Broken aid promises by Western governments are depriving millions of African children of promised school places, the United Nations has warned.
Ahead of a special education conference in South Africa on Sunday to coincide with the World Cup final, Unesco said a lack of money was hampering attempts to get 32-million children a place in the classroom.
Western donors said a decade ago that they would provide the finance to deliver universal primary education, but they have been contributing less than one fifth of the $11-billion annual cost of meeting the pledge in the low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
Sunday’s summit was called by South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, as part of a campaign involving Fifa, football’s governing body, to push Africa’s education crisis up the international agenda.
Unesco said the meeting took place against a backdrop of worrying trends in international aid for education, which fell back in 2008 as the global economy plunged into the first synchronised recession since the second world war.
With Western governments facing increased pressure on their budgets, aid spending on basic education in sub-Saharan Africa dropped from $1,72-billion in 2007 to $1,65-billion in 2008, with aid per pupil down by 7%. Unesco said on current trends, there would still be 23-million children out of school by 2015, with knock-on effects on economic growth, poverty reduction and health.
“Donors have to come up with new finance and they need to act fast,” said Kevin Watkins, director of Unesco’s global monitoring report. “We are now just one primary-school generation away from a broken promise to Africa’s children.”
Data from Unesco released for the education summit showed that sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 45% of the children that do not go to school and that just one in three children are in secondary school — the world’s lowest level.
Unesco said more than a third of adults could not read or write.
“Governments across the region need to do more to tackle these disparities — but increased aid is also vital,” Watkins said.
“The report estimates that the region also needs to recruit an additional 1,2-millon teachers.” – guardian.co.uk