Promoting education – an international concern

Until the end of the 1980s, developing and donor countries viewed the promotion of basic education as a national issue, to be managed from the country's own resources. It had very low priority in development cooperation. However, the critical situation in the education sector in most developing countries forced a rethink: school enrolment rates had fallen to almost one third by the end of the 1980s in some developing countries, and around 50 percent of children were breaking off their education during the first four years of primary school. The number of illiterate adults hovered at around one billion.

World Conference on Education for All

UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme were determined to draw attention to the need for more support. In 1990, they organised the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand. In the World Declaration on Education for All, they set out a number of education objectives, including universal primary education for all school-age children by 2000. They also pledged to halve adult illiteracy by the same date, measured against the 1990 baseline. These targets were not achieved.

Follow-up conferences

In 2000, the 1990 objectives were reaffirmed at the World Education Forum in Dakar and a new deadline - 2015 - was set. The Millennium Declaration also reaffirmed the goal of universal primary education by 2015. The educational objectives defined in the Millennium Declaration are identical to those contained in the Dakar Framework for Action.

These objectives were reaffirmed at other international conferences as well. The Five-Year Review of the Fourth World Conference on Women in New York in 2000 underlined the importance of education for women. The G8 Summits in Genoa in 2001 and in Kananaskis, Canada, in 2002 emphasised the role of education as a central building block for democracy, higher living standards, peace and development. The World Summit for Children in New York in May 2002 called for all children of the world to have access to free and compulsory primary education of good quality. And the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002 reaffirmed the educational objectives of the Millennium Development Goals. The participants also recommended that the United Nations consider adopting a decade of education for sustainable development. The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development for the period 2005-2014. Its purpose is to drive forward the international community's educational objectives.

Education is now recognised as a public good which must be promoted. The international community agrees that human development is impossible without education. Promoting education is therefore one of the key objectives of international development.