoes grow. The teacher thanks Nagwa and encourages
the class to applaud her.(60)
This is a gender-sensitive classroom in action. The subject
matter is relevant to the students' lives; the
teacher-student interaction is mutually respectful; a girl
is encouraged to participate rather than just listen
passively; and her contribution is then affirmed (Panel 11).
Investing in education systems to make them inclusive
benefits all children. Unfortunately classrooms like Nagwa's
are still very much the exception. Discrimination against
girls is the largest impediment to achieving Education For
All.
Girls' right to a high-quality education that serves their
needs is all too often denied, even to those who reach the
classroom. Their learning and self-esteem can be undermined
by lessons and textbooks filled with implicit and explicit
messages that girls are less important than boys. Their
teachers - women and men alike - may praise boys more,
reward them with attention and offer them more opportunities
for leadership. At school, girls may be routinely assigned
housekeeping tasks that would only be given to boys as a
punishment.
A gender-sensitive class should contain roughly equal
numbers of girls and boys, and their performance should be
at parity, but many classes in the world do not fulfil that
most basic criteria. For example, of the estimated 130
million out-of-school children aged 6 to 11 in the
developing world, 73 million are girls.(61) The importance
of reducing this gender gap by targeted strategies to
promote girls' education has been stressed throughout the
1990s. It loomed large in the World Declaration on Education
for All in 1990, adopted by 155 countries: "The most urgent
priority is to ensure access to, and improve the quality of,
education for girls and women, and to remove every obstacle
that hampers their active participation. All gender
stereotyping in education should be eliminated."(62) (See
Figs. 7 and 9.)
These words were carefully chosen to focus not only on the
quality of the education available to girls and the need to
remove all barriers to attending school, including those
related to cultural tradition or lack of political will, but
also related to the physical aspects of the problem, such as
lack of school places or appropriate facilities. Many girls
drop out of school at the onset of menstruation, which makes
them particularly vulnerable when there are no separate
toilets.
The broad social benefits of educating girls are almost
universally acknowledged. They include the following:
• The more educated a mother is, the more infant and child
mortality is reduced (Fig. 8).
• Children of more educated mothers tend to be better
nourished and suffer less from illness.
• Children (and particularly daughters) of more educated
mothers are more likely to be educated themselves and
become literate (Fig. 10).
• The more years of education women have experienced, the
later they tend to marry and the fewer children they tend
to have.
• Educated women are less likely to die in childbirth.
• The more educated a woman is, the more likely she is to
have opportunities and life choices and avoid being
oppressed and exploited by her family or social situation.
• Educated women are more likely to be receptive to,
participate in and influence development initiatives and
send their own daughters to school.
• Educated women are more likely to play a role in political
and economic decision-making at community, regional and
national levels.
While the bigger global problem concerns girls' lack of
access to a quality education, a problem in boys' education
appears to be looming. It is clear that in some regions
boys' enrolment is lower and their drop-out rates higher.
This is a long-established phenomenon in countries with
pastoral traditions such as Lesotho and Mongolia where boys
have always been expected to tend the herds. But it is also
a growing problem in the Caribbean, where girls are not only
staying in school longer, but significantly outperforming
boys at primary and secondary levels. These findings are
possibly the first reflection in the developing world of a
'boys' education' problem that exists in industrialized
countries (Panel 12).
To protect children's right to education, schools and
education systems must be 'gender sensitive'. What does this
mean? In practice, most reforms to improve quality and
guarantee child rights will also make education more gender
sensitive. Key measures proven to promote girls' schooling
and enhance the quality of the school experience for all
children include:
• Offering a child-centred learning experience in the
classroom that elicits the best in each individual, starts
from the life and environment of the community and
includes learning in the local language.
• Recruiting and training teachers to be sensitive to gender
and child rights. In some areas, more women teachers are
needed to serve as role models for girls as well as to
ensure that parents are comfortable with the classroom
environment. A UNICEF study of countries that achieved
universal primary education early in their development
process shows that these countries did exactly that --
they employed a much higher proportion of women
teachers.(63) The goal for all teachers, male and female,
however, is to create classrooms in which girls and boys
can contribute equally. Recruiting more women teachers
will be of limited use if girls' needs continue to be
disregarded. The educational process must change.
• Rooting out gender bias from the images and examples found
in textbooks and materials. Since these images tend to
show males in positions of activity, power and authority,
their elimination may seem like a reform detrimental to
boys. In reality, boys benefit from curricula that
encourage them to behave on the basis of who they are
rather than on what society expects them to be. Thoughtful
revision of textbooks, classroom materials and lesson
plans is likely to increase their general quality and
relevance to all children's lives.
• Giving the local community more control over and
involvement with schools and ensuring that parents and
families are involved in achieving gender sensitivity in
education.
• Ensuring that principals, supervisors and other
administrators are sensitive to gender issues, which will
result in schools where girls and boys have a good
learning environment that is safe and clean. This would
include facilities that do not discourage girls'
attendance. It would also include a better gender balance
among principals, supervisors and other administrators.
• Collecting education statistics and ensuring they are
disaggregated by gender, to get a true picture about
girls' access to and participation in education. Data
disaggregated by geographical location, socio-economic
group and, where relevant, ethnic and linguistic group
will help identify other possible areas of discrimination
as well.
• Providing programmes that foster early childhood care for
child growth and development (see 'Element 5. Care for the
young child'). All children's self-esteem and preparedness
for school are enhanced by this kind of pre-school care
and stimulation, but girls' staying power in primary
school seems to be increased even more than that of boys.
• Locating schools closer to children's homes. This can be
achieved through school mapping to identify the least
served locations, and by establishing small multigrade
schools in remote rural areas. These measures make
schooling more accessible to all children but particularly
encourage girls' enrolment.
• Scheduling lessons flexibly to allow children to
participate who might otherwise be deterred by family
responsibilities in the fields or the household.
• Offering free education, or ensuring that children are not
denied education because their parents cannot afford it.
Faced with a choice between sending their sons or
daughters to school, poor families often send their sons.
Gender sensitivity is not merely a facet of the education
revolution but is woven into its very fabric. Measures aimed
at girls' participation advance the cause of universal
education on every front.
A gender-aware approach must, therefore, inform
decision-making at every level of the system. At the
national level, decisions about education must be based on
gender-specific information to ensure equality as an
absolute priority. Sufficient resources must also be found
so that families no longer have to bear the direct and
indirect costs of schooling.
Heads of schools and administrators must promote
high-quality, child-centred learning and ensure that schools
are safe places, where girls feel respected and are safe,
physically and intellectually, from the teasing, rowdiness,
violence and sexual harassment that overwhelms them in so
many schools.
Teachers must use gender-sensitive materials and monitor
their own bias, making sure that girls participate as
frequently as boys and in the same ways. They also need to
include in the curriculum material about women's
contributions to society and the local community, especially
where that contribution is hidden or undervalued.
The global UNICEF Girls' Education programme is currently
pursuing these goals in more than 50 countries, including
the three regions with the widest gender gap: sub-Saharan
Africa, South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. The
latter two face a long and challenging road to equity but
have at least increased girls' enrolment in primary school
over the last decade.
In the Middle East and North Africa, progress has been
notable, but within the region, however, country
circumstances vary widely. Bahrain and Jordan have
completely eliminated the gender gap in primary schooling,
and Saudi Arabia has nearly done so. Morocco, on the other
hand, has a 19 percentage point difference between boys' and
girls' enrolment.
In general, though, most countries in the region show
substantial progress, which reflects the priority that
governments and international agencies have placed on
improving girls' educational opportunities since the Jomtien
conference.
All 17 of UNICEF country programmes in the region have a
significant female education component; aid donors have been
particularly favourable to this area; and countries have
been persuaded of the need to educate girls -- not least by
the growing need for a better trained and qualified labour
force. The Government of Iran, in recent years, has been
particularly supportive of education for rural girls and
women.
In sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, girls' net
enrolment rate, at 51 per cent, is lower than it was in
1985. The region's gender gap is smaller only because the
boys' enrolment rate has fallen even more.
At the Pan-African Conference on the Education of Girls,
held in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) in 1993, UNESCO
recognized that Africa is lagging behind other regions and
called on African governments, regional, bilateral and
international agencies and NGOs to make girls' education a
priority.
Fortunately, energy is being devoted to progress in the
1990s with every prospect that it will pay significant
dividends over the next decade. The African Girls' Education
Initiative, supported by UNICEF, now operates in over 20
countries and has substantial financial backing by the
Canadian and Norwegian Governments to carry it through to
the end of 1999.(64)
The Initiative is helping countries try different approaches
to close the gap between boys' and girls' enrolment, but one
common measure is to improve education systems overall in
order to better the educational experience of girls.
In Mali, for instance, constraints to girls' education are
seen in the broad context of weaknesses in the entire basic
education system, so that rather than using a piecemeal
project approach, the focus is on decentralized planning and
making the curriculum more relevant. Preliminary results are
encouraging. In participating schools, girls make up a much
larger percentage of the student population than they do in
schools in neighbouring villages.(65)
Zambia's Programme for the Advancement of Girls' Education
(PAGE) has targeted gender issues within the system by using
a host of initiatives ranging from piloting its own
single-sex classes (no results are available to date), to
increasing parental support for girls' education via joint
pupil-parent sessions. The attempt to reach out to
parents -- which has helped encourage rural parents to
evaluate how they allocate household tasks to their sons and
daughters -- is a recognition that gender sensitivity begins
at home and in the community and cannot be left to the
school alone.
At school and community meetings organized by PAGE,
attitudes towards girls' education remain divided, but it is
clear that the dialogue has helped reduce entrenched
opposition. The seven provinces not included in the original
programme asked to join, resulting in the Government's
launch of PAGE in 1998.
At the national level, meanwhile, Zambia's Ministry of
Education has agreed on the following 10 criteria by which
inspectors will judge whether a school is gender sensitive,
which could prove useful to other countries as well:
1. At least 45 per cent enrolment of each sex.
2. A completion rate of 80 per cent.
3. A girls' progression rate of 85 per cent.
4. At least 40 per cent of teachers from each sex.
5. The head teacher and deputy should be of opposite sex.
6. A catchment area of no more than 5 kilometres.
7. Separate toilet facilities for each class of 40.
8. Gender-sensitive teaching.
9. Use of gender-sensitive materials.
10. Active parental and community support.
As these criteria make clear, 'gender-sensitive' means a
concern for gender equality that also benefits boys. PAGE
points to a survey in one area that showed the programme had
succeeded in increasing the number of girls passing the
grade seven final exam, while the number of boys passing the
exam had increased even more.(66)
"Getting girls into school is merely the first step on a
long rugged road that is filled with ruts and roadblocks,
some cultural, others economic,"(67) said Priscilla Naisula
Nangurai, a head teacher in Maasailand (Kenya), speaking of
the pressures for girls to drop out of school. Ms. Nangurai
was one of a group of 'dynamic African headmistresses'
profiled by the Forum for African Women Educationalists
(FAWE) to promote girls' education by providing positive
role models.
A remarkable organization in itself (Panel 13), FAWE is
collaborating with a team from the Institute of Development
Studies at Sussex University (United Kingdom) on a major new
girls' education programme, Gender and Primary Schooling in
Africa (GAPS). The aim of GAPS is to adapt the influential
research and financial modelling in the book Educating All
the Children* to the practical needs and cultural
circumstances of various African countries. It recommends a
package of reforms that will "deliver schooling for all, at
levels of quality and gender equality which are defensible,
within 10 to 15 years."(68)
Each country's national government takes joint
responsibility for the research project. The first three
countries studied - Ethiopia, Guinea and Tanzania - have
moved into the second phase in which the reforms will begin
to be implemented, and research is now under way in a second
group of countries.
Reform proposals are bold and wide ranging, charting a route
by which Ethiopia might plausibly move from its current
primary gross enrolment rates of 39 per cent for boys and 24
per cent for girls to 102 and 106 per cent, respectively,
over a 15-year period. They include cost-saving reforms such
as automatic promotion in grades one to five, and increasing
double-shifting to 75 per cent at both primary and secondary
levels.
The cost of such a dramatic increase in educational
provision would inevitably be high, especially since it
depends for its overall success upon "quality-enhancing and
gender-equalizing reforms," such as increased spending on
learning materials, higher wages for teachers, and subsidies
for stationery and clothing material to 50 per cent of rural
girls. Nevertheless, the model suggests that Ethiopia, which
has farther to travel than many other countries to reach
schooling for all,(69) could achieve the goal by a
combination of increased spending, modest economic growth
and targeted aid.
Guinea, meanwhile, is working to overcome some of the social
and cultural factors inhibiting girls' education. It has
reduced direct costs of schooling through tax relief and by
abolishing compulsory uniforms. As the primary reason girls
drop out of school in Guinea is to marry, the Government has
also made it illegal to force a girl into marriage before
the ninth grade. To address the second major cause of
dropping-out among girls - domestic responsibilities and
household chores - it has introduced devices such as
mechanical mills and has dug wells to reduce girls' burdens.
It has also passed regulations specifying the times and
parameters for chores in school, ensuring that these fall
equally upon boys and girls.(70)
Even when a country manages to offer universal primary
schooling -- as many countries do in East Asia, the
industrialized world, and in non-indigenous parts of Latin
America, the need for gender-sensitive education remains.
Indeed, at the junior secondary level -- girls face serious
obstacles in continuing their education. It is particularly
critical for girls to cross the precarious bridge from
primary to secondary school in South-East Asia, because,
when they enter adolescence, many face the risk of being
recruited into the sex industry and other hazardous and
unhealthy work settings.
Pregnancy, another risk during this period, leads in many
countries to girls' automatic expulsion from school, in
contravention of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(article 2). The suspension or exclusion of pregnant girls
from school was the subject of a 1997 ruling by the
Committee on the Rights of the Child.(71)
Botswana is addressing the discrimination through a pilot
project that gives pregnant girls three months' maternity
leave, during which they would keep in touch with school via
extension courses. When they return to school, their baby
would be cared for in a day-care centre located alongside
the junior secondary school. In return, girls would work in
the day-care centre, which would double as a living
classroom, teaching parenting and life skills to both male
and female students, and aiming to reduce the number of
adolescent pregnancies. Community response has been
positive. Popular demand, in fact, forced Botswana's
Government to permit pregnant students to take exams and be
readmitted to their original school.(72)
Work is a major factor in denying millions of girls their
right to education:
Asabe Mohammed, a 14-year-old food hawker from the village
of Soro in Nigeria, had been on the street selling food
cooked by her mother throughout her primary school years. "I
think I was not that big when I started hawking food," she
commented, pointing to a seven-year-old girl. But Asabe had
a second chance, attending the Soro Girl-Child Education
Centre, established in May 1993 as part of an initiative by
UNICEF and the Nigerian Government to give out-of-school
girls the opportunity to acquire basic education and then
feed into mainstream secondary schools. In September 1997,
Asabe was among the 35 girls who graduated at a colourful
ceremony. She received a post-literacy certificate as well
as prizes for excellence in arithmetic, writing and
tailoring and is now enrolling in a junior secondary school
in Darazo, about 30 kilometres away. Those girls who will
not be continuing their education have benefited from the
training and are now setting up their own businesses in
trades such as embroidery, tailoring, knitting and
soap-production.(73)
There are girls like Asabe in virtually every town and
village of the developing world. This is why the success of
gender reforms in education may have to be judged, not just
by their results in terms of enrolment rates or even
learning achievement, but by the extent to which they change
the lives of girls for the better.
______________________
*The book referred to is by Christopher B. Colclough with
Keith Lewin (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993).
Element 4. The State as key partner
The obligation to ensure all children's right to education
and to achieve Education For All lies with national
governments. But within this encompassing obligation, many
actors play vital roles in delivering high-quality basic
education to all children, from central to local
governments, from international agencies to local
communities, NGOs and religious groups. Only the State,
however, can pull together all the components into a
coherent but flexible education system.
Historically, provision of education in developing countries
has gone awry because governments have focused on higher
education to the detriment of primary and secondary levels.
As inheritors of colonial education systems, most developing
countries, immediately after independence, preferred to use
limited resources to create universities and schools aimed
at meeting the needs of industrialization. Many countries
continue this focus on higher (tertiary) education to the
detriment of primary and secondary levels (Fig. 11). The
most extreme example is the Comoros, which spends 8 per cent
of GNP per capita on each pre-primary or primary pupil and
1,168 per cent on each college student.(74)
There are many countries where the imbalance is almost as
alarming. The inevitable result is that universal primary
education has not been achieved. In the minority of
countries that have accomplished that goal, the State
provided the policy and leadership, and in most cases became
the main provider of primary education, working in
partnership with communities, private schools and the
private sector. In many of these cases, the concentration of
state resources on primary education meant a greater
reliance on other providers for secondary education.
The most critical role of the State in education is as a
guarantor of children's right to basic education. Experience
in the last few years has led to a more textured
understanding of the role of the State, and of the State
itself. It is no longer useful to think of the State in
monolithic terms as a single national authority, but better
to understand that the State's authority exists at all
levels from the national or federal to the local, and the
roles that the State will play with regard to policy,
funding and provision often vary significantly from one
level to another.
The Convention reiterates and reinforces the responsibili-
ties of the State vis-ŕ-vis children's education in a number
of clauses. Article 28 ensures the right of children to
education, and article 29 elaborates a vision of quality
education that fulfils that right. The State, therefore,
must ensure that children successfully complete primary
education and must set standards to ensure minimum levels of
quality and learning achievement (see 'Element 1. Learning
for Life').
Buttressing these are article 3, which calls upon States to
ensure that the best interests of the child are taken into
consideration in all decisions and actions concerning the
child, and article 2, which mandates that States protect
children from all forms of discrimination; article 2
encompasses the educational ostracism of girls, who
represent nearly two thirds of out-of-school children in
developing countries. Thus States must implement all key
policy measures proven to increase the chances of girls'
entering and staying in school (see 'Element 3. Gender
sensitivity and girls' education').
States can use a variety of approaches to protect these
rights, including legislation. Laws appear most useful in
holding a State itself responsible for meeting its own
obligations, one of the most important of which is ensuring
that all children have access to school. Others are reducing
exploitative child labour and mobilizing society in support
of Education For All.
Above all, the State, as a vital role player in the
education revolution, must supply the political will to make
things happen. Irrespective of how flexible and diverse the
education system becomes, the State must still be involved
in planning for the entire system, designing and supervising
the curriculum, educating teachers, setting standards,
contributing to school construction and paying salaries. But
its role is also changing rapidly. Instead of acting as an
omnipotent central authority, States are finding that
partnerships with multiple sectors of society offer a
greater chance of achieving Education For All, and many are
passing power to lower levels of the system to improve
efficiency and responsiveness.
Mobilization
Education For All was intended to galvanize the
international community into action -- from the level of
governments and global institutions, to private companies
and media outlets, to local schools and villages. The 1990s
has witnessed the power of that concept.
Brazil offers an important example of mobilization and
partnership that embrace the whole society beyond the
education sector and the traditional education constituency.
In 1993, Brazil's nationwide mobilization effort culminated
in a 'National Week on Education for All,' resulting in a
10-year plan that led to concrete government action on many
fronts. In 1995, the new Brazilian Government expanded
actions that included transferring federal funds to local
schools and municipalities, improving the national testing
of students' learning achievement and using television as
the medium for a national distance-learning
teacher-education programme.(75)
The Government's most important role has probably been to
mobilize the whole nation behind the universal education
campaign. The most visible member of this effort has been
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso himself who, soon after
he took office in January of 1995, demonstrated that
education was his top priority by teaching the first class
of the year at the Jose Barbosa School in Santa Maria da
Vitória, in the state of Bahia. This was followed by a
national mobilization campaign called 'Acorda Brasil. Esta
na Hora da Escola!' (Wake Up, Brazil, It's Time for
School!).
The public response exceeded all expectations. A round of
debates took place throughout the country. A toll-free
telephone service, Fala Brasil (Speak Brazil), was
established for members of the public to express their views
on education and issues concerning the Ministry of
Education's programmes; it receives an average of 1,500
calls per day. A national database was set up to record
successful educational projects or innovations and make them
available for replication or adaptation in other regions. It
became available on the Internet in September 1997.(76)
Brazil put into practice almost all of the key guidelines
for successful mobilization:
• clearly articulating the goal and vision, with specific
time objectives;
• monitoring progress frequently and effectively via a few
clearly defined indicators;
• placing the goal of universal basic education at the very
centre of national life;
• building a national consensus so that the results survive
changes of government;
• using the power of the new information and communications
technology effectively;
• identifying, emulating and creating success stories.(77)
Other countries have successfully mobilized for Education
For All. Since 1995, the Philippines has designated the last
Monday in January as National School Enrolment Day (NSED).
On that day every year, schools throughout the country stay
open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. to enrol children eligible to
begin first grade the following June. The aim is not only to
increase enrolment via media attention to NSED, but also to
help education authorities plan for the number of teachers,
classrooms and materials required the following academic
year. On NSED, children receive medical and dental
examinations, an arrangement that also helps prepare schools
for students with special needs.(78)
This kind of national mobilization raises public
expectations. It also creates challenges for the
authorities. In the first years of NSED, there were still
shortages of teachers and classrooms when the children
arrived at schools the following June.(79) Nevertheless, the
Philippine Education Ministry was sufficiently flexible to
back up the mobilization campaign with a far-reaching
decision. It assigned the best teachers, especially those
gifted in language, to the first grades to ease the
transition from home to school and make children's first
experience of education as positive as possible.
The power of an idea to mobilize enthusiasm and resources
has also been evident in Malawi. There, in 1994, the new
government marked its break with the autocratic era of the
former President Hastings Kamuzu Banda by proclaiming
universal free primary education. At a stroke, the move
released children's families from the crippling dual burden
of paying school fees and buying school uniforms, producing
a massive leap in enrolment from 1.9 million to 3.2 million
children, including broadly equal proportions of girls and
boys.(80)
The bold approach clearly had major implications for the
Government's budget, but it caught the imagination of
international donors and lenders to such an extent that
Malawi has been able to sustain and refine its commitment in
the succeeding years. Rewarded for its daring, Malawi has
received high levels of international aid and loans for
building classrooms, educating teachers and improving
educational supplies.
Mobilization campaigns can tap new funds for education,
though the benefits to society of involving the private
sector are not restricted to money. In Brazil, the Itaú
Bank, the second largest private bank in the country, and
the Odebrecht Foundation have worked closely with the
Government and UNICEF to support and promote education and
child rights in the media and through fund-raising
campaigns.
The two donors have also provided concrete support for
projects. The Itaú Bank donated all the equipment for the
Fala Brasil education telephone centre, trains the operators
and maintains it;(81) additionally, it funds an Education
and Participation prize to acknowledge the work of NGOs,
community groups and trade unions and supports NGOs with
training and networking opportunities. The Odebrecht
Foundation was a strong supporter of Brazil's Statute of
Children and Adolescent Rights, one of the world's most
creative responses to the Convention on the Rights of the
Child, and a partner in national mobilization efforts for
Education For All.
Partnerships
The formation of partnerships has become a central concept
in planning and managing education, especially in situations
where significant numbers of children are deprived of
education. The State retains responsibility for setting
national objectives, mobilizing resources and maintaining
educational standards, while NGOs, community groups,
religious bodies and commercial enterprises can all
contribute, making education a more vital part of the life
of the whole community.
The role of local communities extends far beyond raising
money for schools, although in some countries 'partnership
with parents and local communities' means 'fund-raising'.
The costs of sending children to school have, in fact, risen
markedly for families. A 1992 household budget survey in
Kenya showed that households directly contributed 34 per
cent of the total cost of primary education.(82) Cambodian
households contribute three quarters of the total cost of
public primary education, and those in Viet Nam contribute
half(83) - a dramatic departure from the totally free
education offered until recently. The inevitable effect of
these costs is a decline in the enrolment and retention of
children in school. Studies carried out in two African and
three Asian countries by UNICEF confirm that private costs
are a major factor in discouraging school attendance.(84)
Partnership with a community may well lead to more funds
becoming available, but this should be a by-product of the
collaboration rather than its only goal. If parents are
asked to contribute more money but have no voice in the
organization and management of schools and see no
improvement in educational quality, they and their children
will soon disappear from view.
On the other hand, a community that participates actively in
the running of an educational facility -- whether a nursery,
primary school or secondary school -- has greater
opportunities to make educational services relevant and a
greater incentive to make them work. Any project has a
higher chance of success if it is based on the expressed
needs of the community and if that community is a key actor
in its implementation, monitoring and evaluation (Fig. 12).
"We decide what's good for our children and we are capable
of doing something about it," says Enamul Huq Nilu, chair of
a school management committee in Jhenaidah Sadar Thana
(Bangladesh).(85) His school is part of the IDEAL project,
which has aimed to reinstitute the community and parental
involvement in primary schools that ended when the national
Government assumed control in 1973. Through a local planning
process facilitated by government and UNICEF officials,
members of the school management committee, parents and
teachers work together to write a yearly plan for the school
that is then monitored by all involved.(86)
A similar philosophy underpins the CHILDSCOPE project in the
Afram Plains district of Ghana. Its main strategy has been
to empower the communities surrounding its 11 primary
schools to identify impediments to their children's
education and devise their own solutions. Parents actively
participate in the education and development of their
children, with resulting improvements in literacy, numeracy
and general enrolment, particularly that of girls. In
addition, the project's holistic approach has led to a
greater community awareness of the health and nutritional
needs of developing children.
As the CHILDSCOPE project illustrates, schools can serve as
vital change agents. They can reach out to local communities
in partnership with other agencies, for example, to identify
children who may need protection. In this sense, teachers
and school employees are the local agents of the Ministry of
Education, assuming a measure of responsibility for tracing
children who do not appear in school and whose rights are
more likely to be endangered.
Partnership in the service of Education For All involves all
segments of society in guaranteeing child rights. For it to
work, however, the State must be prepared to relinquish some
of its decision-making powers to lower levels of the system.
Decentralization
Imagine you are a teacher in a primary school in a rural
district. You hear that a family member has died and wish to
attend the funeral. Instead of asking your head teacher or
board of school governors for permission, you must make your
request to a ministry official in the distant capital.
There, your plea will be dealt with by bureaucrats who have
never met you, have never seen your school and do not know
what provision might be made to cover your absence. This was
the rule until recently in Venezuela, which had one of the
most centralized education systems in the world.(87)
On the surface, the organization of public schooling is
remarkably similar throughout the world. Individual schools
are managed by a head teacher or principal. At the district
level, an administrative body offers supervision and
technical support. A state or provincial education agency
may be available only in larger countries, but nearly all
countries have a national education ministry that plans and
has administrative responsibility for the system as a whole.
Centralized control may be more efficient when it comes to
textbooks - ensuring that children in all parts of the
country have access to quality material and that the
material does not promote ethnic hatred, for example. But
there is increasing recognition that if schools are to
improve and be more responsive to local communities, they
have to be given more autonomy to assess and resolve their
own problems.
Decentralization is an important option, but one that
carries a cost. It is likely to require more careful
planning, more expensive training, more extensive data
collection and even more staff and resources.
Decentralization should be selected not because it is the
cheapest option but the best, and it strengthens the State's
commitment to and ability to achieve Education For All.
As experience is increasingly revealing, decentralization
becomes most dynamic when control of schools is
redistributed, concentrating power not entirely in the hands
of head teachers but involving the community in management
through creation of a governing body with membership drawn
from parents, teachers and the wider community.
Decentralization, so conceived, should be a tool to
encourage partnerships and mobilization -- key features of
the education revolution.
The recent experiences of the Brazilian state of Minas
Gerais, one of the country's largest and most developed
states, shows decentralization at its best. After examining
the reasons for an appalling drop-out rate -- in 1990, only
38 in every 100 students who had entered primary school
completed the first year -- the state made decentralization
the top educational priority. It also shifted
decision-making from the state capital to school boards
headed by an elected principal and composed of equal numbers
of parent representatives and school staff. The boards were
originally responsible for the financial and administrative
issues with which parents felt comfortable, but they are now
involved in pedagogy as well. Community involvement and
local control have already significantly improved
educational standards: In 1994, 11 per cent more students
completed their first year than in 1990; grade repetition
tumbled from 39 per cent in 1990 to 19 per cent in 1994.
Ana Luíza Machado Pinheiro, Secretary of Education for Minas
Gerais, says, "Three or four years ago, when the schools
were falling apart, if you put forward a pedagogical
proposal people would say: 'What for, if we have no desks
and no teaching materials? If the school is in a chaotic
situation, how are we going to implant a new pedagogical
proposal?' Today, with the schools all neat and tidy,
everybody is talking about quality."(88)
Contrary to expectations, participation in schools has been
greatest in poorer communities, and it is these schools that
have registered the greatest student improvement. The Minas
Gerais model has inspired many other Brazilian states to
follow its example; it is particularly attractive because it
requires no additional resources but simply better
management of what is already available.(89)
Other successful models of decentralized school management
are appearing throughout the world. In Poland and some other
Central and Eastern European countries, decentralized school
systems are a reaction to the former highly centralized
socialist systems. In Asia, school clusters -- in which
schools are grouped together to share resources, save costs
and maximize community mobilization -- have proved
particularly useful. The strengthening of school clusters
has been a vital part of the Continuous Assessment and
Progression System (CAPS) project in Myanmar, which aims to
reduce drop-out and repetition rates at the primary level.
The effectiveness of school management flowing from the
cluster system is as important as teacher education,
child-centred learning or community mobilization in terms of
keeping children in the classroom. Good management generates
higher quality education just as predictably as good
teaching.(90)
Decentralization can create educational opportunities for
groups that may be traditionally excluded from a centralized
education system. El Salvador's EDUCO (Programa de Educación
con Participación de la Comunidad) project, for example,
which vests control of schools and pre-schools in community
associations, targets children mainly in rural areas. The
needs of ethnic minorities for special provisions, such as
teaching in their own language, are more likely to be
recognized by a local teacher than a national education
authority.
The recruitment of more girls into school can be improved
through decentralization. In the Mopti and Kayes regions of
Mali, where girls' enrolment rates are very low,
district-level teams, including local NGOs, work intensively
with communities to elect and train school management
committees responsible for ensuring gender parity, among
other things. Mauritania places a high priority on the
decentralized collection of data about girls' education
through local education management committees and regional
observatories.
In fact, the almost universally acknowledged need for better
educational data broken down by gender -- on enrolment and
drop-out rates and on learning achievement -- can be met
much more easily through decentralization.
Yet, as the accelerating process of globalization causes
national governments to privatize an increasing number of
functions, decentralization may be undertaken in the
interests of cost-cutting or privatization. Public education
in this event is likely to be weakened, with access to
education as well as the quality of that education falling
in lower-income regions simply because they have fewer
resources to devote to schooling. Inequality of this kind
mushroomed, for example, after Chile introduced a voucher
scheme in 1981 that siphoned off students from public into
private schools and public school revenues dropped.(91) In
addition, decentralization places additional demands on
local professional and administrative capacity, and if not
accompanied by a strong and effective programme of
strengthening that capacity, it can result in a decrease in
quality and substantially higher costs.
Decentralization can provide enormous benefits if undertaken
from a position of strength and commitment to educational
equity and quality and community empowerment. The most
successful examples occur when a national education ministry
is also strong and not driven by the dictates of finance
constraints -- and where the education ministry can
intervene, as necessary, to stop emerging inequalities.
Element 5. Care for the young child
The principle that learning begins at birth was reaffirmed
in the Jomtien conference's World Declaration on Education
for All.(92) Awareness of the central educational importance
of the early years has grown along with programmes that put
this concept into practice.
Every year new research adds to our understanding of the way
children develop. The rapid development of a young child's
brain depends largely on environmental stimulation,
especially the quality of care and interaction the child
enjoys. Recent work in molecular biology has established
that brain development in the first year of a child's life
is more rapid and extensive than had previously been
thought. By the time of birth, a child has 100 billion
neurons in the brain linked by complex nerve junctions
called synapses.(93) These synapses are the connections
allowing learning to take place, and in the first few months
after birth their number increases twentyfold.(94) Physical,
mental and cognitive development all depend on these
communication links in the brain.
The good nutritional health of both a mother (while pregnant
and lactating) and baby is vital not just for child survival
and physical growth, but for mental development and future
educational prospects.(95) In addition, there is convincing
evidence that the quality of the care -- including
nutrition, health care and stimulation -- a child receives
during the first two to three years can have a long-lasting
effect on brain development. And beyond that, attention to
child development at least through age eight is crucial in
helping children reach their potential.
Given this significance of early nutrition and care, any
meaningful approach to 'basic education' has to include
early childhood programmes that promote child survival,
growth and development. There is a growing consensus that
childcare and early education are inseparable: Children
cannot be well cared for without being educated and children
cannot be well educated without being cared for.(96)
The world is finally recognizing that a child's rights to
education, growth and development -- physical, cognitive,
social, emotional and moral -- cannot be met without a
comprehensive approach to serving their needs from birth. It
is acknowledging that the mental, social and emotional
development of pre-school children has a huge impact on
their ability to thrive in the classroom and later in the
adult world.
Child care: A social imperative
Families are the first line of love, care and stimulation
for their children, and parents are the first, and most
important, teachers (Panel 14). But increasingly the nurture
and stimulation so essential to a child's physical,
emotional and intellectual development are being provided
today in a patchwork of formal and informal services
provided by governments, businesses, NGOs and others.
Full-scale kindergartens or day care for all children are
not the only way of meeting children's and families' needs
for good quality childcare. Expansion of ECCD (early
childhood care for child growth and development) services,
though rapid, has been hampered by many governments'
misconception that the Western model of formal,
prohibitively expensive, pre-school centres is the only way
to meet children's needs in the early years.
Research suggests that structured day care outside the home
is the most effective -- a Turkish study between 1982 and
1986 showed it to achieve better results in all measures of
psychosocial development. Nevertheless, the same survey
showed that children whose mothers cared for them at home
but received training and some outside support gained
significantly over children whose mothers received no
training. The children tested higher in language use,
mathematics and overall academic performance during the five
years of primary school and demonstrated better levels of
social integration, personal autonomy and even family
relationships. As adolescents in 1992, more of them were
still in school than peers whose mothers had not received
training.(97) The most practical, low-cost way for a
developing country to pursue the manifold benefits of ECCD,
therefore, is to try to raise parental awareness of child
development issues.
The better the care and stimulation a child receives, the
greater the benefit -- for the national economy as well as
the child. For example, children with good early childhood
experiences (health, education, nutrition, stimulation,
growth and development) are less likely to 'waste' public
funds by dropping out of school or repeating grades; they
will also suffer less from illness and be more productive in
adulthood.
Often, formal programmes have been used to ensure that
children are ready for school, especially in cases where
parents have to work and cannot provide the primary care for
their children. Few developing countries have the budgets to
match the level of childcare in industrialized countries
such as Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, where 80 per
cent of three-year-olds attend nursery or pre-school.(98)
Trinidad and Tobago, however, enrols around 60 per cent of
four-year-olds in nursery schools operated, at the
Government's request, by Servol (Service Volunteered for
All). Each of the Servol pre-school centres has been
requested by local communities, which have formed an
eight-person school board to provide and maintain facilities
and pay the portion of teacher salaries not covered by the
small government subsidy.
Teachers in the Servol centres do not try to pressure young
children into reading, writing and counting but aim to give
toddlers a positive self-image and develop their
resourcefulness, curiosity and sense of responsibility.
Parent education is fundamental: 'Rap sessions' are held in
which teachers explain the harm done to small children by
both excessive discipline and neglect, and they communicate
the importance of hygiene and nutrition.(99)
Servol's model of nursery school was a significant and
successful departure from facilities in which toddlers were
expected to sit quietly at desks and listen to the teacher.
Many formerly communist countries have been struggling to
make the same kind of transition. One of the strengths of
the old political system in the former Soviet bloc was its
extensive provision of nurseries for the children of working
parents. While clean, safe and cheap, however, many followed
a rigid curriculum in which all children did largely the
same thing at the same time.
In response to declining pre-school enrolment and
availability, teachers in 23 Eastern European and former
Soviet Union countries are moving down a different road
today. Funded by the Soros Foundation, they are learning a
new curriculum designed by Children's Resources
International (CRI) containing the best techniques of early
childhood education. Emphasizing child-centred education and
child-initiated play, the Step by Step curriculum has proven
so popular that the project has expanded to Haiti, Mongolia
and South Africa and has developed curricula for infants and
toddlers and for children up through age 10.(100) Another
initiative, funded by Save the Children (United States) in
Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Croatia, combines structured
play to enhance children's development with strong parental
and community involvement, keeping costs low.(101)
The Lao PDR is another former 'command economy' pursuing
change. Since 1989, the Government has sought external
partners, including Save the Children Fund (United Kingdom)
to help it introduce more child-centred teaching methods in
schools and nurseries. The changes in the 1990s have been
profound, according to Mone Kheuaphaphorn, director of the
Dong Dok kindergarten. In the old days, teachers did a lot
of talking and the children could only be listeners; they
had very little chance to participate.... Teaching aids and
toys were not usually available and, if there were any, they
didn't relate to the topic and weren't attractive to
children.... The activities were controlled by teachers and
the children had no access to free play or choice. Now the
philosophy is 'learning through play' which includes many
activities.... To sum up: The new way of teaching helps
children become happy, healthy and creative. Since the
implementation there have been regular whole-school meetings
and monthly classroom meetings with parents so as to ensure
parents can support their children's learning and also
contribute to the school when it is needed. Parents are
happy to see their children's skills and behaviour change
and that the school has become an attractive place for
children.(102)
The new child-centred approach has also made it possible for
the Lao PDR to launch a successful project integrating
children with special needs and learning disabilities into
the school system at the kindergarten stage. The sensitivity
and responsiveness of a modern pre-school centre has worked
to make education more accessible to those children, such as
girls and minorities, who have tended to be excluded from
the traditional school system.
Every indicator points to the fact that poor children
benefit most -- both in psychosocial and educational
terms -- from ECCD programmes.(103) This finding makes such
interventions particularly appropriate for impoverished
communities. The Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative in the
city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is offering child-centred
nursery education to 30,000 children aged three to five from
slum communities. Its chief aims are to foster a love of
learning in poor communities and prepare children as much as
possible for the challenges of schooling.(104) Pratham, an
NGO, is confident that the Initiative will cover the city by
the year 2001 and is also campaigning for an amendment to
the Indian Constitution giving all children under eight the
right to education.
Intersectoral links
The lesson of ECCD for Education For All is that all schools
can and must change to serve children's developmental needs.
Many of the same principles of ECCD programmes -- the need
for intersectoral links between education and health or
nutrition or the advantages of child-centred, flexible
teaching methods -- could usefully be put into practice in
all schools, especially in the early primary grades.
Until recently, health and nutrition workers tended to
concentrate on helping children survive their first few
vulnerable years, while education experts focused on school
enrolment or improving teaching and learning. Their work
rarely connected, but that situation has changed. The
education sector's increasing work with professionals in
health and sanitation, nutrition and family planning --
forging and strengthening 'intersectoral links' --
represents another vital aspect of the education revolution.
Since 1987, ECCD programmes in Nigeria have steadily
expanded. Each centre offers free immunization and
concentrates on children's nutrition; many programmes have,
in fact, advocated deworming to control parasitic infection
in children. From the start, the aim of the project was to
provide low-cost community-based care, since pre-school
facilities had previously reached only 2 per cent of
children from wealthier families, even in urban areas. Even
these programmes paid little attention to health, nutrition,
and the psychosocial and cognitive aspects of child
development.
The successful strategy has been to reach children wherever
they are. Culturally acceptable ECCD facilities have been
located in market places, churches, mosques, community halls
and annexes to primary schools, and the UNICEF-supported
project has home-based facilities in poor areas, serving
around 175,000 children. An NGO network plans to extend ECCD
services to all Nigerian children under six years of
age.(105)
The need for a coordinated, interdisciplinary approach to
children's education, health and nutrition is most vital in
the early years of life. In order to achieve this goal,
collaboration among a variety of partners, such as trade
unions, the private sector, NGOs and religious groups, is
needed. Children must be better prepared for school, and
ECCD, whether provided at home by parents or in formal
kindergartens, has proven to be the best means. Schools must
also be better prepared to receive young children in a
welcoming, suitable environment; they must then educate
those children and ultimately enhance their capacity to take
advantage of that education. Based on the evidence flowing
in from around the globe, that lesson is sinking in.
Globalization and learning
Virtually all the elements of the 'expanded vision' of
education that emerged from Jomtien can be, and have been,
put into practice, as we have described, in various ways in
education systems around the world. What that vision could
not have anticipated was the extraordinary pace of
political, social, economic and technological changes the
world would go through, and which would have great impact on
education.
For instance, while the Jomtien vision stressed the
importance of the State working in partnership with civil
society to ensure access to quality education for all, it
did not count on the rapid emergence at the end of the cold
war of a plethora of new nation States, many of which had to
deal with problems of tenuous authority, limited capacity
and precarious resources. The need for partnership suddenly
became even more urgent, as did the recognition that the
State need not be the only provider of education. The focus
on human rights recast the principal role of the State as
guarantor of every child's right to a quality education.
So while in many cases the State continues to be the
principal provider of basic education, in others it is just
one in a broad range of different organizations providing
basic education. It retains, however, the important role of
providing leadership, developing policy and standards, and
articulating the national vision. And in every case the
State is accountable for ensuring the right of every child
to a high-quality basic education.
While the Jomtien vision recognized the importance of the
process of globalization, few in 1990 could have anticipated
how quick the pace would be in the last eight years.
Computer programmers in the Philippines now write programmes
for software developers in the United Kingdom, while lawyers
in India draft briefs for legal firms in the United States.
From the intermingling of cultures and the growing dominance
of certain cultures and languages of the 'global village',
two strong trends have emerged -- heightened demand for
schools to teach an international language that will give
access to the global village, and an increasing concern for
education to help preserve and protect cultural and ethnic
identity and diversity. Education thus is becoming a key
strategy to provide access to a world that is increasingly
interdependent and also to help ensure the survival of
cultural and ethnic identities.
Nor could virtually anyone in 1990 have foreseen the
extraordinarily rapid growth of modern communication and
information technologies. The Internet existed then but
attracted very little attention. The meteoric advance of
information processing and electronic communication
technologies has created the possibility for changes in
education that were not taken seriously in 1990.
Suddenly, and at an awe-inspiring pace, new possibilities
are arising for transforming the education vision of Jomtien
into reality, using not only mass media and radio as Jomtien
proposed, but also the new information and communication
technologies, which are already transforming teaching and
learning in privileged communities. As potent as they are,
unless access to them can be assured for the less
privileged, they will simply serve to widen the existing
learning gap between communities and countries rather than
bridge it.
In the years since Jomtien, significant possibilities have
emerged to advance human welfare. At the same time,
disparities between the privileged and the poor have
widened, and with them the threat of social instability and
civil conflict, making the arguments for the education
revolution as an investment to promote peace, prosperity and
the advancement of human rights even stronger now than they
were a decade ago. The next section, 'Investing in human
rights', looks more closely at the arguments for that
investment.
Investing in human rights
On the brink of the 21st century, the world is on the cusp
of an education revolution, based on our expanded and
revitalized concept of what education means and the ways in
which learning can be enhanced.
The commitment to education, which foundered on the rocks of
debt and structural adjustment during the 1980s, has been
renewed in the 1990s by the awareness that human rights are
key to human development.
As never before, humanity recognizes that human rights are
indivisible and that the fulfilment of one right reinforces
and promotes another. That there is a human right to
education, like the rights to freedom of speech and thought
and freedom from torture, may still strike many as a novel
concept. It is an especially far-reaching and transforming
concept in the developing world, where 130 million children
who should be in school are not. Even more revolutionary is
the insistence of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
that this education must consist of a high-quality learning
experience in a child-centred, gender-sensitive environment.
Clearly much of what currently passes for basic education is
simply indefensible. Its inadequacy can be illustrated by
the following examples of school experience:
[In Japan]: Children are thrown into this severe and endless
competition for better social position at the age of
kindergarten because all educational institutions are
hierarchically ranked from top to bottom according to
prestige, actually defined by the number of students whom an
institution can send to a 'better' or 'famous' higher
educational institution or big company. Only children who
have been well trained to learn almost inhumane perseverance
and self-restraint can succeed in getting ahead... [they]
know well that if they drop out of the school system, [they]
will easily be driven to the socially marginal rubble.(1)
[In Zambia]: The average pupil walks seven kilometres every
morning in order to get to school, has not eaten, is tired,
undernourished, malnourished, suffers [from] intestinal
worms, is sweating and lacks concentration on arrival. He or
she sits with 50 other pupils in a similarly poor condition.
Their receptivity is minimal. The teacher is poorly
educated, badly motivated and underpaid. He speaks bad
English but still tries to teach in that language.... He
does not know his subjects well and uses poor teaching
methods during his lessons.... The acoustics and ventilation
are bad, the room dark, there are no chalks, the blackboard
shines, there are too few notepads and pencils.... The
school is an alien world, which ineffectively tries to offer
knowledge of very little relevance to the pupil, his or her
social environment or the society he or she will meet as an
adult in the labour market.(2)
[In Brazil]: The municipal primary school class...
uninspirational to begin with and lacking basic
instructional materials, was filled with dozing and
daydreaming children... [who] were grossly undersized for
their ages; others, with obviously distended bellies,
complained of stomach-aches from parasites and worms, while
still others were tormented by itching from lice, pinworms,
scabies and other common skin infections. Children of all
ages and talents were exposed to the same repetitive lessons
pitched always to the slowest learners.(3)
Many learning environments are far from the stimulating,
child-friendly ones stipulated by the Convention on the
Rights of the Child. But if the failures of the existing
education system are manifest, so too are the successes of
the pioneering examples described in the previous section --
not only in their teaching and learning environments but
also in the flexible and responsive management systems they
have established. In addition, a positive by-product of
education's extreme financial problems over the last two
difficult decades has been the elimination of whatever
excess might have been in the system, leaving it more
cost-effective and less wasteful than ever before.
A number of economical and high-quality routes to achieving
the world's educational goals have been investigated over
the last decade, and many show promise. These need to be
supported by sufficient resources and political will --
nationally and internationally -- if all schools, in rich
and poor countries alike, are to benefit.
The duty of the State
National governments are obligated to ensure basic education
and to make all necessary changes in policy and practice
towards this vital end. Many were inspired by the Jomtien
agenda to find more money for education, but many others
have failed to make education a sufficient priority.
Developing countries tend to plead poverty as an excuse for
failing to allocate sufficient resources for Education For
All, despite the evidence amassed over four decades of
development that poor countries can work wonders with
commitment and far-sightedness.
Comparisons within Asia make the point. The state of Kerala
in India has achieved a 90 per cent literacy rate, far in
excess of the 58 per cent rate in Punjab, which has more
than double the per capita income.(4) Viet Nam has reached
94 per cent literacy, while Pakistan, with a much greater
per capita income, languishes at just 38 per cent. Among the
factors influencing these results must be counted political
commitment, exemplified in specific policy measures to
ensure Education For All. A general plea of poverty can be
rejected when military spending in South Asia remains so
high, - about $13.6 billion a year in the region.(5)
UNICEF has conducted a detailed study of nine countries and
the Indian state of Kerala that have all achieved much
better health and education results than others in the same
region with similar income levels. All of them achieved
universal primary enrolment early in their development
process. Regardless of political and other differences, all
share a policy of strong state support for basic social
services, refusing to rely on 'trickle-down' from economic
growth or the free play of market forces. Each has
consistently spent a higher proportion of per capita income
on primary education than have lower-performing neighbours,
while keeping down unit costs. They have managed to improve
quality while keeping repetition and drop-out rates low, and
they have kept primary schooling free of tuition fees.(6)
The countries that are furthest from achieving Education For
All have not as a rule adopted the policies and
interventions of those countries that have made significant
progress in education. They have not, for example, ensured a
balance in public spending, funding basic education as well
as higher-education levels equitably. Nor have they kept
costs low as coverage expands. The experience in particular
of francophone Africa is illustrative. There, unit costs
(per pupil and per graduate) remain among the highest in the
world, and enrolment rates among the lowest.
The policy lesson is that the cost to parents has to be
minimized, yet there may be evidence that the out-of-pocket
costs of sending a child to school in sub-Saharan Africa in
the 1980s rose. The progress achieved in the nine study
countries and the Indian state of Kerala provides other
useful lessons - the positive effect of a high proportion of
female teachers on girls' enrolment, for example, and the
advantages of instruction in the mother tongue in the
earliest grades.
In India, there is now a concerted move to increase the
proportion of female teachers in the northern states where
girls' enrolment is the lowest in the country, while in the
rest of South Asia, and certainly in most of Africa, this
remains an issue that deserves much greater attention from
policy makers.(7) However, on the language of instruction
issue, a consensus has emerged only in the last few years,
particularly in West African countries that the mother
tongue should be the medium of instruction in the early
primary grades.
The lesson is clear: National governments have the capacity
to devote far more resources to the movement towards
Education For All, although too few do. Perhaps even more
significantly, under the European Community's Lomé IV aid
agreement, only 20 per cent of the 70 African, Caribbean and
Pacific countries ranked education and training a high
priority, 45 countries saw it as a low priority and 6
countries had no education or training projects at all.(8)
International aid, although important, is no solution to the
funding crisis. Aid contributions generally account for less
than 2 per cent of a recipient country's education budget,
and rates of aid continue to drop to record low levels.
The proportion of bilateral aid committed to education in
1993-1994 was 10.1 per cent, compared with 10.2 per cent in
1989-1990, and 11.0 per cent in 1987-1988.(9) Within the
overall amount, aid to basic education, which traditionally
received minimal amounts of bilateral funds, tripled in the
first half of the decade -- a significant increase
attributable to the impact of the Jomtien conference. But a
more detailed look at the figures and donor countries shows
that over 95 per cent of the increase is accounted for by
just three countries that shifted their aid policies
substantially over the period: Germany, Japan and the United
Kingdom.(10) Other countries either increased their aid to
basic education very slightly or reduced it.
Even the World Bank, one of the Jomtien convenors and now
the greatest single provider of funds to the education
sector, has a varied record in funding education in the
1990s. Its total lending certainly increased in the wake of
Jomtien. In 1989, 4.5 per cent of the Bank's lending was
allocated to education; by 1994, it was allocating 10.4 per
cent of its funds to this area. But by 1997, the proportion
had fallen back to 4.8 per cent. The trend appears to be
changing again, and the Bank estimates that it will allocate
8.6 per cent of its total lending to education in 1998.
Between 1991 and 1997, 45 per cent of education loans by the
World Bank went to fund basic education programmes.(11)
It should be noted, however, that allocation does not equal
spending and there is much World Bank money for education
still unspent. In addition, the World Bank lends money
rather than providing grants, and the majority of its loans
are made to middle-income countries and carry commercial
interest rates. When money is lent to middle-income
countries, the Bank is moreover somewhat constrained by the
purposes for which recipient governments wish to borrow
money, and many are unwilling to take on debt at commercial
interest rates to advance the cause of basic education.
However, the Bank does have a soft-loan subsidiary, the
International Development Association (IDA), over whose
money it has more control. IDA lends to low-income countries
at highly concessional terms. Given this flexibility, the
alarming fall-off in IDA loans to countries in sub-Saharan
Africa is even more troubling than the Bank's reduced
lending to education. IDA loans to the region stood at $417
million in 1993 but have fallen precipitously each year
since, arriving at a low point of $132 million in 1996. This
is less than the average annual lending in the pre-Jomtien
period of 1986-1990. Sub-Saharan Africa, the continent most
in need of financial assistance, is currently receiving less
than 10 per cent of the World Bank's total lending to
education.(12)
The big increases in World Bank educational lending
post-Jomtien have been to Latin America and the Caribbean,
where governments are more likely to be able to afford loans
at commercial rates. Meanwhile, IDA has made substantial
increases recently in loans to public-sector reform and
private-sector development projects in Africa, reflecting
the Bank's commitment to improving a country's
infrastructure and professional capacity and in the
long-term reduction of poverty.
While this is a common approach in development lending, it
can reduce the funding available for education. New Bank
loan commitments for education in Africa declined from
slightly more than $400 million in 1993 to just above $50
million in 1997 (commitments for 1998 are back to the $300
million level). This drop was mirrored by a commensurate
decline in disbursements from slightly less than $400
million in 1994 to approximately $200 million in 1998.(13)
If, as the Bank asserts, investment in education, and
particularly in girls' education, brings the highest return
on investment in the developing world, the Bank may not be
maximizing its African investments.
Education: The best investment
The World Bank's influence as an advocate for financial
investment in education has increased with its publication
of research documenting the productive effects of primary
schooling. Private rates of return -- the amount earned by
individuals in formal-sector employment in relation to that
invested in their education -- appear in all regions of the
developing world to be higher for primary than for secondary
and tertiary education.(14) There is a great deal of
evidence, for example, that basic education increases the
output of small farmers: One study of 13 low-income
countries demonstrated that four years of schooling resulted
in an 8 per cent increase in farm production.(15) Another
study in Bolivia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Malaysia shows a
correlation between the size of a company and the number of
years of schooling its owner has had.(16)
Even more important in recent years has been the
acknowledgement of the paramount value of girls' education.
In a 1992 speech before the Pakistan Society of Development
Economists, Lawrence H. Summers, then Vice-President and
Chief Economist of the World Bank, argued that "investment
in education of girls may well be the highest-return
investment available in the developing world."(17) Mr.
Summers stated:
"Reflecting the biases of an economist, I have tried to
concentrate on the concrete benefits of female education and
explicitly contrast it with other proposed investments.
Expenditures on increasing the education of girls do not
just meet the seemingly easy test of being more socially
productive than military outlays. They appear to be far more
productive than other social-sector outlays and than the
vastly large physical capital outlays that are projected
over the next decade."(18)
As this report has stressed throughout, girls' schooling has
a vital impact on the whole framework of human development.
It not only reduces child mortality and improves the
nutrition and general health of children, but it also
reduces population growth since educated women tend to marry
later and have fewer children. Fulfilling a girl's right to
education empowers her, giving her more choices, more
control over her life and more potential for exercising the
full entitlements of democratic citizenship. Inevitably,
studies confirm, her education has a positive effect on the
larger society: Her own children are more likely to be
schooled and literate, and communities are more likely to
have effective health and education services if educated
women and men are available to staff them.(19)
The value of investing in basic education, and especially
the education of girls, is now almost universally accepted.
Why then has the international community not rushed to
embrace this most cherished project -- an avenue that
promises more than any other to reach the goal of delivering
'human development' worldwide?
The answer is familiar: The political will is lacking. When
the international community decides that an idea or project
is of urgent importance, it can move mountains. Nothing made
this plainer than the economic crisis in East Asia in
1997-1998. The financial collapse first of Thailand, then
the Republic of Korea, and then Indonesia (counted among the
financial 'tigers' of Asia) proved such a shock to the
international financial system that the OECD countries led
by the Group of Seven(20) responded with admirable urgency.
In the space of a few short months, they mobilized over $100
billion to bolster the collapsing Asian economies, to be
distributed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in
return for sweeping structural adjustment programmes similar
to those which poorer countries have been undergoing for the
last 15 years. Recognizing that the crisis was so grave they
could not afford to observe normal administrative
procedures, donor nations bent IMF rules to accommodate the
suffering 'tigers'.
In contrast, the leading industrial nations, IMF and the
World Bank have been less accommodating with the world's
poorest and most indebted countries, something that has not
gone unnoticed. It cast a heavy shadow over events in the
Côte d'Ivoire capital of Abidjan in February 1998, when a
new structural-adjustment agreement was reached after nine
months of painful negotiation, with the Government agreeing
to privatization measures in return for $2 billion in new
loans from IMF. This agreement followed almost two decades
of economic belt-tightening. As N'Goran Niamien, Côte
d'Ivoire's Economic and Finance Minister, commented:
"We have observed the speedy reaction to Asia and seen the
huge sums of money they have been able to come up with
almost instantaneously, often bending the rules pretty
freely. When it comes to us, our negotiations can drag on
for months while they split hairs and act very finicky. One
can easily get the impression of a double standard."(21)
IMF officials have pointed out that the size and speed of
their response to the Asian crisis was justified by the
importance of these economies to the global financial
system, which underlines the point that resources are
available -- almost instantaneously -- when there is
sufficient political will. It also demonstrates
short-sightedness, wrongly suggesting that Africa's survival
is less important to our global system. UNICEF was not alone
in calling, as it did in The State of the World's Children
1988 report, for a sustained transfer of resources to the
least developed nations, on the lines of the Marshall Plan
with which the United States rescued a ravaged Europe
following World War II. Although the idea has been
continually dismissed as impossible and unrealistic, the
East Asian and recent Russian bailouts make it plain that
such resource transfers are eminently possible and entirely
realistic.
The message that emerges is that massive allocations of
global resources are made when the economic stability and
well-being of the developed countries are threatened. The
calls for investment in development and human rights remain,
unfortunately, only rhetoric and have not yet succeeded in
generating a comparable response.
The shadow of debt
A way is urgently needed to address developing world
indebtedness, which is a major aspect of the resource
problem crippling Education For All.
Debt remains a crisis, particularly for the most severely
indebted countries -- and for many of their people who
struggle every day to feed their families, pay for critical
medical treatment or send their children to school. It is a
crisis whose other face is disease, illiteracy and early
death. Until the world realizes that we are globalized and
dependent on the well-being of poorer nations, the struggle
for resource reallocation will remain an uphill one.
Developing countries in all regions except Latin America and
the Caribbean are now having to pay a larger percentage of
their export earnings in debt repayments than was the case
in 1980. The most indebted countries live in the shadow of a
debt many times the size of their national income.
Nicaragua's debt, for example, was a chilling six times the
size of its GNP in 1995.(22) It is hard to see how
governments with large debts can advance towards Education
For All. Tanzania is not untypical in spending six times
more on debt repayments than on education.
In September 1996, IMF and the World Bank established a new
framework for relieving the most heavily indebted poor
countries, years after contending that debt cancellation was
impossible. Their aim was to reduce the debt burdens of
low-income countries to sustainable levels by keeping the
proportion of export earnings spent on debt repayments to
below 25 per cent, and the ratio of debt stock to exports no
higher than 250 per cent. Countries are not eligible for
relief, however, until they complete six years of
stringently monitored structural adjustment. Widespread
criticism of this time lag did lead to an acceleration of
the process for a few countries, including Bolivia, Burkina
Faso, Guyana, Mali, Mozambique and Uganda. Many other
countries will have to wait considerably longer for relief.
What appeared to be a promising initiative to give the
world's poorest countries a prospect of starting the new
millennium with a clean slate has foundered badly -- not
least because of petty disputes among creditor governments.
While squabbles continue over which countries should pay and
how much, Mozambique must continue to devote almost half of
its budget to debt repayments, more than it can spend on
health and primary education combined.(23)
The inertia should be profoundly embarrassing to an
international community that responded so swiftly and
munificently to the needs of much richer Asian and Latin
American countries, and decades ago, European countries.
When it comes to debt relief, said a senior World Bank
official responsible for African programmes, "This is
clearly an area where we have failed these countries. The
political will to do better just did not exist."(24)
The human face of capital
Notwithstanding the stagnation on debt relief, the
international economic agenda is perceptibly shifting. After
almost two decades in which human development has taken a
back seat to globalization and structural adjustment, we may
be entering an era of investment in 'human and social
capital' that will make the task of spreading the education
revolution worldwide much easier.
The 'Washington Consensus' of the World Bank and IMF -- that
resulted in the shock therapy of economic stabilization and
insisted that the State minimize its role -- is now
undergoing re-examination. Joseph Stiglitz, currently Senior
Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank,
recently wrote that the Washington Consensus is incomplete
because it fails to recognize that privatization is not the
only key to economic well-being. The creation of competitive
markets is equally important, and the State can and should,
he says, play an important role in promoting long-term
economic growth.(25)
To ensure such growth, societies need to ensure social
equity, as social conditions have a direct effect on the
health of markets. It is in the interest of economic growth,
social stability and the State itself, therefore, to craft
regulations for markets and the domestic economy and to set
standards in such areas as product safety, environmental
conditions and consumer protection.
Education is critical in this context, as an educated
population is vital to sustain competitive markets and
viable democracy. Those countries going through economic
crisis that have invested in education are more likely to
emerge with far less damage and much greater potential to
rebound.
Argentine economist Bernardo Kliksberg makes similar
arguments. Poverty and inequality are more serious in Latin
America today than in the early 1980s, he points out, and
the average schooling received by each inhabitant is only
5.2 years. Any new consensus must consider not only economic
but two other types of 'capital' -- human capital (a
nation's health, education and nutrition) and social capital
(shared values, culture and a strong civil society). Social
capital has begun to be considered a key component of
growth, with the World Bank announcing in April that it
would incorporate social capital as an objective when it
measured the impact of projects. In contrast to the
assumptions of the former economic model, argues Mr.
Kliksberg, there is a symmetry between equality and growth.
"Now we know that inequity only reproduces inequity."(26)
Armed with this understanding, chances for expanding the
education revolution worldwide should be improved. The late
Mahbub ul Haq, one of the most influential and eloquent
advocates for human-centred development, rightly deemed
education "the true essence of human development. Without
education, development can be neither broad-based nor
sustained."(27)
The growing body of proof for this premise lends additional
weight to the 20/20 Initiative advocated by UNICEF and other
partners. The Initiative enjoins governments in developing
countries to devote 20 per cent of their budgets and
aid-giving industrialized nations to devote 20 per cent of
their development assistance to basic social programmes.
Currently, developing countries allocate on average about 13
per cent of their national budgets to basic social services,
while donor countries devote around 10 per cent of official
development assistance (ODA) to supporting these services.
Raising these proportions to the 20 per cent mark alone
would liberate sufficient resources to achieve Education For
All within a decade.(28) The world would need to spend an
additional $7 billion per year for the next 10 years, on
average, to educate all children.(29) This is less than is
spent on cosmetics in the United States or on ice cream in
Europe annually (Fig. 14)(30).
For once, demography is on our side. From the start,
attempts to meet universal basic education goals have been
unable to keep pace with population growth. But finally the
tide has turned. After three decades of work to slow birth
rates, the population of the developing world is no longer
getting younger -- an accomplishment in which education has
played an important role. Cohorts of children at each age
are still bigger than the year before, but they form a
smaller percentage of the total population, requiring
proportionately less money to provide for them.
It is clear that the link between human rights and
sustainable human development, envisioned 50 years ago in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and articulated in
the principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child,
foreshadowed the increasingly accepted argument for
equitable economic development. And in this, education's
role is especially vital and unique, as it increases human
potential and development at the individual as well as the
social level and is fundamental in the establishment of
other human rights.
It may have taken almost 50 years for the education rights
proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to
be fully accepted. But those rights are no longer
negotiable. It is the world's responsibility to fulfil them
without further delay.
We can move swiftly ahead knowing that Education For All --
making the education revolution a global reality -- is the
soundest investment in a peaceful and prosperous future that
we can make for our children.
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2. UNICEF, Facts & Figures 1998, UNICEF, New York, 1998.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. These results -- obtained from a regression analysis of
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Investing in human rights
1. Fukuda, Prof. Masa-aki, Faculty of Law, Hitotsubashi
University, Tokyo, in a paper entitled: 'The UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child and the Situation of Children in
Japan', 1996, quoted in Hammarberg, Thomas, A School for
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5. Haq, Mahbub ul, Reflections on Human Development,
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6. The 'high-achievers' are Barbados, Botswana, Costa
Rica, Cuba, Kerala state (India), Malaysia, Mauritius, the
Republic of Korea, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. See Santosh
Mehrotra and Richard Jolly, eds., Development with a Human
Face, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997. Also Mehrotra, Santosh,
'Education for All: Policy lessons from high-achieving
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5/6, 1998, pp. 1-24.
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from high-achieving countries', in International Review of
Education, vol. 44, No. 5/6, 1998, pp. 1-24.
8. Bennell, Paul, with Dominic Furlong, Has Jomtien Made
Any Difference? Trends in Donor Funding for Education and
Basic Education Since the Late 1980s, IDS Working Paper 51,
Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, United
Kingdom, p. 26.
9. Ibid., p. 6.
10. Ibid., table 10, p. 22.
11. Communication from Ms. Maris O'Rourke, Director, Human
Development Network, Education Sector, World Bank, 25 March
1998.
12. Bennell with Furlong, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
13. Communication from O'Rourke, op. cit.
14. Colclough with Lewin, op. cit., p. 27.
15. Lockheed, M.E., D. Jamison and L. Lau, 'Farmer
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Development and Cultural Change, 29 (1), Oct. 1980, pp.
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17. Summers, Lawrence H., Investing in All the People,
Quad-i-Azam Lecture at the Eighth Annual General Meeting of
the Pakistan Society of Development Economists, Islamabad,
January 1992, World Bank, Washington, D.C., p. 6.
18. Ibid., p. 11.
19. Sen, Amartya, 'Agency and Well-being: The development
agenda', in Heyzer, N., with S. Kapoor and J. Sandler, A
Commitment to the World's Women: Perspectives on development
for Beijing and beyond, UNIFEM, New York, 1995. Cited in
Mehrotra and Jolly, op. cit.
20. The Group of Seven refers to the seven most
industrialized countries in the world: Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United
States.
21. French, Howard W., 'Africans Resentful as Asia Rakes in
Aid', The New York Times, 8 March 1998.
22. World Bank, World Development Report 1997, Oxford
University Press, New York, p. 246.
23. Watkins, Kevin, OXFAM International, Financial Times,
23 January 1998.
24. Cited in French, op. cit.
25. Stiglitz, Joseph E., 'More Instruments and Broader
Goals: Moving toward the post-Washington consensus'. WIDER
Annual Lectures 2, World Institute for Development Economics
Research, United Nations University, Helsinki, 1998.
26. Gutierrez, Estrella, 'New Consensus Emerges from Social
Debris', International Press Service, Caracas, 15 June 1998.
27. Haq, Mahbub ul, and Khadija Haq, op. cit.
28. Implementing the 20/20 Initiative: Achieving universal
access to basic social services, a joint publication of
UNDP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF and the World Bank, New York,
1998.
29. Delamonica, E., S. Mehrotra and J. Vandemoortele,
'Universalizing Primary Education: How much will it cost?'
UNICEF Staff Working Paper (forthcoming).
30. UNDP, Human Development Report 1998, table 1.12, p. 37.
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