By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 10 2004 (IPS)

Without education, no development is possible, but it is precisely underdeveloped countries that suffer the greatest dearth of quality education, due to the lack of funds. How can that circle be broken?

Mechanisms for solving that problem were the main focus of the fourth meeting of the high-level group on the Education for All programme, which ended Wednesday in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, after three days of discussion and debate among representatives from 28 countries as well as international bodies.

The meeting sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is held annually to assess the progress made towards the commitment of Education for All by 2015, assumed by the world’s governments at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000.

The Brasilia Declaration, which was approved by the delegates at this week’s three-day meeting, underlines "quality" as a basic condition for meeting the six objectives set for 2015.

The six goals are expanding early childhood care and education; providing free and compulsory education of good quality by 2015; promoting the acquisition of life-skills by adolescents and youth; increasing adult literacy rates by 50 percent, by 2015; eliminating gender disparities in education by 2005 and achieving gender equality by 2015; and enhancing educational quality.

One of the main measures that must be taken is for industrialised nations to increase development aid to poor countries, said UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura.

One way to help move towards the goals is through debt forgiveness, but making it conditional on spending in education by the debtor countries, said ministers and other representatives of developing nations, especially from Africa.

Officials from donor countries like French Minister Delegate for Cooperation, Development and Francophony Xavier Darcos agreed on the need for their governments to expand development aid, but called for increased efficiency in educational systems in the beneficiary countries.

Brazil is a good example of the difficulties in meeting the Education for All goals, even though it is not one of the poorest countries.

Over the past two decades, Brazil has expanded primary school enrollment to 97 percent of children between the ages of seven and 14. However, the quality of that education remains poor.

Because of that, Brazil ranks 72nd on a list of 127 countries whose educational systems were evaluated in this year’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Ten Latin American countries, including some of the poorest, like Ecuador, Panama and Peru, rank ahead of Brazil.

If only access to primary schooling were taken into account, Brazil would rank much higher, in 32nd place. But UNESCO’s Educational Development Index also takes into account three other aspects, in which Brazil is weak, especially the factor of how many students stay in school until the fifth grade.

Brazil has high drop-out and failure rates.

Illiteracy and equal access to education for boys and girls were also areas in which Brazil lost points. In Latin America, the highest ranking countries were Argentina, Cuba and Chile, occupying 23rd, 30th and 38th place, respectively. Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela also finished between 44th and 50th place.

Clearly, even in the highest ranked Latin American countries, the situation is far from ideal. It is no consolation to know that the nations of sub-Saharan Africa are worse off. A country’s level of development is directly reflected by the quality of its educational system.

The key to improving the situation is devoting more resources to education, but Brazil is one of the countries that invests the lowest proportion of its GDP to this sector, according to Vera Mazagao Ribeiro, projects coordinator for the non-governmental organisation Educational Action.

The UNESCO report reveals that Brazil assigns only 4.2 percent of GDP to education, as compared with four percent in Chile and 3.2 percent in Senegal.

In addition, the Brazilian educational system faces serious problems that have remained unresolved for years, including inadequate organisation and poor working conditions, Mazagao told IPS. In Sao Paulo, the country’s most industrialised state, there are schools that have an 80 percent turnover in teaching staff every year, she noted.

Since turnover is so high, teachers fail to establish strong ties with the community, do not assume commitments to improve education, and feel "unmotivated", she said.

There is also a kind of de facto "apartheid" or segregation in education, she added. Public schools have gone downhill, and are seen as the realm of "the poor", while the middle class and teachers are abandoning the public education system and heading towards better quality private schools.

Improving teachers’ salaries was one of the measures approved in Brasilia as indispensable to achieving quality education. The UNESCO report shows a sharp drop in teachers’ salaries around the world.

In countries with per capita incomes below 2,000 dollars, a teacher’s salary was equivalent to 8.6 times per capita GDP in 1975, compared to 3.7 in 2000. In Latin Ameica the drop was smaller, from 2.7 to 2.3.

One consequence of that is the growing shortage of teachers. Matsuura warned that the world could be 12 million teachers short within just a few years.

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