Matt Cooper, volunteer with RESULTS working on education issues, reports on the launch of a major new global report…
The 2015 Education for All Global Monitoring Report “Achievements and Challenges” was released today, and as its name suggests, it provides a complete overview of the progress made in education worldwide. By revisiting the goals created at the World Education Forum in April 2000, the GMR highlights the successes achieved and the points in which progress has been lacking.
Since the year 2000, 80 million more children are in school, and half of all countries achieved universal primary enrollment. While these are major achievements, the GMR also highlights several areas in which much more needs to be done to achieve Education for All.
Currently, there is a huge wealth discrepancy at play. Not only are the worlds poorest children less likely to be in school than their richer classmates, they’re five times less likely to complete it as well. This has expanded so rapidly that the gap between the rich and poor attending schools is twice as big as it was in the year 2000. This doesn’t just affect children either. The new report refers to adult literacy as a “neglected goal,” and shows that in sub-Saharan Africa, half of all women are illiterate. If the goal is to provide for a universally education population, these people cannot be ignored.
So what will it take to fix this problem? A drastic increase in finance, both foreign and domestic. The gap between the expenditure of developing country governments and the amount needed to achieve universal primary and lower secondary school enrollment post-2015 is projected to be $22 billion per year. In order to fill that, developing country governments must increase the proportion of their budgets devoted to education, and donors will need to quadruple the amount of aid going to these countries. Is that going to be difficult? Yes. Is it necessary? Absolutely. Without it, the report predicts that aid will continue to stagnate, and the progress that has been made so far will be in jeopardy.
If that increase in aid can be realized, the impacts will be widespread. The 4 million teachers that are needed to get all children into school could be trained and hired, the barriers keeping 121 million children and adolescents out of school could be removed, and the goal of Education for All could be realized.
You can read the full report, watch videos, see infographics and more at http://en.unesco.org/gem-report.
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