Education for All by 2015

• Author: Alain Mingat and Carolyn Winter
• Position: Lead Education Economist in the World Bank's Africa Regional Office/Senior Education Specialist in the Education Sector of the World Bank's Human Development Network

At the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000, officials from 180 countries set a challenging goal: ensuring access to primary education for all children by 2015.

The world has achieved a level of economic prosperity that was unimaginable just one hundred years ago. And yet many people in poor countries still lack the essentials of life. In 2000, an estimated 113 million children worldwide between the ages of 6 and 11 did not attend school.

Human capital-education and skills-is a critical weapon in the war against poverty. If poor countries are to achieve faster economic growth-a necessary condition for reducing poverty-they will need better-educated workforces. Even a primary education can pay off handsomely (Table 1). Investments in primary education have been shown to reap higher returns-estimates range from 11 percent to more than 30 percent-than investments in physical capital. Investment in the education of girls yields especially high returns.

[ SEE THE GRAPHIC AT THE ATTACHED RTF ]

It was in 1990, at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, that the international community first agreed to strive for universal primary education. This goal-ensuring that all children would have access to, and be able to complete, a free, compulsory primary education of good quality-was again endorsed in Senegal in 2000.

Although the goal of providing all children with a primary or basic education has received broad national and international support, verbal commitments have not always been translated into much-needed, if difficult and contentious, changes in policy and practice. However, it is still possible to meet the target if the countries themselves take the right measures and if the international community provides appropriate support.

Educational needs

The ideal would be for all children to complete nine years of basic education-a primary education plus a few years of secondary education. Most low-income countries are far from being able to achieve this, however. A more realistic goal would be to provide universal access to six years of primary education, the minimum needed for lifelong functional literacy and numeracy.

The average in countries with per capita GNP below $1,200 is about four years of formal education, although there are large regional variations. Adults in Africa and South Asia have completed about three years of formal education, on average, while those in Latin America have completed nearly six years. There are also wide disparities between different groups in the same country. For example, in many low-income countries, girls lag well behind boys in educational access and achievement. Illiteracy rates for adult women are as high as 80 percent in some countries; this is especially unfortunate, because women's literacy is associated with very high social returns (for example, lower fertility rates and the improved health and nutrition of children). Urban coverage is generally high, even in countries where average enrollment rates are low, indicating that rural groups are especially underserved.

Progress to date

Between 1960 and 1980, all developing regions made substantial progress in improving the gross enrollment ratio-the number of children in school relative to the number of children in the age group for that particular school cycle. After 1980, enrollment ratios continued to improve in all regions except Africa. During the 1990s, however, progress toward universalizing primary education stagnated in many countries and, in some, enrollments actually declined. In the latest year for which internationally comparable data are available (1998, in most cases), a considerable number of countries still had fewer than 60 percent of their primary-school-age children in school.

The gross enrollment ratio tends to overestimate coverage...