The target year of 2015 that was fixed to achieve universal
primary education will not be met, the United Nations said at the recently held
second Global Partnership for Education Replenishment Pledging Conference in
Brussels. An estimated 58 million children, a large proportion of them from
sub-Saharan Africa, are still out of school. The announcement merely confirms
Unesco’s own admission last year on the odds ahead in the task of realising this
Millennium Development Goal. That admission was based on its finding that the
top six donors had substantially cut back on their aid commitments since 2011.
Two of the donor countries slashed their allocations in this sector by 30 per
cent; reductions made by the European Union were to a similar extent. Unesco
observed that the momentum with respect to achieving this target was lost since
2007, implying that as in the case of several other basic human development
indicators, the global economic meltdown may have contributed to the situation.
But the movement to improve rates of retention in schools and to enhance quality
of teaching seems to be gathering steam again, as most of the donor states
promised at the Brussels conference to step up spending. But more significant,
as many as 60 developing countries that were present in Brussels — India was not
among them — agreed to boost allocations in their domestic budgets for primary
education.
Abolition of tuition fees, cash transfers, teaching in the local
language, increased financial outlays and appropriate curriculum are among
measures that have helped developing countries reduce the out-of-school
population among children, according to the Education For All report. Clearly,
then, there are diverse ways and means to realise the goal of universal
education. Governments found wanting in the requisite will to invest in the
future of their youngsters may be complicit in allowing children to be weaned
away by armed militias that have already wreaked much economic havoc and caused
political instability in many regions. A welcome new dimension to the
Replenishment Pledging Conference is the focus on the needs of disabled
children. Addressing this segment is both a moral and practical imperative,
considering that 15 per cent of the world’s population has some form of
disability, as per figures from a 2011 report on disability brought out jointly
by the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Around the world, about a
third of those that are not in school have a disability, says the Global
Campaign for Education UK. Given such a large proportion of such children, the
relevant goal cannot be accomplished without special provision being made to
achieve it. Thus, there is a case to set separate targets factoring in
disability in the post-2015 development agenda.
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