ASIA: Region’s Report Card in Education Needs Improvement

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Feb 13 2004 (IPS) - A disturbing report card on the state of primary education in Asia highlights the daunting task that governments face in meeting the goal of ensuring universal primary education by 2015.

U.N. education experts are hardly surprised at the troubling picture of an estimated 46 million children who are still not enrolled in primary schools in South and East Asia – 11 years away from the deadline set in the U.N. Millenium Development Goals (MDGs).

”The magnitude of this group of children has been known for a long time,” Sheldon Shaeffer, head of the Asia-Pacific office of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), told IPS.

”(It) includes not only large number of children out of school in large population countries such as India and China but also remaining pockets of excluded children in almost every country of the region,” he said.

According to Shaeffer, the challenge for the region is not only for the countries to get out-of-school children back into the primary school classrooms, but also to get them to ”stay there”.

But if the region falls short of meeting the MDG deadline, the burden of failure should be shared by many, he added, including by ”governments for not putting in place the necessary policies or resources to get more children into school (and) local communities and schools for continuing to discriminate against children excluded from school”.

He also felt that development agencies could not be excused, either, ”for not providing enough funds to help solve the remaining problems of basic education”.

In 2000, during the largest gathering of heads of states at the United Nations, the MDGs were endorsed with the aim, among others, of eradicating poverty and of promoting human dignity and security.

The second goal that countries endorsed out of eight time-bound targets was to achieve ”universal primary education” by 2015. That meant ensuring that all children across the planet will be able to complete the five years of primary schooling.

”Education is central to human development. And one of the great values of the MDGs is its ability to focus attention on the (selected) issues,” Robert England, who heads the Thai office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IPS.

But an UNESCO study released Tuesday drew attention to how far behind the South and East Asian regions are in achieving the MDG commitments. By having 45 percent of the world’s 104 million out-of-school children, the region had the worst record, stated the report published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa has 42 percent of primary level children not in classrooms, the Arab States and North Africa has seven percent, and Latin America and the Caribbean has two percent, the report revealed.

The report points to the region’s demography as one reason for Asia’s shortfall. ”The number of out-of-school children is clearly influenced by the region’s most populated countries: China, India and Pakistan,” it states.

Furthermore, ”Most of the out-of-school girls can be found in India, while in China more boys than girls are out of school,” it adds.

The Indian reality, in fact, plays a large part in shaping the regional picture – 28 million of the region’s 46 million out-of-school children are girls, while boys account for 18 million.

The report also draws attention to another trend that could undermine Asia’s commitment to its youngest citizens. In a number of countries surveyed, a sizeable number of children admitted to schools do not complete the basic first five years of education, it states.

UNESCO’s researchers elicited that by comparing the differences in the enrolment rate at the primary level with that at the start of the secondary level of education. In Bangladesh, for instance, there were 17.6 million children who began the first year of schooling but this number drops to 10 million at the beginning of the secondary level.

In Cambodia the numbers are 2.4 million children who enter primary school but the figure drops to 396,876 when the secondary level starts. China’s numbers are as stark – 125 million at the start of primary school but 90 million when secondary school begins.

The pattern is pervasive in Burma, India, Indonesia, Lao, Nepal, Pakistan and the Philippines, the report notes. In India, Lao and Burma, for instance, ”only half of the children who enter primary school” complete the fifth year, while in Nepal, Cambodia and Bangladesh, ”between 35 and 38 percent of children (drop) out before the end of the primary cycle”.

Asian governments burdened with these education deficits will also be failing not just in the MDG goals but by another agreement, the Dakar Framework for Action, which was a document that government’s endorsed at a major U.N. conference on education in Senegal’s capital in April 2000.

This agreement that came out of the World Education Forum promised to guarantee quality basic education for all. Governments agreed to eliminate the gender gap in primary and secondary education by 2005, and set 2015 as the deadline for governments to achieve gender equality in all education levels.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that attended the Dakar meeting estimated that close to eight billion dollars had to be invested annually over a 10-year period to achieve universal primary education.

And by just how much Asian governments are prepared to foot such a bill is reflected in the UNESCO report. The amounts allocated by countries for education are uneven, ranging from a low of 1.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to a high of 6.2 percent.

On the low end are Burma, which spends a mere 1.4 percent of its GDP on education, along with Indonesia, which spends 1.5 percent, and Cambodia, which spends 1.9 percent, states the report.

Malaysia tops the list of spenders by the 6.2 percent Kuala Lumpur sets aside for education, the report affirms.

”India, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan and Thailand allocate between 4.1 percent and 5.1 percent of the GDP to education,” the report adds.

According to UNDP’s England, governments across the region cannot be faulted for not striving to achieve the goal of universal primary education. ”The concern is rather how to achieve the MDGs than whether.”