Abstract
The Education for All (EFA) movement is a global movement committed to providing quality basic education for all children, youth and adults. The movement stemmed from concerns voiced by UNESCO, UNICEF and developing countries about the growing number of children, youth and adults whose right to even the most basic education was being denied. Education was not keeping pace with population growth. Education and health, the key areas for development, suffered badly from the savage reduction in resources available to developing countries during the economic crisis of the 1980s, particularly in the context of structural adjustment policies. Crippled by debt repayments and plunging export commodity prices, developing countries were forced to slash their education budgets. Spending on education per inhabitant fell by 65 % in Sub-Saharan Africa and by 40 % in Latin America between 1980 and 1987 (Samoff J, Coping with crisis: austerity, adjustment and human resources. Cassell, London, 1994). Paradoxically, as poverty increased in the world’s poorest countries, official development aid fell from nearly $80 billion a year in 1985 to around $65 billion in the early 1990s. Whatever was happening to the peace dividend expected to flow from reductions in arms expenditures at the end of the Cold War, it was not being invested in reducing poverty or in education.
The struggle to ensure that all people have access to education is our mission, our vision, our dream.
(Colin Power)
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Notes
- 1.
UNFPA joined as the fifth UN sponsoring agency after the Conference.
- 2.
The broad view of education for all prevailed during the 1990s, and was endorsed at the World Education Forum at Dakar in 2000. But the battle continued. At the World Development Summit in 2000, the only Millennium Development Goal relating to education was that of achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015. Once more, EFA = UPE, and the rights of very young children, youth and adults were ignored.
- 3.
For example, I helped in the development of India’s District Primary Education Programme and in supporting its efforts to secure the $800 million needed to implement the programme throughout India.
- 4.
Francesco Zanuttinni and the Documentation and Information Service of the Education Sector of UNESCO did an outstanding job, handling over 20,000 requests for information, producing and distributing, on average, 30,000 documents per month during the 1990s.
- 5.
UNESCO Education Sector has a budget of around $100 million p.a. of which roughly half comes from extra-budgetary sources to fund operational projects at the national level. Regular programme funds cover international and regional co-operation in education, staff and operational costs, and grants to UNESCO’s education Institutes.
- 6.
For example, the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1979.
- 7.
Although UK was not a Member State of UNESCO, we maintained a close working relationship with several UK universities, especially the Institute of Education, Edinburgh, Leeds, Sussex and the Open University.
- 8.
The “glass-ceiling index” was created (Economist March 8–14, 2014) to show where women in developed countries have the greatest chances of equal treatment at work and in education. The data indicate that gender equity is highest in the Nordic countries, but that Asian countries have a long way to go.
- 9.
Extracts from my keynote address at LETA Conference, Adelaide, September, 1994.
- 10.
Information about rehabilitation and education programmes for street children supported by UNESCO can be found in UNESCO-ICCB Working with Street Children, 1995, and Velis, J-P., Blossoms in the Dust: Street Children in Africa, UNESCO Publishing 1995.
- 11.
Examples include China, India, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda and the countries now being targeted by the Global Alliance for Education, all of which have made significance progress towards meeting their EFA targets.
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Power, C. (2015). Education for All – A Quiet Revolution. In: The Power of Education. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 27. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-221-0_4
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