EDUCATION: Dakar Forum Ends on Promise of Universal Quality Schooling

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

DAKAR, Apr 29 2000 (IPS) - Governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have agreed to back the Dakar Framework of Action, which promises to guarantee quality basic Education for All.

The agreement, released on the final day of the World Education Forum in this Senegalese capital, is considered an improvement on the last commitment for universal education that world governments made in Jomtien, Thailand 10 years ago.

“In Jomtien, the declaration was made but there were no resources and mechanisms to back it up,” admitted Tom Bediako, a teacher and education activist from Ghana. “It is not so in Dakar. We have got some commitments to secure change.”

The final language of the framework, which was hammered out by a drafting committee on Thursday night, holds out six promises to the children of the world. They include a pledge for comprehensive early childhood care and education for the most vulnerable and the disadvantaged, a universal guarantee of free, quality primary education, and a commitment ensuring that the learning needs of all young people will be met.

Furthermore, the framework also aspires to overcome the prevailing gender gap in education. By 2005, for instance, governments are expected to eliminate this gap in primary and secondary education, while 2015 is the deadline for government’s to achieve gender equality.

Representatives from governments and NGOs admitted Friday, the closing day of the conference that the framework was acceptable to governments from the developing and developed world, the NGOs and international financial institutions.

“Donor countries are prepared to work with developing countries who have a national education plan,” confirmed Marie Minna, Canada’s minister of International co-operation. In her view, the challenges surfacing from Dakar were not easy to surmount, yet she felt optimistic that “we can do a great deal.”

What mattered was for each country to forge ahead with a national education programme, backed by guarantees permitting greater NGO involvement to shape such agendas, she said.

“The vision of Dakar provides us with an opportunity to bridge the knowledge gap that has been widening between the industrialised world and the rest,” says Bangladesh’s Minister of Education, A.S.H.K. Sadique.

“There has been an enormous amount of convergence,” Koichiro Matsuura, the director-general of the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) told the press at the close of the three-day meeting.

On Friday, representatives of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), a coalition of 400 development NGOs and teachers’ unions in 180 countries, revealed why they threw their weight behind the Dakar document.

“We achieved some progress. The document is an advocacy tool for us and we will work on it,” said Elie Jouen, Deputy Secretary-General of the Brussels-based Education International.

In terms of gains, Jouen spelt out three areas that the GCE felt happy it had secured during the drafting stages of the Dakar Framework. They were

the guarantees for quality free education, increased resources through aid for debt relief and the priority to educate girls.

Jouen was , however, loath to celebrate those gains, primarily over disappointment that a financial package the GCE had proposed to fund global education was rejected by the framework’s drafting committee.

Under its Global Action Plan (GAP), announced on the eve of the conference, the GCE declared that 8 billion dollars had to be invested annually over a 10-year period to achieve universal primary education.

From developing countries, the GAP wanted a 4 billion-dollar commitment every year, or six percent of a country’s gross national product set aside for education.

The international community and aid agencies, on the other hand, were expected to mobilise 3 billion dollars a year. The rest, it stated, would have to be raised from NGOs, foundations and other private sources.

Such financial commitments, according to the GAP, were fundamental to securing real promises for change. “It would have guaranteed change,” asserted Jouen.

But Clare Short, Britain’s Mininster Of International Co- operation, disagreed with this financial plan. In fact, she viewed the GCE’s proposal to “set up an international development fund for basic education as dangerous”.

“We are convinced that money is not enough to achieve the goal of education for all,” she remarked. “Political will is also vital and national and international civil society must put pressure on governments to obtain genuine political will.”

In her view, furthermore, the World Education Forum was not the place to “force governments to act in one way.”

The Framework for Action, which was adopted by national education leaders from 181 countries, was seen by many as a step forward from the declaration that flowed out of the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, 10 years ago.

That view was shaped by the specific vision in the Dakar document, as opposed to the one endorsed by the 155 governments in Jomtien, which, one NGO representative admitted, was “vague.”

“The challenge now is to make this initiative a reality,” said Rasheda Choudhry, director of the Bangladesh-based Campaign for Popular Education.

And among the challenges ahead will be the need to provide quality basic education for more than 113 million children (mostly girls) who have no access to primary education and to reduce by half, the 880 million adults across the world who are illiterate.