Education for All

Education For All is a global movement led by UNESCO, aiming to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015. ^[1]

UNESCO has been mandated to lead the movement and coordinate the international efforts to reach Education for All. Governments, development agencies, civil society, non-government organizations and the media are but some of the partners working toward reaching these goals.

The EFA goals also contribute to the global pursuit of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially MDG 2 on universal primary education and MDG 3 on gender equality in education, by 2015.

The Fast Track Initiative was set up to implement the EFA movement, aiming at "accelerating progress towards quality universal primary education".

For more information, see UNESCO's Education for All International Coordination website: http://www.unesco.org/en/efa-international-coordination/

UNESCO also produces the annual Education for All Global Monitoring Report. For further information, see UNESCO's website for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report: http://www.unesco.org/en/efareport

World Conference on Education for All (Jomtien, 1990)

The movement was launched in 1990 at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand. There, representatives of the international community (155 countries, as well as representatives from some 150 organizations) agreed to "universalize primary education and massively reduce illiteracy by the end of the decade". From this conference, the World Declaration on Education for All was adopted, which stressed that education is a fundamental human right and pushed countries to strengthen their efforts to improve education in order to ensure the basic learning needs for all were met. The Framework for Action to Meet the Basic Learning Needs established six goals for the year 2000:

• Goal 1: Universal access to learning
• Goal 2: A focus on equity;
• Goal 3: Emphasis on learning outcomes;
• Goal 4: Broadening the means and the scope of basic education
• Goal 5: Enhancing the environment for learning
• Goal 6: Strengthening partnerships by 2000^[2]

[edit]World Education Forum (Dakar, 2000)

In 2000, ten years later, the international community met again at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, an event which drew 1100 participants. The forum took stock of the fact that many countries were far from having reached the goals established at the World Conference on Education for All. The participants agreed on the Dakar Framework for Action which re-affirmed their commitment to achieving Education for All by the year 2015, and identified six key measurable education goals which aim to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015. In addition, the forum reaffirmed UNESCO’s role as the lead organization with the overall responsibility of coordinating other agencies and organizations in the attempts to achieve these goals. The six goals established in The Dakar Framework for Action, Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments are:

• Goal 1: Expand early childhood care and education^[3]
• Goal 2: Provide free and compulsory primary education for all^[4]
• Goal 3: Promote learning and life skills for young people and adults^[5]
• Goal 4: Increase adult literacy by 50 per cent^[6]
• Goal 5: Achieve gender parity by 2005, gender equality by 2015^[7]
• Goal 6: Improve the quality of education^[8]

[edit]Education for All Development Index

In order to evaluate each country's progress with regards to the EFA's goals set in the Dakar Framework for Action, UNESCO has developed the Education for All Development Index (EDI). The EDI measures four of the six EFA goals, selected on the basis of data availability. Each of the four goals is evaluated using a specific indicator, and each of those components is then assigned an equal weight in the overall index.

The EDI value for a given country is thus the arithmetic mean of the four indicators. Since they are all expressed as percentages, the EDI value can vary from 0 to 100% or, when expressed as a ratio, from 0 to 1. The higher the EDI value, the closer the country is to achieving Education For All as a whole.

The four goals measured in the EDI and their corresponding indicators are:

• Goal 1: Expand early childhood care and education - The indicator selected to measure progress towards this goal is the total primary net enrolment ratio (NER), which measures the percentage of primary-school-age children who are enrolled in either primary or secondary school. Its value varies from 0 to 100%. Therefore, a NER of 100% means that all eligible children are enrolled in school.
• Goal 4: Increase adult literacy by 50 per cent - Although existing data on literacy are not entirely satisfactory, the adult literacy rate for those aged 15 and above is used here as a proxy to measure progress.
• Goal 5: Achieve gender parity by 2005, gender equality by 2015: The indicator selected to measure progress towards this goal is the gender-specific EFA index, the GEI, which is itself a simple average of the three gender parity indexes (GPI) for primary education, secondary education and adult literacy, with each being weighted equally. Therefore it encompasses the two sub-goals of the original EFA goal: gender parity (achieving equal participation of girls and boys in primary and secondary education) and gender equality (ensuring that educational equality exists between boys and girls) proxied by the GPI for adult literacy
• Goal 6: Improve the quality of education - The survival rate to Grade 5 was selected for as being the best available proxy for assessing the quality component of EDI, as comparable data are available for a large number of countries.^[9]