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Education
Formal Primary Education:
Education for All
"Education for All" is the ambitious goal that the international community has set itself. In the Dakar Framework for Action and the Millennium Declaration it has committed itself to achievng universal access to formal primary education for all children by 2015.
Around the world, some 75 million children – more than half of them girls – currently do not attend school. In order to achieve the goal of universal primary education, the World Bank launched the Education for All – Fast Track Initiative (FTI), which involves, among others, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), all the G8 countries and the European Commission. The initiative provides additional facilities, expertise and funding to assist recipient developing countries to introduce universal primary education.
The developing countries participating in the FTI must have prepared a comprehensive Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper as the basis for an education development plan. This plan must aim to introduce free and compulsory primary education for all children by 2015 and abolish gender disparities in primary and secondary education.
Germany's contribution to the FTI
Germany's contribution to the FTI is focused mainly on those countries in which the promotion of primary education is already an agreed priority area of development cooperation: Mozambique, Guinea, Honduras, Yemen and Tajikistan. Notable successes are already being achieved in Mozambique. In order to visibly improve enrolment rates, 20 million euros in extrabudgetary funding was pledged towards primary education during recent government negotiations with Mozambique, for instance. The primary education programmes will also be coordinated with other funding measures in the education sector, especially vocational training programmes, in order to ensure that as many young people as possible are able to undertake training after completing their basic schooling.
Outside the FTI framework, primary education is a priority in German cooperation with Guatemala, Kosovo, Malawi, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
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