Basic education

More than 50 years have passed since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights named free and compulsory basic education a fundamental human right. Sadly such a right remains an elusive and distant dream for millions of the world’s poorest people. RESULTS is committed to generating the political will to transform this dream into a reality.

Contents of this page

The scale of the problem
Why is education so important?
Education for all
The Fast Track Initiative
Progress to date
The challenge ahead
  1. Barriers to education
  2. Quality of education
The UK's role in funding global education
What has RESULTS in the UK done?
More information

The scale of the problem

• Over 72 million children are out of school
• One-in-five adults in the world are illiterate
• Over 70% of the out-of-school children are in Sub-Saharan Africa and South & West Asia
• Over 15% of children in developing countries do not complete a course of primary education.
• In Sub-Saharan Africa, less than 60% of children complete a course of primary education.

Why is education so important?

Education has been described by some as a ‘silver bullet’ in the fight to end poverty. Study after study shows that basic education – especially for girls and women – is one of the best development investments that can be made.

Education plays a pivotal role in the fight against poverty, maternal and infant mortality, ill-health, and especially against HIV/AIDS. According to UNICEF, one out of every six children born to women without an education dies before the age of five. That rate is reduced by half if a woman receives primary school education.

Education for All

In a spirit of optimism at the turn of the millennium, leaders of rich and poor countries committed to one of the most exciting pledges the international community has ever made: Education for All (EFA), which promised to provide free and compulsory primary education for every child in the world.

Central to this commitment were six goals agreed to by over 180 countries at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal in 2000. Two were incorporated into the Millennium Development Goals later that year. The 6 EFA goals are as follows:

• Goal 1: Expand early childhood care and education
• Goal 2: Provide free and compulsory primary education for all
• Goal 3: Promote learning and life skills for young people and adults
• Goal 4: Increase adult literacy by 50 per cent
• Goal 5: Achieve gender parity by 2005, gender equality by 2015
• Goal 6: Improve the quality of education

RESULTS fully supports these aims and works hard to generate the necessary political support to bring them to fruition.

The Fast Track Initiative

The Education for All - Fast Track Initiative (FTI) was launched in 2002, with the aim of ensuring that good education plans were backed by more, better and faster aid. Since that date a combination of good planning and more cash has begun to show encouraging results, potentially paving the way for the realisation of the EFA goals. To date, over US$1.2 billion in grants have been awarded to 23 countries.

RESULTS believes that The FTI is one of the best multi-lateral channels available for funding basic education and has campaigned for the UK to increase its contribution to the Fund. The FTI faces a significant funding shortfall - $1.1billion in 2008 -  meaning that some developing countries with FTI approved education plans cannot access funds to put the plans into practice.

Progress to date

• 41 million more children were brought into the schooling system between 2000 and 2007
• The enrolment ratio in primary education (the percentage of primary-school-age children who are in school) increased to 88% in developing regions in the school year 2004/05, up from 80% in 1990/91 (two-thirds of the increase occurred since 1999)
• 47 out of 163 low-income countries have achieved universal primary education since 1998 and 20 more are on track to achieve it by 2015
• The gender gap is also gradually beginning to narrow with 118 countries having achieved gender parity at the primary level

Despite such notable achievements at least 75 countries will not achieve universal primary completion by 2015 – many of them are so off-track that they won’t reach the target in 80 years, let alone eight. Most will fail to achieve all six EFA goals by 2015.

The challenge ahead

The challenge ahead remains daunting, but RESULTS firmly believes that with sufficient political will and greater investment in education, the world can reach and even exceed the targets that have been set. For this to happen several crucial challenges must first be overcome.

(1) Barriers to education

One notable challenge is the removal of barriers that continue to impede global efforts at providing good quality education that is available to all.

Many developing countries charge user fees for basic education, which include tuition fees as well as supplementary costs such as uniforms and textbooks. These fees put the cost of education out of the reach of huge numbers of families and represent a significant barrier to achieving education for all.

Some barriers occur due to the social and political environment in which children live: about half of the world's out-of-school children live in Conflict-Affected Fragile State, which are countries suffering conflict that also experience income disparity, weak governance and inequality - making the delivery of education immensely challenging.

Additionally, it is estimated that a third of out-of-school children have a disability, while more than 90% of children with disabilities in Africa do not go to school.

(2) Quality of education

Whilst RESULTS supports the aim of getting more children into schools we believe that increasing numbers alone is not enough. We must also ensure that children receive a good quality education that will provide them with the relevant skills and experience to allow them to escape the shackles of poverty.

The poor quality of education provided in many developing countries, resulting from irrelevant and obsolete curricula, overcrowded classrooms, untrained teachers, etc., lead to high dropout and incompletion rates that must be overcome if universal primary education completion is to be achieved.

While it is essential that education is made available to all, without sufficient investment in the education system increasing enrollment can lead to decreasing the quality of the education provided. Many developing countries are prevented from employing the number of teachers that are needed to deliver education for all by restrictions on their public sector wage bills that form part of the conditions for loans from the International Monetary Fund. This leads to student to teacher ratios far above the UN recommended level of 40:1 - in many developing countries class sizes now exceed 100.

RESULTS continues to work with the UK government, foreign governments, other NGOs and international institutions to make sure that such problems are overcome in an expedient and efficient way, helping to ensure that quality education is made available to all.

The UK’s role in funding global education

In April 2006 the UK government made a significant increased commitment to education and plans to spend £8.5 billion (US$ 17 billion) on education projects over the ten year period – 2006 to 2016 – mostly through bilateral programmes or budgetary support. This will double spending to over £1 billion a year by 2010. Results UK applauds the UK government's pledge, but we remain concerned that to date disbursements of the funds have been significantly below the levels expected.

Using the additional funds the UK will for the first time enter into 10-year agreements with poor countries to finance 10-year education plans – locking in the long-term commitment vital to delivering high quality education for all.

The UK has also scaled up its contributions to the Education for All - Fast Track Initiative, spending £150 million (US$300 million) over a three year period. In 2006 the UK also provided an additional £100 million (US$200 million) to help fill the FTI’s funding gap. Despite these commitments, UK spending on the FTI still only represents about 5% of its overall spending on global education.

What has RESULTS in the UK done?

To find out more about what RESULTS has achieved click here

More information

• Must try harder: The challenges that remain in achieving education for all (Report produced by RESULTS UK, October 2008)
• RESULTS submission to the select committee on international development (October 2007) 
• Global Campaign for Education
• UNICEF
• Save the Children
• ActionAid

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