Toward Universal Education: Making a Promise, and Keeping It

Gene B. Sperling

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2001

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Summary:  Easy access to quality education would bring developing countries everything from higher wages to lower infant mortality-but it would also require politically costly reforms. A global compact on education is needed to overcome the problem.

Gene B. Sperling is a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.

At the April 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, 180 countries including the United States committed themselves to a simple yet profound goal: providing quality education for all the world's children by 2015. Part of the aim of the Dakar conference was to assess the steps taken since 1990, when most of the same participants had met in Jomtien, Thailand, and promised that all poor children would have access to quality primary education within a decade. So the Dakar declaration was simultaneously an admission of failure and a pledge to try again -- a triumph, as Dr. Johnson once said about second marriages, of hope over experience.

The jury is still out on whether the Dakar pledge will join the Jomtien compact in the crowded graveyard of overly ambitious development goals. It is true that countries and international institutions have exhibited a great deal of energy and continued commitment on the education front. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) recently launched a Girl's Education Initiative with high-level political backing from Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, and Graca Machel, Mandela's wife and a prominent activist for children's rights, education, and development. World Bank President James Wolfensohn has declared that no country with a viable plan for achieving universal education should be allowed to fail for lack of resources, even though World Bank lending for education has declined over the past two years. And the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has continued the Education for All (EFA) initiative renewed at Dakar with follow-up meetings at the national and global levels.

This activity has been spurred by a growing body of research showing that investment in education -- particularly for girls -- in the world's poorest countries produces impressive health benefits and high economic returns. Education boosts family income, and female education in particular leads to smaller, healthier families by lowering infant and maternal mortality and improving child nutrition. In Africa, a child born to an uneducated mother faces a 20 percent chance of dying before the age of five, whereas the risk for a child whose mother has attended at least five years of school drops to 12 percent. In Brazil, illiterate women have, on average, six children each; literate mothers average between two and three. Indeed, a 1995 study of 72 countries found that "the expansion of female secondary education may be the single best lever for achieving substantial reductions in fertility." Recent research on aids prevention in the urban areas of Zambia suggested that teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 who had received at least a medium level of education had a lower incidence of the aids virus than did their less-educated counterparts. And schools provide an important vehicle for delivering vaccines, medicines, vitamins, and meals.

Studies suggest that every additional year of schooling can increase the wages of workers in poor nations by 10 to 20 percent. In this way, completing basic education can produce significant gains in income. But as ambitious as it ...

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