Abstract
Abstract The global education agenda, embedded in the Education for All (EFA) Goals, and the Millennium Development Goals, has emphasised the importance of reaching EFA rather than sustaining this achievement. As a corollary, the emphasis for external aid has also been on increasing aid to secure EFA rather than on the dangers of aid dependency in securing and sustaining EFA. The international architecture in support of education for sustainable development appears to have little interest in analysing these tensions between the pursuit of these rights-based EFA Goals, on the one hand, and the kind of economic growth and macro-economic environment that would be necessary to sustain their achievement.
Highlights
The global education agenda, embedded in the Education for All (EFA) Goals, and the Millennium Development Goals, has emphasised the importance of reaching EFA rather than sustaining this achievement
In the sphere of technical and vocational skills development (TVSD),2 there has been a recognition that this sector has come back on to the agenda of development partners as well as of many national governments, especially in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (NORRAG NEWS No 38, 2007; King and Palmer, 2007)
If there is no change in the productivity of work in the informal sector, and if foreign direct investment remains miniscule for many developing countries, what will be the impact on families who have invested in the education and training of their children over this last decade and more? Will they sustain these investments for
Summary
Given the sheer scale of reaching Education for All, that there would have been some careful analysis of the trade-off between the costs and the sustainability of EFA. There is more emphasis in the Dakar documentation on the crucial need for sustained political commitment at the country level than at the donor level It is surprising, that neither in this literature of ESD and DESD nor in other commentaries on sustainable development does this obvious tension between the sheer cost of reaching and maintaining education for all get much discussed in the same breath as sustainable development. For the 20 country plans far endorsed by the Fast Track Initiative (FTI), on average one-quarter of the costs will need to be covered by external aid It was estimated in 2002 by the World Bank that to cover the financing gap for reaching universal primary education by 2015, ‘aid would need to reach an average of 42% of total expenditure on primary education and much more in some countries’ We shall find that it is not sufficient to talk about financing gaps, but rather a series of other factors, including country-level commitment, economic growth, the enabling environment and aid dependency, to mention just a few
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