The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meets in New York every year, and global leaders bang the drum, commit to change and roll out new policies. Over time, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) replaced the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the communal goals such as reducing poverty, aiding refugees and improving education outcomes, particularly for girls.
Yet, in many communities, cultural, economic or religious context can hamper their successful pursuit. These barriers damage prosperity and growth for our interconnected world.
Many of the goals are interlinked and progress in one has implications for another. Therefore, it is worrying – both in and of itself and for its causal effects – that the latest UN education report reveals that the number of girls out of school increased by six per cent over just one year (2015/16). The general public’s impression was that the global community is getting closer to achieving the goals, not falling further behind.
Over 600 million children and adolescents are currently being failed either because they are not in school or because they are in schools but not learning. It is challenging. For the 330 million in a ‘school’ who are not learning, it’s absolutely clear that a good school is far more than a just a building.
Yet, in many areas, even having a school building is a hurdle to overcome. In some places, children are not in school because there are none. In large urban slums such as Lagos or Nairobi there are simply not enough government schools for the population; in areas where refugees are seeking safety, there are often no schools to begin with. In such places, even the creation of enough government schools in their most physical sense is a challenge. However, it is only by tackling the inadequacy of learning that happens within the walls of classrooms that have been constructed, and those that need to be, that meaningful progress will be made for the 600 million.
It is only recently that we’ve seen a shift from access to outcomes as the benchmarks of successful intervention. When education inequality doubles, chances of conflict more than doubles. Education drives economic growth and enables people to break the cycle of poverty; diminishing the likelihood of conflict and the appeal of radical ideologies and extremist groups. As the late UN General Secretary Kofi Annan said: “Education is the promise of progress, in every society, in every family.”
An urgent coalescence is needed around the importance of actual provision of quality education to every child -- one that prioritises immediate, measured results that deliver on reducing inequity and increasing children’s learning, rather than getting lost in debate over parent choice or the tax status of education service organisations. Given the critical importance to the prosperity of the world of ensuring the delivery of every child’s right to education, we need robust debate on core education policy frameworks. That debate should be evidence-based and recognise the dignity of parents and children as active decision-makers in their education, and future.
It is encouraging that recent research has shown that it is possible, even probable, for education interventions to have significant impact over one year, let alone the 4-6 year terms of most government leaders. In the first year that our students in Kenya sat the KCPE, results showed performance differences were most impressive in counties with poverty rates of 30 per cent or higher; 89 per cent of Bridge girls outperformed Kenyan boys. In India, a three year RCT by Educate Girls saw learning levels increase by 79 per cent in the final year. This should embolden elected leaders to make significant investments into education programming with proven learning impacts at scale.
Ensuring delivery of high quality education to all would dramatically reduce the frequency of humanitarian crises that emerge from the lack of it. In geography as diverse as Liberia, Nigeria and India, governments have been courageous enough to acknowledge that many schools have been failing children. Rather than wringing their hands and doing nothing, have taken direct action to transform failing systems into powerful systems through public private partnerships. Education leadership requires strong political leadership.
- The writer is co-founder of the Bridge International Academies
