Education Report names and shames countries with poor education funding - 9 July 2010

Today the 1GOAL campaign (as part of the Global Campaign for Education) released its Annual “School Report” which showed that while donors such as Netherlands, Norway and United Kingdom lead the way on aid for education, many of the key donor countries were reneging on their aid commitments with the worst offenders being Japan, Germany, Italy and America. This comes as the UN confirmed that in 2010 African countries may be facing education cuts of up to $4.6 bn from their budgets as a result of the financial crisis.

The “School Report” which comes from data provided in 2008 contains a league table of how donors are being rated on their funding for education. In the top three donors are Netherlands, Norway and Denmark and at the bottom of the list is Italy followed by Japan and then Australia.

A number of western donors including France, Germany and the US give almost two-thirds of their aid to basic education in advice, consultancy and bureaucratic support rather than paying for teachers, classrooms, and children going to school. Not only is the spending directed in the wrong areas, a huge funding gap remains from donors with many not paying their fare share. The cost of paying every child to go to school is just 0.2% the estimated $8 trillion that was spent on bailing out the banks could have paid for every child to go to school.

The report shows that there has been huge success across Africa with 40 million children being able to school in the past ten years. There have been some notable country success stories with the number of children out of school in Tanzania decreasing from 3.1 million to 100,000 and in Zambia decreasing from 600,000 to 100,000 and a 36% increase enrolment for primary education.

1GOAL is calling on poor countries to increase their spending on education to 20% of their national budget and for a roadmap for all African children to be in school by 2014. The real challenge is to ensure that once the basics of education are in place that children are able to leave with an education, for example:

• In Malawi, Uganda and Chad less than 40% of children that enrol complete primary school
• In Central African Republic, Rwanda, Malawi and Mozambique there are more than 65 pupils for every teacher
• In Togo currently only 15% of primary school teachers have received appropriate training

The major breakthrough on education funding is set to come at the UN Summit in September where 1GOAL is calling on donors to quadruple funding on education from $4 billion per year to $16 billion per year. Along with new money, 1GOAL is calling for donors to prioritise the poorest counties and aid to cover the basic costs of schooling – teachers salaries, books and school buildings – are prioritised.



Source: http://www.join1goal.org/news_intern.php?page=1&NewsID=113