Raquel Castillo
Asia Advocacy ad Campaigns Coordinator,
Real World Strategies for Education for All Programme
Global Campaign for Education (GCE)/ASPBAE
UNESCO Media Training on EFA
Hanoi, Vietnam, 18-20 April 2007
For every child & parent
. . . an equal chance
The right TO education,
the rights IN education
Why Educate? What are the
boring messages?
Education is a human right.
Human rights are inherent, every person is born with them
and they cannot be given or taken away.
Rights establish the basic standards without which people
cannot live in dignity. Other rights include the right to
shelter, food and security.
Not only is education an entitlement, but it is also crucial to
tackling global poverty, improving health, halting the
spread of HIV and AIDS, and enabling people to play a
full, active part in their communities.
Why Educate? (Some of the
more exciting things to look at)
Education Empowers:
• A single year of schooling increases a woman's wages by
10-20%.
Education Saves Lives:
• Seven million cases of HIV/AIDS could be prevented in the
next decade if every child received an education.
• A child born to a literate mother is 50% more likely to
survive past the age of 5 years.
Education Builds the Future:
• Children with educated mothers are twice as likely to go to
school and are less malnourished.
What is the international
community doing about education?
•
Education is in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.
World Leaders have made many promises to make the right a reality.
• The EFA goals were agreed by over 180 countries at the World Education
Forums in 1990 in Jomtien and 2000 in Dakar. These goals are set for 2015.
• Since this meeting in 2000 the Global Campaign for Education has been
reminding world leaders of their promise. Every year we’ve not only targeted
governments but also international bodies such as the G8.
• Some governments are doing more than others. In fact due to commitment
and resources from good performers - school fees have been dropped in many
countries. Since we started campaigning, the number of children out of school
has gone down from 100 million to 77 million.
The EFA goals
“All children, young people and adults
have the human right to benefit from an
education that will meet their basic
learning needs… Ensuring that by 2015 all
children… have access to and complete
free and compulsory primary education of
good quality.”
Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) and EFA
At the UN Millennium Summit in 2000:
191 Heads of State agreed to
• Ensure that all boys and girls complete primary
schooling by 2015 (MDG2)
• Eliminate gender disparities in primary education
by 2005 and at all levels by 2015. (MDG3)
Legal guarantee of free education
Cambodia
Yes
Indonesia
No
Lao PDR
No
Malaysia
No
Myanmar
No
Philippines
Yes
Thailand
No
Vietnam
Yes
The 4 As of the
right to education:
• Availability – that education is free and government-funded and
that there is adequate infrastructure and trained teachers able to
support education delivery.
•
Accessibility – that the system is non-discriminatory and
accessible to all, and that positive steps are taken to include the
most marginalised.
•
Acceptability – that the content of education is relevant, nondiscriminatory and culturally appropriate, and of quality, that the
school itself is safe and teachers are professional.
•
Adaptability – that education can evolve with the changing needs
of society and contribute to challenging inequalities, such as gender
discrimination, and that it can be adapted locally to suit specific
contexts.
General reflection questions
It will
then be important to look
at who
determines the costs,
makes decisions
about sanitation, etc.
Do we send our children to
school? Why
and why not? Are there
Who is denied the right to education? How?
particular groups
What would need to change to make
of missing children?
education available to them? For example, is
education only available in one language
and therefore inaccessible to minority
groups who do not speak the language?
What can we do to make the right to
education a reality?
➤ Availability:
•
Is primary education free and compulsory?
•
If not, is there a government plan to achieve free and compulsory
primary education, with a reasonable timeframe and budget?
•
Is sufficient money allocated for all children to receive primary
education?
•
Is the state making concrete steps towards achieving free secondary
and higher education?
•
Are teachers well trained, and do they receive domestically
competitive salaries, do they have appropriate working conditions,
teaching materials and the right to organise?
•
Are school buildings safe, do sanitation facilities exist, is there safe
drinking water, a library, ICT resources?
➤➤ Accessibility:
•
Is education accessible to all, without discrimination on any grounds
– for example race, colour, ethnicity, sex, language, religion, economic
or social status?
•
Are positive actions made to reach the most vulnerable? Are there any
laws,such as child labour laws, which need to be enforced to ensure
accessibility?
•
Is education within safe physical reach?
•
Are there appropriate transport facilities?
•
Is education affordable for all – this includes indirect costs such as
textbooks and uniforms?
•
Have all legal and administrative obstacles, such as the need for a
birth certificate, been abolished?
The Education for All FastTrack Initiative (FTI)
• Supposed to accelerate funding to countries with
good education plans.
• Shamefully, donor contributions have failed the
first 20 countries to have their education
strategies endorsed – leaving them facing a
collective shortfall in aid of over $500 million.
What’s special about 2007?
Midpoint for both the EFA goals and MDGs and at the current rates
of progress these are not going to be met. (We have already missed
the first target of getting equal numbers of girls and boys into school
by 2005.)
On the 2nd May an exceptional donors’ conference on Education
for All will be held in Brussels, co-hosted by EU Commissioner for
Development, Louis Michel, UK Chancellor Gordon Brown and World
Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. This meeting is the best chance
we’ve had this century for making the dream of Education For All a
reality.
In June 2007, leaders of the G8 countries are meeting in
Heiligendamm, in Germany, where they will review progress made
since the big pledges on aid and debt in 2005 .
What is GCE doing in 2007?
What is the GCE?
The world’s longest chain for education
Why JOIN UP?
• You will be joining millions of others who believe
all children should go to school.
• You will form part of the world’s longest chain.
• You will be able to tell world leaders why
education is important, using your own words.
• You can create your message in different ways –
using text, pictures, sounds or video.
Virtual join up action!
Visit the website:
www.campaignforeducation.org/jointhechain
Click on ‘join the chain’
Create an image of yourself by choosing a head, a top, legs and shoes
Register your details
Add drawings, photos, sounds and video to your ‘JOINED UP’ page
See yourself in the chain!
The GCE Real World Strategies
for EFA
• The Real World Strategies Programme, now
is in its second phase in the period 2006-10.
• It was organized with the over-all aim to
contribute to achieving specific policy
changes at global, regional and national
levels to escalate EFA progress over the
next 5 years.
• It provides campaign and advocacy support
to 11 national education coalitions in Asia
and the South Pacific.
The Real World Strategies for
Education for All (RWS-EFA)
programme in 2007 seeks to
optimize the policy spaces and
campaign opportunities in the year
coinciding with EFA & MDG midterm review, highlighting
outstanding EFA concerns towards
concrete policy changes.
What is Global Campaign for Education's asking of
poor country governments?
• Offer a legally binding guarantee that education shall be
free and compulsory for all, using institutions and the
media to communicate this right to teachers, parents,
children and the general public.
• As a matter of urgency, agree and implement an
integrated long-term education plan to achieve the full
Education For All agenda
• Increase Government spending on education to 6% of
GDP, with at least half of this amount being for basic
education (explore fresh solutions e.g. debt-for-educ,
specific taxes on ‘sin’-products
• Allocate of 20% of budgets to education; show efficient
use of resources; tap local resources)
What is the Global Campaign for Education's
demands of rich country governments?
• Fully fund the global external financing gap for the achievement of
Education For All:
$15-16 billion per annum in Overseas Development
Assistance by 2009
• This money has already been promised:
– In 2000 the World Education Forum pledged that countries with
good plans would get the money they need to achieve EFA
– In 2002 the G8 launched the Fast-Track Initiative to deliver this
money
– In 2005 world leaders pledged to increase aid by $50 billion per
year by 2010 and reaffirmed commitment to free, universal
primary education
• End exclusion and discrimination within their own education
systems, ensuring an equal chance for every child
What is the Global Campaign for
Education's demand of International
Institutions?
• Allow poor countries sufficient fiscal space:
ease up debt
• Ensure that public sector wage caps do not
prevent recruitment of urgently-needed
teachers and other public sector workers
(current phenomenon  para-teachers
GCE-ASPBAE Education Watch initiative
of NGOs parallel to the Mid-Decade
Assessments of EFA and MDG
Participating education coalitions focus on the particular context and the existing
capacities of the national coalitions.
• South Asia  Education Budget Tracking
(India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal
• Southeast Asia  Education Access and Outcome
(Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia)
• South Pacific  Literacy Mapping
(Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea)
What do we need to look at in
the subregion?
• In order to reach the universal primary education MDG by 2015, all
children need to have started school by 2009.
World’s no. of out-of-school children  77 million (GMR 07)
East Asia
 9.3 million
(mostly from Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, &
Malaysia, though with no data from China)
• 94 countries that missed the first Millennium Development Goal set
for 2005 must get an equal number of boys and girls into primary
and secondary school.
What is needed . . .
• An additional 18 million teachers are needed to give all children a
quality education.
• Percentage of female teachers will have to be improved in:
Cambodia
41%
Timor Leste
30
Lao PDR
45
• Percentage of male teachers will have to be improved in:
Myanmar
Philippines
Vietnam
-
19%
19
22
What is needed . . .
A common standard for everyone in times of emergency
and conflict to keep “Schools as Zones of Peace”
Worldwide, 43 million children live in countries affected by
conflict; at least 3 million in Afghanistan, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand
• Conflicts disrupt education; schools are often targeted
directly by combatants, destroyed or damaged; used as
military base or housing internally displaced persons (IDPs);
teachers and students are killed, injured and abducted
• Lack of educational opportunities for refugees and IDPs,
particularly women and adolescents; Refugee Education
Trust estimates that only 3 percent of the 1.5 million refugee
children between the ages of 12 and 17 worldwide have
access to education, making them increasingly vulnerable to
underage recruitment or sexual exploitation
- Save the Children
What is needed . . .
• We need a total of $12 billion per year to provide
Education for All – that’s to have every girl and
boy finish school and to teach all adults to read
and write.
• The amount is the same as 1% of the global
military budget.
• The amount is less than the world spends on
potato chips
What is needed . . .
In the words of the UNESCO,
it is ‘reaching the unreached!
Child
Laborers
?
Girl Children
Differentlyabled
Indigenous
People
Women &
Ethnic
minorities
Children in
conflict/
displaced/
abused
National education coalitions
in Asia & Pacific
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Bangladesh – Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE)
Cambodia – NGO Partnerships for Education (NEP)
India – National Coalition for Education (NCE)
Philippines – Civil Society Network for Education Reforms
(E-Net Phils.)
Nepal – Global Campaign for Education (GCE Nepal)
Solomon – Coalition on Education in Solomon Islands(COESI)
Papua New Guinea – Papua Education Network (PEAN)
Indonesia – Education Network (E-Net for Justice)
Pakistan – Pakistan coalition for Education (PCE)
Sri Lanka – Coalition for Education Development (CED)