Keeping kids at school: Millennium Development Goal ‘at risk’

The principle that no child should be deprived of an education has been extolled as an essential development goal for decades. Yet, according to one new study launched this week, major hurdles remain to its fulfilment.

Governments first formally committed to universal primary education (UPE) at the United Nations in 1960, setting a deadline of 1980 for its achievement. By 1999, the ambition proving ever elusive, leaders vowed to make it a Millennium Development Goal to be met by 2015.

But, according to one of the authors of the new Commonwealth Secretariat study, ‘Maintaining Universal Primary Education: Lessons from Commonwealth Africa’ - launched this week at a major international conference on education and development - as many as “70 nations” remain likely to fall short.

“There has been huge progress,” says Professor Lalage Bown, co-author and academic from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, “but not sufficient enough to enable many countries to achieve it by 2015.”

Achieving universal primary education

“For most people living in the modern world if you don’t have at least some basic education you become a non-citizen,” she continues. “Without practical knowledge of basic literacy and numeracy you are not able to really participate in your own society.

“If you are not in school you are not able to contribute to the economy or to civic activities effectively. One hundred and fifty years ago this wouldn’t have mattered so much as only a minority had an education. Today it is extremely disempowering to the individuals and a drag on the resources of a country.”

The study, which looked at UPE efforts in five African countries - Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia - illustrates how these countries have tried to move towards UPE, and how they hope to sustain it.

It found that the challenges of achieving, and maintaining, universal primary education are multi-fold. As well as overcoming cultural attitudes, such as those which undervalue the value of education for girls, policy-makers face significant resource constraints.

Abolishing fees and improving schools

Factors such as distance, quality of teaching and building quality all affect a parent’s likelihood to not just enrol their children, but to keep sending them to school over successive years, explains Professor Bown.

Many governments face such high rates of population growth that need outstrips supply of schools and teachers, she says. When teachers are faced with crumbling classrooms of 100 or more students, parents question the utility of their child’s education.

Professor Lalage Bown

“Parents are much more likely to send and keep their children in school if they are getting something good out of it. If they are in ramshackle, dirty, old buildings they are not very keen. In many countries schools are dingy and those which originally were quite well-built are deteriorating.”

Guidelines for leaders and policy-makers

In their study, which was completed as a collaborative project between ten researchers from the Council for Education in the Commonwealth and the UK’s University of Sussex - and published by the Commonwealth Secretariat - the authors found that countries which had abolished education fees saw a dramatic rise in the number of children turning up for school.

“It is another incentive,” says Professor Bown. “In one or two countries, Kenya and Ghana [which abolished fees], there was a more than expected rise in the number of children attending school.”

Florence Malinga, Education Adviser at the Secretariat, speaking ahead of the study’s launch this week, stated that the study is set to be distributed to ministries of education around the Commonwealth in coming months.

She said: “The experiences of these country case studies will be useful in suggesting guidelines for political leaders and education policy-makers and planners on what direction to take, what challenges to anticipate and what to avoid.”

The study is being launched at the International Conference on Education and Development, organised by the United Kingdom Forum for International Education and Training, in Oxford, UK.

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