EDUCATION: Schooling Crisis in Developing Nations

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Kerstin Marx

UNITED NATIONS, May 29 1999 (IPS) - Any hope of promoting global access to basic education by the turn of the century had been dashed because of problems – mainly in the developing world – encountered during the past 10 years, a UN conference heard here.

“The 1990s have been blighted by an education crisis, and a decade of lost potential,” said the international non- governmental organisation Oxfam.

According to an Oxfam study, 125 million children currently were out of school throughout the world. In addition, 872 million adults in the developing world – one-third of the population – were illiterate.

The 241-page report, was presented this week during a review of the 1995 UN Social Summit in Copenhagen. At that conference, governments endorsed several key educational targets: to enrol all children into primary school, to cut adult illiteracy, and to close the education gap between girls and boys.

The Copenhagen summit also rescheduled a target set by the 1990 World Conference on Education, that no child would be out of school in the year 2000, until 2015.

But if current trends continued “even this revised target will be missed,” Oxfam said. Its report predicted that when 2015 arrived ” at least 75 million children will still be out of school.”

Africa, the world’s poorest region, faced the deepest problems, according to Oxfam.

Since the 1990 Conference on Education, another two million African children had joined those unable to attend school and their ranks would swell by a further nine million children by 2015, Oxfam said.

Africa would then account for three-quarters of all children being denied education, however, Latin America and some South Asian nations also faced immense problems, delegates learned.

In Haiti, more than one million primary school-age children have no access to education, the United Nations Childrens’ Fund (UNICEF) reported. The country’s illiteracy rate affected 55 percent of the population – the highest in the Americas.

According to UNICEF, the educational crisis could be found “throughout the developing world.”

The review also heard evidence from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) that “many and perhaps even the majority of developing countries have been unable to achieve substantial progress in provision of education.”

The ICFTU contended that the crisis “is due in part to the dual problem of declining budgets and an expanding population” – a position widely echoed at the meeting.

Sonia Elliot from Guyana, speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 developing nations and China, stressed that there must be “a reversal in the trend of declining official development assistance (ODA)” to enable development goals, such as education and health care, to be achieved.

Other delegates pointed to the heavy debt burden that the majority of developing countries faced after accumulating loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, commercial banks and bilateral donors since the 1970s.

The indebted nations spent more on repaying these loans than they did on providing education and delegates stressed the need for money to be channeled instead into primary schooling.

According to the Oxfam study, Honduras was spending 60 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on servicing its foreign debt, while only 12 percent went to primary education. In Zambia, 25 percent of GDP went on debt servicing, compared to five percent for education.

When Uganda last year became the first country to get some relief of its external debt under a new World Bank-IMF programme, it used the money it saved largely to eliminate school fees.

The impact was “dramatic,” noted the New York Times. “While two years ago 54 percent of Uganda’s children attended primary school, this year 90 percent do.”

Oxfam stressed that “inadequate financing is a central problem, especially in low-income countries” but it also pointed out that to achieve universal education, only an additional eight billion dollars would be needed during the next 10 years.

That sum equalled just four days’ worth of military spending worldwide, the agency added pointedly.