World Food Security
An important complementary...
An important complementary resolution adopted at the WEF was that governments and international agencies should be held accountable for progress towards achieving these educational goals. For this purpose, UNESCO instituted an annual series of EFA Global Monitoring Reports starting in 2002.
These reports are written by an independent international team based in UNESCO, supported by UNECSO staff and drawing from UNESCO's Institute for Statistics and commissioned studies by researchers and institutes around the world. Of the four reports so far published in the series: the first assesses whether the world is on track to meet the educational MDGs (UNESCO, 2002), the second examines the question of gender disparity in education (UNESCO, 2004), the third looks at the important question of the quality of education (UNESCO, 2005) and the fourth focuses on literacy for life (UNESCO, 2006).
According to these reports, `steady progress' has been made since 1998, especially towards UPE and gender parity among the poorest countries but the overall conclusion is that `the pace is insufficient' for the educational MDGs to be met by 2015. There have been some encouraging trends that show considerable achievements in many low-income countries. Primary school enrolment is up sharply in both sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia, with nearly 20 million new students in each region.
Some 47 countries out of 163 for which data are available have achieved UPE, and another 90 are on track to achieve UPE by 2015: 44 countries are making good progress but are unlikely to achieve the goal. Enrolment of girls in primary schools has risen rapidly in some low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia.
Gender and quality goals are increasingly more visible in national educational plans of developing countries, where public expenditure on education has increased as a share of national income in about 70 countries out of the 110 countries with available data. And aid for basic education more than doubled between 1999 and 2003 and could rise further to $3.3 billion a year by 2010 following commitments made by major donors at the G8 summits.
What is called the Fast Track Initiative (FTI) has emerged as a key co-ordinating mechanism for aid agencies. The FTI was established by the Development Committee of the IMF and World Bank in 2002 to accelerate progress towards universal completion of quality primary education by 2015. It is supported by a partnership of all the major education donors and UNESCO, UNICEF and the regional development banks. But by mid-2005, the FTI had resulted in pledged of only $298 million, well below what is required.
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