Detailed Action Plan guidelines are now required and advocacy to inform the public and the donor community about the importance of EFA is imperative. Since many donors have already earmarked their annual funding, a pragmatic, country-level approach was suggested to free up some resources before the end of the year.

Assessment, evaluation and monitoring must be an integral part of the Plans and the monitoring scope and methodology should be established from the outset. Intermediate targets should also be set to accommodate changes of direction mid-way. The pooling of available data and indicators would make for greater efficiency.

Subregional mechanisms should be put in place to review the Plans and propose eventual revisions, thus providing further guarantees to the donor community. Participants agreed that the review should take place before governmental approval to ensure that revisions are taken into account. It was underlined that the review process would be more acceptable to countries if the aspect of interaction were highlighted above that of assessment and that the regions were undoubtedly better placed to decide on the criteria for this review. The question was raised as to who should conduct this assessment?

A significant proportion of funding should come from the country itself, but additional funds will be required. Donors should be prevailed upon to raise their funding levels or redirect to EFA a portion of their already committed resources. A question that remained unanswered was whether the release of funds should be linked to the assessment outcomes.