Introduction

Education Now: Break the Cycle of Poverty
(Oxfam UK Education Now Campaign, Media Report)

Education is the single most powerful weapon against poverty. It saves lives. It gives people the chance to improve their lives. It gives them a voice. In 1990, world leaders and representatives from 155 governments met at an international conference in Jomtien, Thailand. Jointly convened by UN agencies and the World Bank, World Conference on Education for All was a high-profile event.
The governments pledged themselves to rid the world of the scourge of illiteracy. They signed up to a plan which would give every child in the world a good primary education
by the year 2000.

They failed.

The facts speak for themselves.

Today, a decade after the rallying cry of Education for All, there are still 125 million children who never attend school.

Another 150 million children of primary age start school, but drop out before they can read or write.

Sixteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa (with almost half of Africa’s 6-11 year-olds) have suffered a decline in enrolment rates.

Today, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for one-third of the total out-of-school population. On current trends, it will account for three-quarters of the total in 2015.

One in four adults in the developing world - 872 million people - is illiterate, and the numbers are growing.

Imagine all the 6-14 year-old children in north America and Europe. That is the number of children in the world who never see the inside of a school. Now imagine what the consequences would be for north America and Europe, if our children never went to school. That is the scale of the crisis.

In Africa the crisis is getting worse. In the first five years since the call for Education for All, an extra two million African children joined the ranks of those out of school. By the year 2015, a further nine million African children will be without an education. Their numbers making an estimated total of 54 million African children deprived of even the most elementary education.

Inequalities in education

Global inequalities in the provision of education are enormous. Today, a child in Mozambique can expect to go to school for two to three years, with luck. A five-year old European or North American child can expect to spend 17 years in formal education.

Within countries too, there are gross inequalities in educational opportunities. The difference between town and countryside is stark. In poor countries, men living in the countryside are twice as likely not to be able to read and write as those living in the towns. In Niger, West Africa, more than 90 per cent of children in the capital are enrolled in school. The enrolment rate is less than 20 per cent in the countryside. Minorities also suffer. In Mexico, illiteracy rates of indigenous people are five times the national average, and school enrolment rates for this group are 20 per cent lower than the national norm.

Girls account for two-thirds of the children not in school. Despite government commitments to close the gender gap, it is widening in many countries. For example, Ethiopia has one of the lowest rates of enrolment in the world, and one of the largest gender gaps. Fewer than one-third of 6-11 year old boys and one-tenth of girls are enrolled in school. Over the first half of the 1990s, the proportion of girls in school fell by 10 per cent in Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the proportion of girls in primary school fell by eight per cent during the same period.

Many in the West would assume that the crisis in girls’ education is worse in Islamic countries, but they would be wrong. Arab states have increased the proportion of girls in school by some four times the overall rate of increase in developing countries. And Bangladesh has made spectacular advances to close the gender gap in the last 20 years.

However, all countries have to do more to close the gap between boys and girls in school. In many schools in the developing world, the treatment of girls is tantamount to a system of apartheid.

High drop-out rates remain a problem in all regions. Latin America has achieved near-universal enrolment, but one in four children drops out before completing school. In Pakistan, fewer than half of children enrol in school, and slightly under half of those who do (about five million children) drop out before completing. The 150 million children who drop out of school do so before acquiring basic literacy skills.

Even when children manage to attend school, conditions can be so poor that learning is practically impossible. In the not untypical case of Tanzania, there is an average of one toilet for every 89 children. Teaching standards are low, with an emphasis on rote learning in many countries, and outcomes as a result are poor. In Zambia, only one-quarter of students completing primary school meet minimum standards of literacy.

To make matters worse, the international community has failed to respond effectively when financial crises threaten advances in education. Almost two years after it began, the crisis in East Asia continues to destroy human potential on an enormous scale, with millions of children dropping out of school, and education systems collapsing. The result is that advances achieved in education over decades are being reversed almost overnight.