Education for all Schools reach out

Contents • A global campaign • India’s Barefoot College generation • Basic education: gaps on the map 1 Five flagship projects • Uganda’s full school benches • Bangladesh: girls first • El Salvador: power to the parents! • Mongolia: distance is no object • India: local heroes 2 Uneven progress • World literacy: what went wrong? • Partnerships in practice • Aid: an unfair deal? • Do schools foment inequality?

© Spier Donati/Rapho, Paris Education is a right and one of the most decisive tools for escaping poverty, but today there are still over one hundred million children who do not make it into school and close to 900 million illiterate adults. Why? Education systems remain overly rigid and commitment by the state alone, in particular a financial one, is inadequate to reach the excluded. Ten years ago, the World Conference in Jomtien (Thailand) affirmed that education could not reach everyone unless it became everybody’s business. It required new partners and an expanded vision. Ten years later, how do things stand? This section opens with five flagship projects illustrating the “Copernican revolution” that UNESCO Director General Koïchiro Matsuura calls for. Uganda has tripled enrolment in primary school by combining mobilization at the top with delegation to the local level. In El Salvador, parents are co-running schools in rural areas. A Bangladeshi NGO has managed to educate over one million children, most of them girls. Ten million Indian volunteers are giving a new impetus to literacy work. In Mongolia, radio programmes provide new job skills to a dispersed population. “Give private initiative more responsibility, more space, more freedom,” says Sanjit Bunker Roy, father of the Barefoot College in one of India’s poorest states. The advice merits our attention given the uneven record of the past decade. Literacy remains education’s poor relation, as Mohamed Maamouri of the University of Pennsylvania underlines. Without true reciprocity, partnerships remain a hollow concept, both at the national level (Mark Bray, Hong Kong University) and between Northern donors and developing countries (Kenneth King, Edinburgh University). And without bold initiatives, education will continue to widen rather than reduce the gap between rich and poor, concludes Harvard’s Fernando Reimers.