4/5/2007
Aid For Education

The conference ‘Keeping Promises on Education’ was held in Brussels on May 2.  Organized by the European Union in conjunction with the United Kingdom and the World Bank, the purpose of the conference was to obtain confirmation by the member states of the European Union and G7 of the commitments made at Dakar and in New York in  2000.  Concrete measures were proposed to provide the developing countries with greater, faster, more effective and more predictable assistance in the education sector.

Midway to the date set for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the education goal is to enable 77 million children (of whom 44 million are girls) who are still deprived of primary education to complete primary school.

Yet, if the efforts made since 2001 are not augmented, at least 75 countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, will fail to achieve the Millennium Goal of universal primary education.

Aid to education accounts today for 4% of total official development assistance.  According to the 2007 global report prepared by the World Bank, $9 billion in external assistance is necessary to achieve the goal of universal primary education, which implies tripling the current level of  aid to the poorest countries.

The Global Campaign for Education (GCE) released a damning report showing a significant fall in rich country aid to funding basic education in the poor world. The report shows that the US, Japan, Germany and Italy are the most miserly of the rich countries, collectively giving just 10% of what is needed to keep their own promises of every person having the chance of an education by 2015.