Education for All: Volume 8

Comparative education researchers have been studying both the promises and the challenges surrounding the Education for All (EFA) movement for decades, but in comparative education research literature there is still neither consensus on the impact that EFA has nor clearly identified global trends in either EFA policymaking or policy implementation. It seems that for every promise that EFA brings, there is an accompanying challenge. This volume of International Perspectives on Education and Society highlights the struggle between the global promises and the national challenges of EFA.

Education for all has become a rallying call among heads of states, international organizations, corporate leaders and transnational advocacy groups. Implementation of EFA goals has also expanded, and today enjoys both new volumes of aid spending and new modes of aid delivery. This chapter considers why the global promise of EFA has moved beyond international rhetoric to action, and explores what the current EFA movement can tell us about the prospects of rights-based and redistributive forms of global governance.

The promotion of Education for All (EFA) in today's globalized world is an important responsibility to be borne by the international community as a whole. International cooperation in education is being undertaken in many developing countries under collaborative arrangements of “Actors” with varying positions. Essential as the backbone of such cooperation is a mutually complementary partnership between the public (governments and official aid agencies) and private (civil society). Without this, international cooperation in education is exceedingly difficult to implement. Thus, led mainly by international agencies, the mechanisms for global governance for the promotion of international cooperation in education have been created.

This paper sets out to analyze the mechanisms of governance on a global level as led by international agencies. Moreover, it attempts to elucidate the role of civil society, which has gained in importance as a partner of governments and international agencies, leading to a study of public and political dimensions in international cooperation in education. Furthermore, to see how the international community might close the four critical gaps in the areas of “policy, capacity, data and financing” and assist developing countries in promoting EFA, the paper analyzes an example of a recent international initiative called the EFA Fast-Track Initiative (FTI).

One of the central themes of education for all (EFA) for the last two decades has been empowerment through access to education. The history of EFA, however, can at best be termed as checkered. EFA has been relatively successful in drawing world attention and improving access to education. However, the question whether world attention and improved access has resulted in empowerment of people in the developing world still remains unanswered.

In this paper we argue that the limited success of EFA can best be examined and analyzed by paying close attention to tension between demands of the global capital and labor market place and nationalist agendas of the developing (post-colonial) state. These tensions affect the EFA agenda in the developing countries in complex ways.

Taking empirical-educational data from Pakistan we demonstrate that demands of the global capital and the labor market had resulted in an increased attention on institutions and programs of study that cater to the needs of the global capital and labor pool. Access to these institutions is limited to certain strata of the society. On the other hand the mass education program in Pakistan is largely defined by the nationalistic agenda of the post-colonial undemocratic state. A net impact of the interplay of these global and national dynamics is that not only the EFA's aim of mass education is hampered but also more importantly education in its present state is not empowering the recipients.

This chapter reviews the status of Education For All (EFA) in China and identifies four gaps: between rural and urban residents, between residents of geographic regions, between ethnicity groups, and between the genders. It turns to examine the educational situation and interests of girls weighed down by the crushing burden of multiple disadvantages in “left-behind” Western China. Based on analysis of macro-level socio-economic and educational conditions, along with rich micro-level data on girls’ vigorous pursuit of education, the authors argue that the changing conditions of rural girls’ lives and their education can best be understood from a critical empowerment perspective. Summarizing the global discourse and cross national evidence on the benefits of girls’ education, the chapter and looks beyond a utilitarian perspective and argues for the cogency of a critical empowerment framework. Filled with telling stories and case studies of Han Chinese, Tibetan, and Muslim girls, this chapter proposes that prioritizing girls’ education in Western China is crucial and required for achieving the MDG of gender parity. Even though girls are often stranded by family financial conditions, their actions and ideas seeing education as their future reflect a changing gender identity and role in the family and society. The fieldwork suggests that educating girls promotes localized development, reduces dangerous levels of economic gaps and social instability, but also advances hard to measure effects: personal and civil empowerment, and sustainable, harmonious cultural change – as well as MDG.

This study aims to make explicit fundamental challenges, which includes children with disabilities and special educational needs in education in China, Hong Kong, and Indonesia under the current conceptions of Inclusion and Education for All (EFA). Based on extensive research and staff development work in these places, this chapter argues for uniting the aims of inclusive education and EFA in order to realize the goal of EFA in all countries. Such a transformative agenda will require a new model of looking at difficulties in learning and the concept of diversity in education. Unless a conscious effort is made to move our thinking and planning from EFA to Inclusive EFA, we will not achieve true universal education.

The Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan was a signatory to the Jomtien Education for All agreement. Pursuing EFA in Bhutan presents a number of unique geographical, systemic, linguistic and other challenges, and the Royal Government of Bhutan has adopted multigrade school development as one major strategy in moving towards EFA. This adoption can be considered a form of policy borrowing. In this chapter we explore how multigrade schooling has been enhanced and expanded in Bhutan to achieve EFA goals, and in particular, the conditions under which multigrade teaching has become an accepted and important form of educational delivery in Bhutan. We trace the development of multigrade teaching to a set of partly planned and partly coincidental events and contexts. We review the geographical setting of Bhutan, local and global political events, teacher training issues, teacher upgrade programmes, contemporary discourses of education, development and modernization, and local initiatives to promote and strengthen multigrade teaching as a key strategy in providing access to school for children in remote areas. We also identify a number of challenges facing multigrade teaching, including the linguistic context, local reservations about the desirability of multigrade classes and resource issues.

The paper critically examines the program on Education for All (EFA) in India, namely Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in a financing and development framework. In doing so, the paper identifies a number of policy and implementation gaps in the program. A fine-tuning of the existing matching shares by discriminating the matching shares in terms of need for, ability to provide matching shares and to strengthen the absorptive capacity could go a long way in attaining the horizontal equity in terms of every child completing elementary schooling in India. This would also ensure the other desirable principles of intergovernmental transfers such as predictability, transparency, and incentive mechanism besides improving utilization.

Further, it clearly emerges that only after ensuring the basic minimum levels in terms of physical and human infrastructure, and ensuring equal access to all the child population of age group of 6–14, quality is given priority. Thus, the challenge is both improving the qualitative and quantitative targets of UEE with enhanced resource allocation to education. Hence, Center is to ensure release of funding for SSA through special efforts as the program requires enormous funding and serious commitment of both central and state governments.

On the developmental aspects, the scheme not only widens social inequity but also perpetuates the declining quality of public provision by encouraging alternate schools and para teachers, besides the financing norms. These low-cost options will result in serious ramifications on equity, quality, balance, and sustainability of the basic education structure.

Just how influential are global policies in national education systems? A case study focusing on Peru's response to EFA provides insights pertinent to behaviors of countries with weak economies, sizable ethnic minorities, and a still undefined national project. Convergence of ideals of universal basic education access and good quality of schooling abound in policy discourse yet commitment to specific targets lags. While Peru became one of the few countries to produce an EFA national plan, it exists only on the margin of political action. This study probes domestic and exogenous factors affecting state behavior and concludes that the world of democratic ideas finds much easier acceptance among decision-makers than the resolution of relations of economic, political, and cultural domination within and between countries – forces embodying powerful dynamics that determine the likelihood of an adequate national response to either domestic problems or global proposals.

Among the compromises raised at the Education for All Conference held at Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990, and signed by Mexico and the rest of the countries that attended this Conference, were the reduction of the adult illiteracy rate by the year 2000, with sufficient emphasis on female literacy; and the expansion of provisions of basic education and training in other essential skills required by youth and adults, with program effectiveness assessed in terms of behavioral changes and impacts on health, employment and productivity. Based on a general revision of the things that the National Institute for Adult Education (INEA) reports have been its main policies and programs in the last few years, and on the results of a formative evaluation of the so-called “Programa Cero Rezago Educativo” (Zero Educational Delay Program), this chapter discusses some of the main strengths, weaknesses and challenges faced by INEA in order to address the compromises acquired more than 15 years ago.

The paper examines 15 years of basic educational reform in Mexico directed at improving scholastic performance, equity and education for all (EFA), through mainly administrative measures, particularly decentralization. Taking a critical policy studies approach informed by anthropological examination of local educational processes, this chapter takes issue with scholarship that sees educational reforms in LDC's as the product of “decision makers” and the school reality as a deficit to be filled by “policy”. This perspective mirrors the characteristically top down approach of the very reform process it is supposed to be analyzing. The approach taken in this paper treats school district persons and institutions as active agents in their own right. More specifically the paper will argue that Mexican reforms toward EFA have been unable to transcend the very corporatist–personalistic structures it avowedly sought to reform. It has thus been largely ineffective in mobilizing forces for change, the goodwill, creativity and initiative of educators so important to its avowed aim of improving student scholastic performance. However, isolated examples of innovative uses of spaces opened by the reform offer ideas about how to reorient the reform in more productive directions.

In this chapter, educational policy development addressing the learning needs of the at-risk population in Curacao is described as a direct result of the implementation of the global standards of the EFA goals. The at-risk student population is defined in this chapter as the proportion of students whose home language differs from the school language. Achievement is based on proficiency in the language of schools and a national tracking system, which has historically accommodated the learning needs of the at-risk into various school types. This chapter argues how the global promises for a quality education for all is exposing a more than 40-year-old policy of national tracking that questions the right to an academic education for the majority of the at-risk students. Goal 4 of the EFA places Curacao as an example of islands which have long surpassed the target for participation in technical and vocational programs. The chapter opens with an overview of the goals and targets that created a framework for continuous structural reform of a complacent system of education for all backed by compulsory education.

This paper presents a state-of-the-field review of progress toward the ideal of Education for All in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. First, the significance of Education for All in Sub-Saharan Africa is clarified. Then, the beginnings of formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa (i.e., nineteenth century missionary education) are discussed, followed by colonial education. This is followed by an overview of post-independence strategies and initiatives aimed at the expansion of education. The Outline of a Plan for African Educational Development, drafted by a meeting of Ministers of Education of African states (MINEDAF) immediately after independence, 1961, is discussed, followed by the resolutions taken at the seven MINEDAF conferences held since 1961 till the present day. The resulting strategies and initiatives aimed at bringing education to all are discussed and evaluated. The impact of structural adjustment programs signed in recent years by most governments of African countries with the World Bank is also addressed. In conclusion, the present state of education in Sub-Saharan Africa and the prospects and challenges of Education for All are summarized.

This chapter addresses the issue of teacher quantity, quality and their interrelationships. It first sets out the scope of the ‘quantity gap’ in primary teachers in sub-Saharan Africa, from 1991 to the present and towards the EFA target date of 2015. It then assesses different measures of ‘quality’ among current primary teaching forces. It begins by looking at how countries compare in terms of the percentage of teachers that meet nationally specific criteria of a ‘qualified’ teacher and as linked to an internationally comparable benchmark of teachers’ educational attainment. The next section looks beyond minimum qualification standards to examine the educational qualifications that teachers actually based on data covering 13 South and East African countries. Among the same group of countries, it opens a discussion concerning direct measures of teachers’ knowledge of science and mathematics and academic skills. The final section then examines measures of in-service training or the continuing professional development of the current teaching force based on the results of a regional assessment study.

This chapter outlines the enormity of the task of achieving universal primary education in Africa with over 40 million children currently out of school in sub-Saharan Africa. Several questions are addressed with reference to global trends and using World Bank and national enrollment data. For example: Why does Africa seem unable to secure “education for all” for school-age children? Is it simply the relative poverty levels of African countries, or are there grounds for thinking that other factors might be at work? And, what challenges do these countries face in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic? This chapter also notes that some countries are at higher risk of not achieving universal primary completion and gender equality by 2015. What must politicians and policy-makers do to reverse these trends? As observed by Blair's Commission for Africa, the challenges are immense and if Africa continues on its current path then the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for halving poverty, universal primary education and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths in sub-Saharan Africa will not be delivered in 2015 but instead between 100 and 150 years late. The challenge is to find short- and long- term policies and solutions to address this global policy.

Satisfactory provision of basic education is a way through which social inclusion and economic growth can take place in post-apartheid South Africa. Although the country embraces the principles and guidelines for EFA declaration, making basic education available to the present school-age children, and to adults who were denied the opportunity during the apartheid era, has remained unrealized. The gap in basic education has persisted despite notable improvements in the educational sector in South Africa. To address this challenge, this chapter seeks to reconceptualize and expand the meaning of “basic education” within the context of South African society. It argues that the meaning and the practice of basic education in South Africa is inseparable from the historic experiences and the socio-economic dynamics that shape the present society. Besides, to realize the goal of improved quality, the role of non-state institutions in basic education provision needs to be redefined.

Although global factors undeniably play a role in the adoption of Education for All (EFA) goals in any given country, it would seem that a great majority of studies on EFA tend to overlook the significance of local dynamics. The meaning of schooling is socially constructed, regardless of how the global consensus may wish to structuralize it. The main concern of this chapter, therefore, is to closely analyze the processes by which EFA goals are adopted by the Ethiopian government and how they are implemented at the central and local levels of the government structure. The government's dependence on foreign assistance contributes to the way in which Ethiopian education policy converges with EFA. However, EFA goals are predominantly the concern of policy makers at the international and central government levels, while, over the course of implementation, the administrative judgment of street-level officials inevitably narrows the actual focus of policy. Also, the choices parents make concerning their children's education are not always purely motivated by educational concerns, but are also contingent on economic and/or social factors as well. Ethiopia has achieved a rapid increase in enrolment rates, a development regarded as a sign of true governmental commitment to succeeding in EFA. However, as the author demonstrates in this chapter, a variety of social and systematic factors coalesced to bring about the increase in enrolment, with governmental commitment numbering as just one.

Civil war and conflict in African nations tend to involve the destruction, damage, and neglect of schools and classrooms. Sierra Leone is no exception. The slaughter and dispersal of children and the unemployment of teachers, coupled with the loss of equipment, textbooks and other supplies, accounted for the rapid decline in school enrolments during the civil war. This chapter seeks to provide a synthesis of the impact of the global mandate “Education for All” in Sierra Leone's local and national context. It provides examples of contextual realities and challenges that confront the implementation of this international mandate. The chapter argues that Sierra Leone's embrace and constant striving for the actualization of this global mandate is encouraging, but lacks significant contextual quality to make it a truly realized promise. Although progress can be classified as ongoing and truly encouraging, vital historical lessons can be learnt as the country forges to foster the realization of this dream.

For over six decades, multilateral agencies in education have prompted the international community to embrace proposals for large-scale initiatives to solve once and for all the problems of illiteracy and the lack of universal schooling. Even with their highly contrastive policy frameworks, the major agencies can periodically be relied upon to call for military-like assaults to achieve basic education for all, usually over a 10–15-year time frame. Just as predictable have been inflated expectations, failures of analysis, strategy and financing, and the tendency of agencies to hold other actors to account for failing to meet agency expectations. The much-trumpeted World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA, 1990) is analyzed in the wider perspective of post-WW2 agency programs for universal literacy and primary education. Although expectations of success were high at the time, the WCEFA initiative quickly evaporated, although it remained for some time as a much-cited normative and political point of reference. The failure of WCEFA is analyzed in terms of the strains and stresses facing multilateral education at the end of the Cold War and in terms of more recent multilateral commitments to education for all.