To educate the world’s children, donors must deliver

Ibrahim Ary, Zobaida Jalal, Galema Guilavogui, Ann-Therese N’dong-Jatta and Fabian Osuji IHT
Monday, March 8, 2004

Women’s day
 
WASHINGTON As school bells ring across the world on Monday, which is International Women’s Day, more than 100 million primary school-aged children will not be sitting in class — and about 60 million of those missing out will be girls. On average, in the poorest countries in Africa one girl in two is not in school.

The crisis extends to another 150 million children who will never complete their primary education.

Neither Western nor developing-country governments need to be convinced of the need for education for all. The case is compellingly clear: No country has reached sustained economic growth without achieving near universal primary education. Particularly for girls, education is related to lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancies. Educated women marry later, have fewer children and raise healthier, more nourished families.

New research also indicates that education is crucial in the fight against AIDS. Women with some secondary schooling are three times more likely than uneducated women to know that the AIDS virus can be transmitted from mother to child.

Four years ago, at a meeting in Dakar, Senegal, 182 countries committed themselves to the goal of universal primary education for boys and girls by 2015. But despite such strong commitments, the funding needed to get children into schools, estimated at an additional $5.6 billion annually, remains elusive. The sum is the equivalent of just three days’ worth of current global military spending. It also equals the cost of building just 330 high schools in the United States.

A major step toward achieving universal education was taken two years ago at the World Bank spring meetings, with the introduction of the ground-breaking plan called the Fast Track Initiative.

The initiative was a new compact between donor and developing countries: If developing countries developed sound, credible plans to expand education access and quality, donors would not let them fail for lack of funding.

The five countries we represent were part of an initial group of 23 countries invited to prepare proposals. Our side of the bargain was to adopt a tough agenda for reform, including raising education spending to 20 percent of the national budget, reducing class sizes to less than 40 pupils per teacher and abolishing primary tuition fees. In return, donors agreed to guarantee enough extra funding to make these ambitious reforms feasible and to cover any costs that could not be met out of each government’s own budget.

It seemed the perfect solution — aid was to serve as a jump-start, not a handout. Donor contributions would accelerate reform and enable us to implement vital reforms like training teachers, building classrooms and eliminating fees. The responsibility for producing sound plans and turning them into reality rightly lay with developing countries’ governments.

Yet two years later, while many of us have committed ourselves to ambitious reform of our education systems in order to get every girl and boy into school, donors have failed to deliver the funding they promised. Niger is a clear case in point. It is ranked by the United Nations as the second-poorest country in the world. A mere 8.4 percent of Niger’s women can read, and an estimated 1.4 million children of primary school age are out of school.

Under the Fast Track Initiative, the government developed a national strategy to provide quality basic education for all its children. In the process it identified a need for external funding of $96 million over the first three years to fulfill the plan.

Recent research by Oxfam, however, reveals that after endorsing Niger’s education plan, donor governments then backtracked, leaving a mere $46 million to be doled out for Niger over three years — less than half the amount initially promised. They have failed even to fully finance this version, and Britain and the United States have not committed a single cent to education in Niger under the initiative.

The first 12 countries to meet the Fast Track criteria for funding have received commitments totaling only $443 million over five years. This works out to about $3.50 a year for every school-age child. It may be enough to provide them with a lunch box, but hardly enough to guarantee a classroom and a teacher.

Next month, as donor countries meet at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings in Washington, they must take steps to close the multibillion-dollar shortfall in education financing, starting with the first 12 countries whose plans they have already approved under the Fast Track Initiative.

If donors don’t deliver on their promised commitments, the millions of girls and boys missing school today could all too soon be joining the ranks of the 879 million people, or one-quarter of all adults in the developing world, who cannot read or write, and the cycle of poverty will continue.

Donors must come through with the real money to educate the world’s children. And they must start with girls.

Ibrahim Ary is Niger’s minister of basic education and literacy. Zobaida Jalal is Pakistan’s minister of education. Galema Guilavogui is minister of pre-university and civic education, Republic of Guinea. Ann-Therese N’dong-Jatta is Gambia’s secretary of state for education. Fabian Osuji is Nigeria’s minister of education.



Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune