Universal primary education by 2015? Not without some innovative financing | Kevin Watkins

The MDGs promised education for all, but to avoid the failure of the most disadvantaged children in the world, we need a global fund

walk through the maze of alleys and shacks of corrugated cardboard in the sprawling slum of Kibera, Nairobi, and you get an idea of ??the power of education.

In a resolution of about 1 million people is a public school, just to see. Deprived of their right to free public education, some of the poorest in the world have to pay for the privilege of sending their children to private schools without trained teachers, books, pencils, water and sanitation.

Kidongo Mary, a single mother with four children, has certainly worth the sacrifice. Do two jobs can be kept close to two children to school. One of them, David, 12, has no doubts about the value of education. "If I can make it through elementary school, my future will be better. Maybe I can become a doctor. "

He helped his mother pay school fees - about $ 3 a month - to work for six hours a day by selling coal in the local market. His greatest fear is that going to have to leave school as his older brother and sister.

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poorest countries in the world, desperately poor parents struggle to get their children an education that will help them escape poverty. They know that learning provides an avenue to greater income and opportunities for expansion - and so do their children. If only governments around the world share their sense of purpose and ambition. They undertook, as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of universal primary education by 2015, the international community effectively shrugged, turned and broke a promise to the world's children.

The global crisis of education

is not the headlines. No children go hungry because of lack of classrooms and textbooks. And financial markets are not recorded figures bad news for children in school.

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tell a part of history. In the midst of our increasingly interconnected world and knowledge-based economy, there are 67 million school-age children not attending school, with a greater number of adolescents. Millions more to start school but drop out before obtaining literacy and numeracy needed to escape poverty.

Now the bad news. After a rapid decline in the first half of the last decade, progress in reducing the school number has stagnated. According to UNESCO, we are faced with the prospect of having more children out of school in 2015, we have today. It is difficult to imagine a more telling indictment of governments that have signed up for the MDGs with such solemnity.

To make matters worse, there is a body of collecting survey data highlighting the impressive quality of education that affect millions of children. One study found in rural areas of Pakistan (pdf) which, after three years of schooling, half the children were unable to write a sentence with the word "school".

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inequalities in education are disparities in the morning trade, income and employment. Bridging the act as a catalyst for growth and poverty reduction. Get all the schools for girls in Africa could prevent 1.8 million deaths per year.

So what went wrong? Part of the problem can be attributed to the interaction between educational disadvantage and poverty. Achieve universal primary education means breaking the difficulties that the forces of 115 million children in school and the labor market. This means that public attitudes towards sex that result in more than 6 million more girls out of school than boys. And that means the design of policies that expand opportunities for hard to reach, such as those living in rural areas and slums like Kibera.

Reviving the progress towards the MDGs requires a much stronger commitment to equity by the governments of these countries. Progress in the last decade in countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Bangladesh shows that poverty should not be an obstacle to education. But political leaders must demonstrate a commitment to reach those who stayed behind.

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