It was in April 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, that 180 governments, the World Bank, Unesco and Unicef vowed to provide free, good quality primary education for every child in the world by 2015. At the time, about 125 million children - two-thirds of them girls - had no schooling.
Developing countries promised to come up with national education reforms designed to achieve the target by the end of 2002. The World Bank, the UN agencies and the world’s wealthiest nations were committed to ensure that no country would fail for lack of money and that a global mechanism would be created to ensure this happened.
In April this year agreement was reached on a World Bank scheme to fast-track funding, initially to 18 countries already committed to reforms to achieve education for all - at an estimated cost of between pound;318 million and pound;509 million a year for 10 years. The aim was to inspire all 88 developing countries likely to miss the 2015 target. Other commitments at Dakar included equal access to education for both sexes and a 50 per cent improvement in adult literacy rates.
Zambia, where 79 per cent of primary age children go to school, is expected to be one of the first countries to benefit. But the only concrete cash commitment to the fast-track initiative so far has come from the Dutch government, which has promised pound;80 million over several years. The viability of the entire scheme, World Bank insiders say, rests on a crunch meeting of donors, including the UK, in Brussels on November 27.
But lack of funding is not the only factor that can undermine the drive for education for all. Even in the country that is held up as the model for modernisation, Uganda, which more than doubled enrolment in three years, things can go horribly wrong. The dash for expansion was so fast that teachers could not be trained quickly enough to respond to rising class numbers and the quality of education plummeted. Many schools in Uganda have classes of 150 or more, where teachers race against time to mark mountains of exercise books.
The charity VSO, which sends volunteers to teach in developing countries, has just published a report on teacher motivation in Zambia, Malawi and Papua New Guinea. What Makes Teachers Tick? says improving teachers’
motivation in developing countries is vital for reforms to succeed and that teachers need a voice in the development of policy.
It warns that if quality is neglected the commitment to education for all will mean nothing. Either, a generation of learners will leave education expecting to participate fully in society and the economy but lacking the necessary skills and knowledge; or community confidence will suffer as parents withdraw their children from school early, or refuse to send them.
What Makes Teachers Tick? is available at www.vso.org.uk or from Lucia Fry on 020 8780 7369
