The Facts

Education for All

Above all, we must do our part to see that all children have the basic right to learn. There is nothing more disappointing than a child denied the hope that comes with going to school, and there is nothing more dangerous than a child who is taught to distrust and then to destroy. That’s why the third commitment I’ll make is working to erase the global primary education gap by 2015. Every child — every boy, and every girl — should have the ability to go to school. To ensure that our nation does its part to meet that goal, we need to establish a two billion dollar Global Education Fund.

— Barack Obama, September 25, 2008

The world will fail to achieve the second Millennium Development Goal of Universal Primary Education if urgent action is not taken now.

Today, 75 million children, more than half of them girls, are out of primary school, and 776 million adults are illiterate. Additionally, 226 million adolescents will never attend secondary school. There remains a dramatic global divide not only in access to education, but also in learning achievement. International learning assessments reveal a major divide between richer and poorer countries. Two-thirds of all children arrive at primary school undernourished or with a disability that will likely impair their education achievement throughout their lives. Unless urgent action is taken, tentative progress made in the field of education over the last eight years will be undermined and another generation of children will not have the tools they need to participate fully in the global society.

The education aid architecture needs an improved, global, multi-partner mechanism to raise, coordinate, disburse, and monitor resources for basic education.

While there are several exciting international efforts to achieve the Education for All goals, there remain serious obstacles to getting every child in school. Among those challenges are ensuring adequate external resources are available to support scaling up education systems, improving donor coordination so aid flows are aligned to meet country needs, chanelling flexible, predictable and quickly disbursed funds, and improving monitoring of education aid and its impact to ensure accountability for results. Current programs and partnerships provide a strong foundation for a new aid architecture for education, and we can build on what exists to ensure that U.S. foreign assistance is leveraged to bring children an education.

The Education for All Fast Track Initiative has galvanized donors to work together to fill the financing gaps for national education plans in 37 low-income countries — but it currently faces a $1.2 billion shortfall. The Fast Track Initiative has been able to pioneer effective ways for donors to support country-led education strategies, but the pace of donor contributions is not enough to keep up with the need for additional financing to fill the gaps in those education plans. Another problem is that almost 40 million children around the world are in conflict affected countries or fragile states; they continue to be out of reach of current efforts to provide safe schools and quality education. And international donors continue to neglect the most important investment needed to achieve Education for All: teachers — 18 million new teachers will need to be trained and hired between now and 2015 if all children are to complete a basic education.

Despite these needs, aid for education from rich countries and multilaterals like the World Bank appears to be stagnating at levels far below current estimates of the financing need. Out of the $16 billion annually required to provide 8–9 years of schooling for children in low-income countries, donors currently contribute, on average, around $4 billion a year.

President Obama has committed to creating a Global Fund for Education started with a $2 billion contribution.

During his Presidential Campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly promised to create a Global Fund for Education, capitalized with a $2 billion contribution. His Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, reaffirmed his commitment to creating a Global Fund for Education in her confirmation remarks as recently as January 2009. The world’s hope burns high that he will fulfill this promise, and RESULTS and its partners are working to ensure that this initiative is a success.

Despite this promise, the president has so far only requested $981 million from Congress for basic education in FY 2010, just a $281 million increase in foreign assistance for education. While he continues to express the value of education — for girls, for peace-building, for economic recovery — he has yet to turn his words into action.