The impact of the global financial crisis on donor aid, especially for developing countries, is threatening development, particularly when it comes to advances in education.
This emerged at the International Conference on Education, organised by the International Bureau of Education of the United National Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) in Geneva, Switzerland last week.
Minister of Education Naledi Pandor was one of the first participants to raise the matter.
She was a keynote speaker at the conference, which deals with inclusive education, and at the opening session took to the stage after Xavier Carcos, France’s minister of national education.
”I hope that France as the [current] leader of the European Union, will ensure that promises made [in terms of aid] will be acted upon. Given the crisis in the economic world, our fear is that we [South Africa and Africa] are increasingly invisible,” Pandor said.
This comes amid a Unesco report last week accusing the donor community of a ”collective failure” to deliver on aid commitments.
Kevin Watkins, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring report, warned that while the financial crisis was highly visible in terms of both coverage in the media and the agenda of politicians, the education crisis in the world was becoming more invisible.
The reason for this, said Watkins, was because the economic meltdown affected the ”people of Wall Street and not the people living in the slums of Manila [in the Philippines]”.
At the 2000 World Education forum in Dakar, Senegal rich countries pledged that no credible national plan of a country wanting to meet the Education for All (EFA) goals by 2015 would be allowed to fail for want of finance.
EFA aims to provide universal primary education as well as increase early childhood care and education, adult literacy and boost educational opportunities for girls and women by 2015.
According to Watkins, the Dakar promise is not being met.
On a conservative estimate, the report calculates that the aid-financing gap for achieving basic education by 2015 is about $7-billion annually.
Watkins said considering that more than $3-trillion has been committed to rescue plans, $7-billion in aid is not a huge claim on resources.
The report points at the fact that in 2005 donors pledged to increase aid by $50-million by 2010, but that current aid commitments point to an impending shortfall of $30-million against this pledge. Almost half of this money is meant for sub-Saharan Africa.
”If donors are serious, they cannot afford another two years of collective underperformance. Accelerated progress towards EFA will not be possible without a strengthened international commitment to increase overall aid to the levels pledged in 2005,” the report states.
According to the report overall growth in aid was due to a few donors rather a broad-based effort by the international community. This growth was insufficient to counteract the drop in aid. This meant overall aid in 2006 was lower than in 2004.
The report is also highly critical of some donors skewing aid budgets in favour of higher education. While the Netherlands and the United Kingdom allocate over 60% of their aid to basic education in low-income countries, France only allocates 12% of its total aid budget to basic education in poor countries. Germany only contributes 7%.
The report also urges the United States and Japan to invest a greater share of national income in aid.