6. Mobilizing resources for EFA

Achieving the ambitious but urgent goal of EFA will require the investment of large amounts of new financial resources. A significant proportion of funding must come from the individual countries themselves through, for example, reallocation and the adoption of cost-effective measures to reach EFA goals. However, most will also need considerable additional outside help.

The Dakar Framework calls for such outside assistance on a sys-tematic basis. Specifically, it states, 'The international com-munity will [launch] a global initiative aimed at developing the strategies and mobilizing the resources needed to provide effective support to national efforts (para. 11).' It also goes on to declare, 'We affirm that no countries seriously committed to education for all will be thwarted in their achievement of this goal by a lack of resources' (para. 10).

Given the strategic importance of initiatives at the national level, the national plan was considered to be the central organizing basis for the financing of EFA at the national level. National plans are viewed as a national commitment on behalf of the govern-ment, NGOs and donors to the promotion of EFA. Ongoing development programmes should be revisited to channel funds to EFA. Gaps need to be identified within the country itself.

Some donors may find it difficult to raise additional funds, but they could reallocate funds within their own budgets and ori-ent their funding more towards EFA in collaboration with the countries. On the donor side, advocacy work has to be under-taken and political leaders have to be convinced that EFA is important.

Trends in international development assistance during the 1990s

The global initiative is being launched within the context of softening donor contributions to international development.

The decline in assistance
Total net resource flows to aid recipient countries, of which Official Development Assistance (ODA) forms a part, more than doubled during 1991-96 (from $138 to $345 billion). It then declined severely during 1996-98 because of the Asian finan-cial crisis, but recovered somewhat in recent years (estimated at $248 billion in 1999).

Four member countries (Denmark, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden) were joined in 2000 by Luxemburg, according to pro-visional figures, to fulfil the UN target of allocating 0.7% or more of GNP for international development assistance.

As percentage of GNP of member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has fallen by more than one-fifth in constant dollar terms, from 0.33% in 1992 to its lowest level of 0.22% in 1997, with slight recovery to 0.24% in 1999. Real net ODA disbursements (in constant 1998 prices) fell from $60,421 million in 1992 to $48,324 million in 1997, then increased to $55,343 million in 1999.

The four largest economies - France, Germany, Japan and the United States - have reduced their assistance by the largest amounts during the 1990s. By contrast, the non-G7 group have allocated increased shares throughout the 1990s and new, smaller countries have joined in this support.

Aid allocations have been on the decline in all regions except for Europe and Central Asia and East Asia and the Pacific dur-ing the 1990s. The trend for the least developed countries has been downward in recent years. Sub-Saharan Africa has wit-nessed the sharpest decline by roughly one-third. Some of themajor aid providers are responsible for some of the largest reductions. Moreover, during the 1990s, non-concessional funds gained importance over concessional disbursements.

Education as a proportion of overall aid
It is noteworthy that education seems to have suffered rela-tively less within this overall declining ODA trend, although complete disbursement figures are hard to retrieve. Nevertheless, education continues to constitute a low propor-tion of individual countries' development assistance. Of total DAC bilateral allocations, education seems to have maintained its proportional share, constituting roughly 11% in both 1989 and 1999. Multilateral allocations increased from 4.6% to 7.6% in the same years.

The absolute value of bilateral commitments to education was largely unchanged from 1990 to 1999 (roughly $3,980 million in 1998 prices) after having experienced a high of $4,341 mil-lion in 1994. Official Development Assistance for basic edu-cation 1997-98 was on average $703 million.

Urgency of the situation
Given the urgency of reaching the goals of EFA, this decline in donor contributions is disturbing. Moreover, recent tragic events relating to global terrorism have prompted new worries about the impact of security concerns on funding of social sec-tors in general and education in particular.

The trends of the 1990s as well as the new concerns about security suggest the need for innovative thinking in resource mobilization for EFA.

Estimates of the total costof achieving EFA

There are ongoing efforts by the World Bank, UNESCO and other organizations to estimate the financial resources needed to achieve EFA. These include attempts both at establishing a global financing goal and at identifying specific resource gaps at the country level. Estimates have been made to estimate the additional resources required to achieve UPE by 2015, based on gross and net enrolment figures.

Due to differences in methodologies and underlying popu-lation, enrolment and expenditure statistics, the annual addi-tional resources needed to achieve UPS have been variously estimated to be:

OXFAM - US$8 billion per year
UNICEF - $9 billion
World Bank - $13 billion
UNESCO/UIS - $15 billion

World Bank data suggest that 97% of education budgets in developing countries comes from national governments, and only 3% from the international community. In some contexts, the contribution from the international community funds is higher and is considered to play a critical, catalytic and sup-portive role.

The affordability of universal primary education
Despite the variations between these estimates, the key mes-sage that emerges is that UPE is affordable. It requires a mod-erate concerted effort. Even the highest estimate, US$15 bil-lion
per year, represents less than 0.3% of the total GNP of the developing countries, 0.06% of the total GNP of the developed countries, and 0.05% of the world's GNP.

As the World Bank observed in a recent paper, Educating for Dynamic Economies: Accelerating Progress Towards Education for All (EFA), 'Financial projections show that for almost all of the very low-enrolment countries, once the system stabilizes after an initial
surge in enrolments has moved through the system (a period of about 10 years), national resources should be able to sustain the system with rapidly declining external financial support.'

Current challenges

The international community is thus faced with four major challenges:

To drastically increase support for basic education within a context of increased support for the education sector and for overall international development assistance.

To ensure that increased financial flows, from the private sector as well as ODA, act as a catalyst for national resource mobilization and sustainable development with due atten-tion to the critical role of basic education.

To strengthen policy coherence and co-ordination of EFA efforts nationally and internationally.

To hold national governments and the international community to their commitment for EFA through care-ful monitoring of the progress towards the goals and tar-gets of EFA.

Summary of progress in financialsupport for EFA

Efforts to mobilize support for EFA among multilateral agencies and bilateral donors bore fruit at the G-8 Summits in Okinawa in 2000 and Genoa in 2001, which strongly endorsed the com-mitment made at Dakar 'that no countries seriously committed to EFA will be thwarted in their achievement of this goal by a lack of resources'.

The Dakar Framework specified six strategies for promotion of the Global Initiative:

1. Increasing external finance for basic education
In view of the drastic decline in international assistance during the 1990s, member countries of OECD, in particular those with large economies, are urged to translate their expressed com-mitments into practice and to provide increased and targeted assistance to countries most in need.

A range of alternative sources for mobilization of international resources must also be considered. These include former aid recipient countries and non-OECD and non-DAC countries; pri-vate investment financing, in particular partnerships among the financial services industry, the state and civil society to pro-mote social development and to link private and public finance with public education; and innovative fund-raising and funding
for EFA on the part of NGOs, private foundations and large-scale corporate foundations.

Special soft terms must be applied for education aid in view of its critical role for poverty reduction and sustainable devel-opment. External lending must be redirected to Education for All from all major intergovernmental and regional devel-opment banks. In the case of the World Bank, lending must be increased both through the soft-loan concessional com-mitments from the International Development Association (IDA) and through non-concessional lending from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

2. Ensuring greater predictability in the flow of external assistance
Predictability depends both upon political will and procedures that take their point of departure in recipient country needs rather than in aid-providing country interests. Predictability also depends on the capacity of the recipient country to absorb and use funding in accordance with nationally defined plans and goals. There is a need to review the conditions for aid provision and to ensure long-term commitments for Education for All from both national governments and inter-national funding and technical assistance agencies. There is also a need to review bottlenecks at the country level related to human and institutional capacity building. An important priority is to ensure predictability in funding for the least developed countries and for regions, for example sub-Saharan Africa.

3. Providing debt relief and/or cancellation for poverty reduction and basic education
It is important to identify innovative financial schemes that can supplement ODA financing. Debt relief and/or cancellation is one mechanism which, together with debt-for-development swaps, have received strong international attention and politi-cal backing. The core notion is that forgiven debt in specific countries would be translated into social development activi-ties, including financial support for EFA. These debt relief mechanisms must be enacted with the utmost urgency. Financing should not be done by diverting funds from already declining ODA.

There is a need to revisit underlying terms of the debt-relief schemes and to ensure that criteria are conditioned in terms of social and human development goals.

Countries must be provided with the necessary technical assistance in order for them to produce a national poverty strategy.

4. Facilitating more effective donor co-ordination
There is a need to ensure consistency in goals and strategies by all actors as a basis to promote holistic national develop-ment processes and to ensure maximum impact of inter-national assistance. Government leadership is essential in this effort at the national level. National EFA Forums, along with sub-regional and regional forums, are further mechanisms to strengthen the movement towards the EFA goals. At the in-ternational level, the Working Group on EFA and the high-level group are important mechanisms to ensure consistency in focus and understanding of the EFA movement. UNESCO's re-cent membership in the United Nations Development Group aims at strengthening the EFA effort across the United Nations institutions.

5. Strengthening sector-wide approaches
These are the best alternatives, or supplements, to the kind of fragmented international project support that characterized international development co-operation in earlier decades. All partners are expected to work within the framework of government programmes which provides an opportunity for national authorities and development partners to be aligned with shared priorities. It also permits the agencies to provide longer term support against well-defined policy objectives and to support reforms through agreed operational commitments and devolving greater authority to national governments con-cerning resource decisions. Lessons and best practices in sector wide approaches must be properly communicated and
shared among all actors.

6. Monitoring progress towards the goals and targets of EFA
Monitoring of progress must be made the responsibility of all partners, nationally, regionally and internationally. It must be an integral part of EFA plans at all levels. It must be based on common output and outcome indicators that cover all aspects of the multi-faceted EFA concept, while allowing for national adaptations. Appropriate education management and infor-mation systems must be set up at the country level, training programmes conducted in developing baseline and other data, and country capacities in general evaluation and monitoring must be strengthened.

Linking EFA action plans with other policy frameworks The Dakar Framework calls for all countries to develop or strengthen existing national plans of action by 2002 at the latest. Building on the findings from the EFA 2000 Assessment, these plans should be elaborated in coherence with national strategies and development plans for alleviation of poverty. The elaboration of the national EFA plan provides an opportunity for countries to improve the internal coher-ence of sectoral and inter-sectoral policies and strategies. Links must also be ensured with international frame-works such as the Common Country Assessment (CCA), the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP). The successful application of sector-wide approaches rests on a number of pre-conditions at both country and agency levels. At the country level, they include longer term macro-economic planning, strong government leadership and effective participation of civil society organizations. They, therefore, often require provision of consolidated technical assistance by the development partners in order to strengthen the human and insti-tutional resource base. The approaches also represent a particular challenge to the EFA movement in terms of adaptation of knowledge on, training in and learning from successful experiences.

The need for efficient spending of funds for EFA
Research over the past decade has also found that education spending is necessary but not sufficient for educational progress. There is wide variance not only in countries' public spending on education (from 2% to 9% of GDP) but in what that spending produces as measured by average years of schooling completed by the population. Niger and Sri Lanka, for example, both spend slightly more than 2% of their GDP on education, but in the one country the student population completes less than two years of schooling, while in the other more than 11 years.

Research shows that a handful of key factors indicate why the effectiveness of education spending varies so much. These are:

- education effort, or level of national resources being devoted to education;
- unit costs, which are heavily driven by the level of teacher salaries relative to GDP per capita, pupil/teacher ratio, and governance;
- student flow efficiency, or repetition and drop-out.

Successful countries are characterized by a powerful combin-ation of relatively high education effort (spending in primary education averaging 2-3% of GDP), reasonable unit costs and relatively low repetition rates. Countries likely to achieve 100% enrolment, but not 80% primary completion, present an inter-mediate but unsatisfactory combination of low spending, low unit costs and low quality.

The strong implication is that countries cannot hope to achieve universal primary access and completion (and, implic-itly, gender equity) unless key parameters of their education system are within reasonable norms of efficiency and their national efforts to invest in education are on a par with those of other countries.