The Mail & Guardian’s sister newspaper, The Guardian, is launching a campaign to bring education to the world’s millions of illiterate people. Victoria Brittain, Larry Elliot and John Carvel explain why it’s necessary
Imagine that all children aged six to 14 in Europe and North America did not go to school. The figure is huge, yet that is the fate of an equivalent number of children, 125-million, of primary school age in developing countries.
Imagine also that one in four adults in Britain could neither read nor write. There would be demands for the government to spend money to make good the education deficit with the rest of the world. But in developing countries a quarter of adults – 872-million people – are illiterate, and there is no sign of anyone producing the funds needed for teachers, books, desks and school buildings, let alone a computer in every class.
Ending this situation would require money, but not all that much. Universal primary education would cost $8-billion a year – roughly what the world spends on arms every four days, or half what parents in the United States spend annually on toys.
There are those, however, who say the money cannot be afforded. That is not the sentiment shared in Sierra Leone, where in the past decade thousands of children mutilated and killed other children in a baffling civil war, and where a shaky peace is being imposed at a great price by Nigeria and the United Nations. Nor in Cte d’Ivoire, where late last year a merry-go- round of thieving governments was ended abruptly by army officers.
Democracy failed in these two cases. It is failing, too, on every continent in an unseen drama linked to intolerable poverty. Behind this lies the crisis in education, which many governments are reluctant to admit.
In the north there is no such reluctance. “Education, education, education,” is a catchphrase coined by Tony Blair, but the sentiment is shared by any government in Europe or North America. The equation is simple: the successful parts of modern economics are based on knowledge, and that means quality education.
In April, Dakar in Senegal will host the World Forum on Education for All, organised by the World Bank and the UN. It will be about how to get those 125-million children into school, and what to do about 150- million who drop out. If history is anything to go by, the conference will come up with a vacuous protocol that will make all the right noises but change nothing. This is no longer good enough.
People who are denied education will be poor and unhealthy, and will die earlier than the rest of us. They will be open to the grossest forms of exploitation in a world where the educated have no excuse for not knowing what is happening elsewhere. In Africa, Burma, Cambodia and Afghanistan there are thousands of child soldiers; in Mauritania and Sudan slaves accept their destiny; in Asia millions of girls are slaves within their families, or sold as sex slaves.
Education was recognised as a basic human right 50 years ago in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Ten years ago the world community promised primary education for all, and to halve the adult illiteracy by 2000. Five years ago the promise slipped to 2015. The vicious circle of ignorance, poverty and civil strife means that the world is a more unstable place, that potential markets are closed off to the West, and that the number of refugees and economic migrants will increase.
It doesn’t have to be this way. This week The Guardian is launching a campaign to end the most powerful cause of global poverty, inequality and instability: the lack of education. A network of teachers’ unions, women’s groups, community groups from Brazil to India, South Africa to Bangladesh, with Oxfam and ActionAid in Britain, is lobbying to get firm commitments to making 2015 a real goal and not just another broken promise.
The campaign needs resources, but it needs political will even more. It will mean a change in priorities from governments in the developing world, Western financial institutions, and donor countries that follow their lead rather than set their own priorities.
The Guardian backs the Global Plan of Action (GAP) proposed by Oxfam and its partners in the developing world as the basis for the Dakar meeting. Governments in the north would provide an extra $4-billion a year through aid and debt relief, which developing countries could match by diverting military and other spending to education.
For Africa, the continent worst affected by the education crisis, the GAP will provide $2-billion of the $3,6-billion needed to finance education for all. But Africa will have to cut its $7-billion-a- year spending on arms to train enough teachers to allow class sizes to be reduced, and to provide children with pencils and notebooks.
There are vast opportunities for change. In Pakistan, for example, 11-million children are out of school, the government spends six times as much on the military as on primary education, and the country has nuclear weapons. In Brazil, Chad and the Philippines, governments skew resources towards higher education, where they benefit the wealthy, rather than towards basic education for the poor. In Brazil the desperately poor north-east ranks on par with Mozambique, while the richer south ranks with South Korea.
A commitment will have to come from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Both institutions are advocates of cost-recovery – a euphemism for transferring financing responsibilities to families. Cost-recovery means the world’s poorest have to pay for their children’s education. Many cannot afford to do so, and school enrolment rates have dropped in numerous African countries, such as Tanzania and Kenya, as a result. Girls are falling further behind, despite the known links between girls’ education and the future health and productivity of their families.
The growth of technology- and knowledge- based economies will bring a wealth of opportunities, but it threatens those that lack the infrastructure of electricity and telephone cables. The rest of the world owes them at least a firm commitment to primary education.