Overview of EFA 2000 Assessment in the Asian Pacific Region
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is my task today to present you with a brief overview and synthesis of the 42 country EFA 2000 Assessment Reports that you have worked so hard to prepare. It is a daunting task, given the complexity and incredible variety of the countries represented in this room. I will nevertheless try to present you with the general trends; drawing from the country reports, and from the sub-regional synthesis reports we prepared for each of our four sub regions: Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus, South and West Asia, East and Southeast Asia , and the Pacific.
This overview will touch generally on the main quantitative trends but will also discuss qualitative considerations. Reflecting the approach of the reports themselves, this presentation will look not only at what has happened in the past ten years, but also at what the trends and points of emphasis are likely to be in the future.
As you will recall, one of the main messages of Jomtien was that Education for All was concerned, not with just primary schooling, but with six dimensions, namely early childhood, primary education, adult literacy, education for quality of life, learning achievement, and skills training.
For each of these six dimensions, the country and sub-regional reports present a mixed picture of good news and bad news. Lets us look at each of those dimensions.
With regards to primary education, the good news is that participation in primary schooling has grown appreciably, outpacing the population growth rate of the school age cohort. Total primary school enrolment for 2000 will approach 400 million for the region as a whole, compared to 331 million enrolled in 1990. this represent an average annual growth rate much higher than 1.4% population growth rate.
The bad news is that national reports on the positive increases in primary schooling enrolment often inadvertently cover up the increasing disparity of access with in the country. The least assessment excise gives to us this time reliable data at sub-national levels, disaggregated by gender, and by urban-rural categories. In many of the larger countries, internal disparities paint an alarming picture: rural areas geographically remote communities, ethnic minorities, the less advantage in general register slower or no progress as compared to the more accessible target populations; the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The gender gap in countries where is a major problem has not appreciably narrowed, in spite of major efforts and project designed to improve this situation.
The drive for increased enrolment my have narrowed rather than broadened the vision of education for all, so that alternative channels, non-formal and literacy programmes, multi-channel initiatives, community empowerment and skills training, in short the other dimensions of Education for All, may have taken a back seat in education priorities.
Even within the dimension of universal primary education, a focus on expanding capacity may have distorted resources allocation from support for quality and retention measures. With the benefit of hindsight, many countries now recognize that resources may well have been better spent improving the holding power of school, reducing repetition and dropouts, rather than merely adding to the infrastructure of a system whose internal efficiency allows massive wastage in terms of too many children dropping out after a few years. Empirical data supports this; several countries in Southeast Asia , for example have registered creditable progress in expanded enrollments without registering appreciable improvement in high dropout and repetition rate.
As regards the second dimensions, early childhood care and education, though smaller and at an earlier stage of development, this sub-sector registered an even more impressive growth rate over the past decade, in all sub-regions except for the Central Asian state, where central financing for early childhood programs was one of the victims of the process of transformation to a market driven economy. Enrolment in early childhood programmes was 30 millions in 1990, and it now reaches an estimated 47 millions in 1999, an average increase of almost 50%. Encouragingly, this expansion has been enhanced by an increase in community support, a phenomenon that other sub-sector of EFA ca learn from. However, problems on this front also remain. Early childhood is urban biased, teacher are generally poorly trained, current systems demonstrate poor sustainability (party because they are generally dependent on local resources) and not enough data is available.
The third dimension is learning achievement and the assessment of it. This dimension has become the focus of renewed priority in many countries in the region. The concern for quality has driven policy reform and project activities in the areas of curriculum reform, teacher training, textbook revisions, and reorientation of testing procedures.
The concern for the quality of learning is no doubt laudable, although how that is defined, how universal standards and learning needs are balance with local and community needs, hot to allocate resources to the carious quality inputs of textbooks, teacher training, etc. must be subject of continuous scrutiny. Many country efforts towards the measurement or assessment of this learning achievement are likewise welcome, but again there is the danger of misusing assessment instrument; they must constantly be guided by the original purposes for which they are intended: as diagnostic tools to evaluate the system, rather than the individual student. Already is a few countries there is a slide towards the use of test for credentialing and limiting access to basic education.
The rates for adult literacy, the fourth dimension, have increased in almost all countries. Although the different rates of success in this areas among different countries, as well as the different ways of measuring this success make it difficult to generalize about a consistent pattern of improvement in this dimension. There has been more focus on fictional literacy and the number of community learning centers has increased. For Asia in general, the adult literacy rate is currently 73%, just a slight increase compared to 1995. In Asia, the lowest adult literacy rate is in South Asia , with just above 50%. More worrying is the uneven growth, and the insufficient resources devoted to and low status accorded to adult literacy. Where success has been noted, there is a clear shift in the understanding of literacy, not as an end in itself, but as a tool for empowerment, for skills development for agricultural productivity, employment, or entrepreneurship, or as a vehicle for nutrition, sanitation and other health messages - always sustained by some sort of post-literacy programmed.
The uneven record of literacy programmes in this region pint to this dimension as one where great potentials for future improvement exist. Not all countries seem to have recognized this dimension as critical to the Education for All vision. Those countries that have reported success in this area have been characterized by government mechanisms especially for literacy and adult education, adequately financed and staffed with dynamic and credible leadership. Often policy measures in these countries have engendered an atmosphere in which volunteerism, NGO involvement, and literacy programmes and their corresponding benefits, it can be said that a specific recommendation that emerges from the analysis of the data is that countries should allocate a proportionately larger percentage of their basic education budgets to this dimension, and provided this sub-sector with the dynamic leadership and institutionalized frameworks that it deserves.
Perhaps because the EFA indicator and the accompanying technical guidelines provided to the countries were skewed in favor of quantitative measures for the EFA dimension, country reports were sketchy on their progress in the fifth and six dimensions, i.e. skills training for the youth and adults, and multi-channel information education for a society's learning needs. Precisely because these dimensions are harder to assess, greater emphasis rather than less emphasis should be given to them in future assessments.
Aside from giving us a picture of progress in the above six dimension, the country reports also described the situation with regards to two enabling conditions for any progress in Education for All: management and information systems, and financial resources.
The state of education management information system (EMIS) in many countries, and national capacities for mounting, sustaining, analyzing and benefiting from these have vastly improved over the past few years. The very exercise of serious engagement in the EFA assessment exercise that is culminating today was in small contributory to this.
Although much progress has been made in EMIS, much remains to be done. The advent of new technologies now makes EMIS no longer just the concern of statisticians at the central level; educational mangers at all level of the educational hierarchy can and must now be intimately involved in the gathering, and more importantly, the analytical use of data. On the one hand, the use of a reliable information system is more important then ever, especially in situation of fundamental reform such as in much of Central Asia . At the same time, countries must allow quantitative considerations from becoming the exclusive criteria for prioritizing and decision making. The neglect of the two dimensions of EFA, and the relatively low priority given to non-formal avenues of education arise precisely from the tendency to focus on areas where data and information are more easily available.
Financial resources made available from national budgets for basic education have increased substantially by about 80% on the average, in the ten year since Jomtien. It is to be noted, however, that growth patterns were more marked, in the first five years than in the last five years under review; there has been a tendency to level off the extent of support for basic education in recent budget cycles. And this increase has been normal rather than real, and often disguises a decrease in real terms, or a decrease in the effective percentage of national budgets devoted to basic education. Education budgets may have increased, but budgets in total increased at a faster rate, meaning other sectors grew more, and inflation increases in may cases (even where a monetary crisis did not occur) overtook education budget increases. Although growth in real terms was noted in the first half of the decade of the nineties, a general leveling off was observed in the second half, and the carious external factors affecting budgets in the last year or two do not bode well for even keeping the same real shares of budget in years to come unless concerted advocacy, public awareness, and political will is brought to bear on this issue.
The average annual amount of international assistance for basic education to complement national resources has in recent year increased from $3.8 billion in 1985 to 6 billion in 1990, and to $7.4 billion in 1995. But the dramatic increase in availability of international resources for basic assistance has come mostly from development banks, rather than from bilateral or multilateral resources. Theses are loans, rather than grants, and the long-term implication of these two types of assistance are substantially different. As accompanying reports shows, the bi-lateral donor community manifested a shift in their project priorities in favor of basic education, and net resources to that sub-sector started to grow, but it leveled off too soon and in fact has once again started to decline. This is unfortunate, as most of the donor, with the exception of the Nordic state, have fallen far short of their commonly started goal of 0.7 of GNP for overseas development assistance, of the goal of 20% for the social development sector, or a significant portion of the for the basic education sector. Sadly, the picture is not much brighter from the multi-lateral donor community. Due to changes in leadership, competing, forthcoming in increased allocations for basic education.
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This presentation would not be complete without highlighting the challenges likely to be articulated by the Dakar Forum. Having looked at the behind, and reports of what has taken place in the past, it is now necessary to look at the ahead, the renewed efforts that have to be undertaken, the new directions that have to be explored, the new shift in thinking that have to be reinforced.
The lessons of the past reminds us that there should be several shift of emphasis: from enrolment to achievement; from schooling to learning; from education for children to education for all, including the pre-school child, youth, adults, and people with special needs; from looking at education as a ministry responsibility to looking at it as a responsibility of all sectors of society.
Hard economics realities remind us that there should be a shift from merely looking for more resources to finding better and new creative ways to use resources. And because resources will continue to be limited and cannot hope to keep pace with the rapid growth in demand for EFA, one must look for new and more cost efficient ways of reaching EFA goals. Our analysis of the past ten year has shown that indeed the world was mobilized to pay priority attention to EFA; indeed many more resources and project were brought to bear on basic education. But the result have not been commensurate with the efforts and the resources used; illiteracy, gender gaps, unreached groups continues to persist. Clearly the time has come to be more analytical about what we choose to continue doing and what we choose to do in the future.
A specific example is the alarming conclusion from the analysis of country date which shows that, in the case of primary schooling targets, objective and even quantitative targets explicitly set forth by many governments will be simply unattainable in the medium term by the sheer momentum of existing parameters. Simple projection show that the growth rate (and hopefully more successful retention rate) of school age cohort populations will in the medium term capacity to provide adequate places. Arbitrary setting of percentages as goals will not result in achieving them; wishful thinking will not suffice. If universal primary education is to be met only one of the following alternative is possible:
• National budgets must introduce dramatic quantum leaps in allocation to primary education, doubling or even tripling this allocation over a few years.
• The responsibility for financing primary education must shift, with all its pitfalls, to communities, the private sector, religious groups, NGOs, or parents.
• Non-formal education programmes will have to be designed to assume a greater and more integral role in the public education system.
• A breakthrough in the design of a primary school delivery system must take place that effectively brings the cost per student down to a fraction of its current cost.
It is evident that, not only in this particular case but also in the analysis of other aspect of EFA, it is not enough to do more of the same. It is not enough to do things better, one has to do better things, find different ways to achieve the same goals. It is a daunting task, but not an impossible one. The seeds of such innovations are already in the system; it is a question of systematically finding them, nurturing them a bringing then to flower. It is a question of using the promise of all sorts of new technologies. It is matter, more then ever trapping into the commitment, dedication, and creativity of education policy makers school managers, teachers, and learners themselves.
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Ten years ago, I had the privilege of being at Jomtien, where I witnessed 155 government and dozens of agencies and organization declare to the world that Education for All was important, indeed necessary, as a building block for all social and economic development, and as a pre-condition to tackling the world's problems of environment, gender equity, population, ethic strife and many others. I listened as these governments and agencies pledged to broaden their vision and to accelerate progress towards Education for All.
Four years ago, in Amman , Jordan , I participated in preparing a report to measure the promised progress. We noted with concern that the broadened vision had narrowed somewhere to schooling for all and that data needed for a more accurate tracking of progress in EFA needed more a more rigorous and timely methodology. We registered with satisfaction, however, that we had arrested the declining trend in resources and attention for EFA, turned to corner, and made real progress. Though disparities persisted; primary schooling rates had gone up. National budgets for basic education had gone up significantly, and international resources from grants and loans had multiplied. We proved to the world that Education for all was not an idle dream, but a real possibility.
Today we are gathered to once again assess our progress, this time with sophisticated methodologies and more thorough country level efforts than four year ago. The result of your assessment efforts over the last year or so have indicate that indeed the visions for Education for All has finally started to broaden late in some instances, than before.
But you have also noted a slowing down in the progress and in growth of resources and projects put at the disposal EFA. You have noted that new challenges that were not possible to anticipate ten years ago are now facing the EFA task; social and political transformations in Central Asia, economic crisis scenarios in Southeast Asia , the boom in information and communication technology everywhere, and the upsurge of ethic unrest and imbalance in far too many places.
Clearly although much has been done, much remain to be done. But time waits for no one. Asia's out-for-school children and unreached youth and adults, whose basic human right to education we are denying with each passing day; will not wait for us. They will not wait for our management reforms to be completed, for our statistics to be more accurate, for the true potential of NGOs to be brought to full flower, for governments to finally recognize and institutionalize the innovations within their own countries which are the seeds of the needed paradigm shift their systems so desperately need. These children will grow day by day, these youth and adults will march rapidly into the ever more complex world of tomorrow as quickly as we have just entered in to the new millennium. We can waste no time in accelerating out progress and finding new and effective ways attaining Education for all.
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In Jomtien, we declared to the world that Education for All was vitally important, indeed necessary. In Amman , we proved to the world, that Education for all was not only necessary, it was also possible. Today, in Bangkok , let us proclaim to the worlds with all our might, the Education for All is not only necessary, not only possible, it is also urgent.
