The Facts

Education for All

"If we don't stand up for children then we don't stand for much."

-- Marian Wright Edelman

The international community must take bold action to ensure that every child's right to education is realized in this lifetime.

Significant progress has been made since the Millennium Summit in 2000, but it has not enough to put the world on the path to success. In the past decade, the number of children out of primary school has dropped by only 28% to 72 million children today, with more than half of them being girls. Continuing on the same trajectory means that there will be 56 million children still out of school by 2015. 759 million youths and adults are illiterate; two thirds of this population are women. Additionally, 226 million adolescents will never attend secondary school. At this rate, the goal of universal primary education will certainly not be reached by 2015.

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 securing adequate external resources are available to support scaling up education systems, improving donor coordination to align aid flows to meet country needs, channeling 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.

President Obama has committed to creating a Global Fund for Education started with a $2 billion contribution. Yet, the U.S. Administration has failed to see education as a pillar of its new development approach.

"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

Despite this promise, the president has only requested $840 million from Congress for basic education in FY 2011, a 15% decrease in last year's budget request of $981 million in foreign assistance for education -- and far short of a bold $2 billion. In addition, the president's current development approach which was unveiled in Canada during the G8 Summit has prioritized efforts in health and agriculture, while neglecting to ensure that people in low-income communities are able to sustain the benefits of those investments through their own talent, knowledge and skills. Education amplifies the impact of investments in development, improving outcomes in all areas - from agricultural productivity to child survival, HIV prevention to economic growth.