International Development: Universal Primary Education

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friend Lady Verma to the Dispatch Box and thank her for the opportunity to discuss this issue.

On a day when we have learnt of the gravity of the economic situation facing our country it would be too easy to concentrate on matters at home and the consequences for families up and down this country. However, it is a mark of a civilised people to recognise the bonds of a common humanity which transcends national borders to reach out to people in distant places. Looking at the challenges those people face in attaining fulfilment of their most basic rights is sobering indeed and will bring balance to our deliberations today. It is a brave and morally upright position for this Government to have maintained their commitment to meeting the UN target when so many other rich countries have not. It is a measure of this country’s intrinsic liberal internationalism that we do not forget those further away from our shores.

It is, of course, also a tribute to the previous Labour Government that we have achieved so much in lifting others out of poverty and made such a significant contribution towards the millennium development goals. There has been substantial progress across the board in the early years but the global economic crisis imperils many of the objectives in the period that we have now entered.

Before I move to that scenario, I want to concentrate on what has been achieved in the all-important area of primary education. In determining this goal in 2000, Governments were clear about the overlapping benefits to accrue from education overall. In countries which live in peace and security, it is an essential component of development. It undoubtedly lifts individuals out of poverty and increases their life chances. For girls, it increases their economic participation, improves their own and their children’s health outcomes and reduces their family size based on informed choices and consent. They are, quite simply, empowered individuals because of access to literacy and, hence, information. Education results in true sustainability as future generations will benefit from today’s investment.

In the developed world, universal and compulsory primary education has laid the foundations for secondary and tertiary education, which is now taken for granted by 40 per cent to 50 per cent of young adults. It is a legacy that has been built on by successive generations for more than 100 years. However, there are still large sections of the globe where it is only recently that children have had near-universal access to primary education. According to the latest UN MDG report in 2009, in developing countries overall enrolment had reached 88 per cent by 2007. Improvements were most striking in sub-Saharan Africa, where enrolment rose by 15 per cent in the period since 2000, and in southern Asia by 11 per cent. Hence the number of children of primary school age who are out of school has dropped by 33 million since 1999.

Nevertheless, despite these gains, statistics can tell the other side of the story as well. It now appears that challenges remain whereby we will not be able to meet the target of ensuring that by 2015 children are able to complete a full course of primary schooling. Even in 2007, 72 million children were denied the right to education, of whom nearly half live in sub-Saharan Africa and 18 million in southern Asia. UNESCO figures show that 29 million children will still be out of school in 2015—29 million too many.

The factors leading to this are several, and I will touch on just three: the reduction in donor support in the period ahead, the gender gap in education and the situation in the poorest conflict-affected fragile states. Financial support for attaining this MDG was always viewed as insufficient for the scale of the problem. Not only did it require investment in infrastructure for the poorest rural areas, where schools simply do not exist, it also required capacity-building in terms of teachers trained to adequate levels with adequate teaching aids and resources. Furthermore, the greatest barrier, that of school fees and other indirect costs, reduces enrolment. In some less-developed countries, children in the poorest 20 per cent of the population are three times less likely to be enrolled in primary school than children from the wealthiest 20 per cent.

Several countries have made progress in eliminating school fees, most notably India last year, which passed legislation to provide free and compulsory education for six to 14 year-olds, thereby aiming to lift millions of children out of illiteracy in the next decade alone. Among sub-Saharan countries going down a similar route, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia have also moved to provide free education at primary level and there are others still in the pipeline. Nevertheless, the situation in conflict-affected fragile states is still dire and several streams of donor funding are simply unavailable to these countries due to their fragile governance arrangements. It becomes, therefore, a Catch-22 situation. The greatest need requires greater risk-taking on the part of donors and their accountability mechanisms militate against taking risks.

The impact of the global economic crisis should also not be underestimated in the period going forward. We know from UNDP figures that when oil prices increased in 2007-08 that was accompanied by higher food prices due to increased consumption in the more affluent parts of still developing countries such as China and India. The combination of the price of oil and food had an indirect impact on accessing primary education. With fiscal consolidation and reductions in the economic growth, it is inevitable that even in those countries aiming to achieve the target of 0.7 per cent of GNI the figure will fall in absolute terms as their economies shrink. The cake, in effect, will become smaller still. Does DfID have contingency reserves specifically dedicated to this possibility and will it be able to plug the gap in any meaningful way?

Gender inequality in south Asia and the Middle East is also of great concern. At the midway point in measuring progress toward this MDG in 2007, it was found that the target to reduce gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 had already been missed. Several aspects affect the completion of primary education. In the case of girls, culture has a significant impact as well as geographical location, and rural communities have greater disparities than urban areas. It is also the case that social and economic constraints impact on girls disproportionately and that families and societies give a lower priority to girls’ education. This is when the importance of making primary education not just free but compulsory comes in. In Muslim countries, where this problem is particularly acute, waiting for cultural change will take too long and is of itself a by-product of education. One cannot come until we have achieved the other. This is when compulsion becomes necessary. We should welcome India’s move to make free education additionally compulsory so that all parents have to comply with the law irrespective of religion or values. Implementing that will be expensive; the estimates for India are $40 billion alone for the first tranche of children to go through school.

While the gender disparity figures for enrolment are improving slowly, the staying on and completion rates are not promising and the drop-out rates for girls, which is significantly higher than for boys, is worrying, with the resultant impact on secondary education as well. In sub-Saharan Africa, the ratio of girls’ to boys’ enrolment in secondary education actually fell from 82 per cent in 1999 to 79 per cent in 2007. Overall, only 60 per cent of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education, with a mere 30 per cent achieving it for secondary education. This gender gap is replicated through tertiary education, in stark contrast to the developed world, where women outnumber men in higher education.

I turn to the situation in conflict-afflicted, fragile states. Displacement is a major factor, with the average period in a conflict calculated to be some 10 years—in other words, potentially the entire period that a girl or a boy would spend in education. Hence millions of these children do not even have basic literacy. Therefore, there is a pressing need for the donor countries’ humanitarian aid policy to be revisited. Currently, the 2008 humanitarian consensus action plan does not even mention education, which is seen primarily as a development activity. What priority are this Government likely to give to education in conflict situations? We have amassed some considerable skill in this area in Afghanistan, and perhaps we need to build on this best practice to replicate elsewhere.

Finally, I draw the House’s attention to the critical recent report of the National Audit Office, which found that since 2001 funds spent by DfID have meant a positive contribution towards achieving this MDG, but it has not improved the quality of education or reduced drop-out rates. Its report recommends that funding should be better targeted towards improving people attendance and attainment—in other words, to deliver a more sustainable educational outcome.

We welcome the DfID review recently announced of bilateral aid. In seeking value for money, considering countries such as China for partnership agreements in this area may need revisiting. Such countries have growth rates and the ability to lift their people so dramatically out of poverty at a very different scale to those poorest and fragile states in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

This is a critical time for the world economy. The resilience of the developed world has been tested in the past three years and it has, on the whole, risen to that challenge. It has had the human capital and resources to do so. However, the poorest countries in the developing world do not have these levels of resilience, as we have seen from the rise in small-state conflicts. It is imperative that this country, the European Union and other developed countries rise to the challenge of international solidarity by meeting in full their obligations for these MDGs.