By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MEXICO CITY, Jun 26 2000 (IPS)

This week’s international conference in Geneva — the Social Summit Plus Fiveoffers governments an opportunity to demonstrate how they are going to provide quality basic education for all the world’s children, say education analysts.

What is required are “concrete initiatives” to help children gain easy access to schools, observes Robert Bissio, managing editor of the Social Watch Report, a publication backed by a coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Governments must tackle education with a new sense of urgency, adds Anne Muller, of the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). “It is a simple question of getting priorities right.”

Such calls can be understood in light of the current global education picture, which indicates that many governments have fallen far short of the pledge they made at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, Denmark. At that summit, representatives of 186 countries, including 117 world leaders, had promised to achieve universal access to quality basic education for at least 80 percent of primary school age children by the year 2000.

According to UNESCO, however, there are over 113 million children who have not been to primary schools. Of that number, furthermore, 100 million live in developing countries.

In addition, declares UNESCO, many children who have made it to school are not receiving a quality education, consequently resulting in too many of them repeating classes and finally “dropping out before they can read or write.”

According to Bissio, governments meeting in Geneva to review the progress made since the Copenhagen summit “must clearly recognise that efforts have been insufficient.”

And one area, in particular, that is expected to draw attention is the downsizing of education budgets. “Limited education budgets have conspired to limit access to education and many countries have slapped user fees on students, or have resorted to other cost-sharing methods,” declares UNESCO.

In its view, such policies represent “a marked departure from an earlier consensus where countries agreed that the state should finance education as a public good.”

So how much is needed to provide basic education for all? According to a report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), it will cost 8 billion dollars a year for the next 10 years.

The resources, it says, could be found in the budgets of many governments and development agencies, as well as in the private sector.

It is a question of priorities, it adds, that “pits resources for education against, for example, spending on arms or on subsidised programmes that benefit only the few.”

This, however, will not be the first time this year that governments will be called upon to account for their failure to meet basic education targets and to demonstrate the concrete plans they have in mind to achieve their goals. The initial occasion was the World Education Forum, held late April in Dakar, Senegal.

At that forum, in fact, NGOs and education rights advocates were particularly critical of the manner in which girls were being discriminated against in the world education system. According to studies they had done, uneducated girls made up close to two-thirds of the 113 million children not in primary school.

For Oxfam, a British-based NGO, such treatment of girls was “tantamount to a system of apartheid.”

According to the Education for All (EFA) 2000 Assessment, a report released at the Dakar Forum, South Asia has the worst record. “The largest number of girls excluded from basic education remains in South Asia,” it stated.

What had contributed to such a reality, it added, were “negative conditions in the environment external to the education system.”

The need to educate girls, it noted furthermore, should be seen as more than an educational issue. “It is deeply influenced by poverty, tradition, habit, legal systems and discrimination – all requiring political will, not just to educate girls, but also to eliminate those non-education obstacles.”

And in its concluding remarks, the EFA called on governments to demonstrate “strong and clear leadership” to put in place the changes required “to make girls’ education a possibility and to maintain the momentum to make it a reality.”

At that forum, in fact, governments agreed to remedy such a state of deprivation. In the Dakar Framework of Action, the final document stemming from that gathering, they pledged to eliminate this gender gap in primary and secondary education by 2005.

And to achieve that, says Muller, governments should begin by concentrating on three areas of reform. Initially, they should find remedies to tackle schools that exclude children.

Then they have to address the education bureaucracy, which has contributed to the current state of deprivation by “failing to adequately support teachers.” Furthermore, governments need to change their attitudes towards non-formal education. In her view, many governments have failed to embrace the potential of such alternative schooling methods.

This week’s summit (Jun. 26-30), adds Muller, provides governments an occasion to demonstrate their seriousness by reaffirming the commitments made in Dakar. “The main responsibility for achieving the goal of education for all rests with national governments.”

Bissio agrees, adding that the education goals are “not unrealistic, and indeed, in several cases they were extremely modest.”

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