14 January 2005
Remarks by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer on Education in Africa
Education is the fundamental birthright of every child – empowering them for the future, putting opportunity directly into their hands - but it is also the very best anti-poverty strategy, the best economic development programme.
In low income countries, most of which are in Africa, average earnings increase by 11 per cent with each additional year of education.
Each additional year of maternal education reduces childhood mortality by about 8 per cent.
For many young people, primary education is the one chance they will have to acquire the basic literacy, numeracy and essential life skills to enhance their chances of a sustainable livelihood.
And education is also the best way of ensuring economic prosperity and business competitiveness for their country. Countries cannot develop properly if only elites are educated. Instead of developing some of the potential of some of the people, future economic growth depends upon developing all of the potential of all. And increasing access to secondary and tertiary education is just as important as primary – educating the future doctors, nurses, teachers, policy officers, lawyers and government workers of tomorrow.
So the development case for education, the case for investing in education, is unanswerable. It is essential to the creation of an economy which has the flexibility to respond to market forces; it helps people to become more productive, and to earn more income; it leads to improvements in health, nutrition and child mortality. People are able to transform their own lives and society, and acquire the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, as well as the capacity to utilise knowledge and information.
And let us remember the promises we have all made on education.
Not just fifty years ago, when the universal declaration of human rights proclaimed free and compulsory education to be a basic human right.
But successively in international declarations:
The promise made at the 1990 World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, that we would ensure universal access to, and completion of, primary education by the year 2000.
The promise made at the 1990 World Summit for Children - signed by all but two of the world's governments - which reaffirmed the right to an education as a legally binding obligation.
The promise made at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development - that by 2005 we would achieve universal access to basic education, the completion of primary education by at least 80 per cent of primary-school-age children and close the gender gap in primary and secondary school education.
The promise on education for all reaffirmed in Dakar, Senegal, in September 2000; and by setting and signing up to the 2000 Millennium Development Goals - which pledged that we would have universal primary education before 2015 and gender equality in primary and secondary education by 2005.
Over the last few years, progress has been made.
Here in Tanzania, because of debt relief, the Government was able in 2001 to abolish the user fees families had to pay to send their children to school and enrolments in primary education increased by 50 per cent as a result. Tanzania now spends over $150 million more on schools and teachers than four years ago and debt relief has provided predictable financing which has enabled Tanzania to implement a long-term plan for universal primary education. The country is now on track to get every child into primary school by 2006 – 9 years ahead of the target - and to achieve the goal of gender equity by the target date of the end of 2005.
The Tanzanian Government has said on behalf of President Mkapa, “In promulgating the Primary Education Development Plan he wanted, among other things, to show that where a committed African government is externally supported in terms of debt relief and long-term assurances of budgetary support, these goals can be attained within a much shorter time frame. The debt relief received in 2001 enabled his government to increase budgetary allocation to priority sectors for poverty reduction by 130 per cent over the last 6 years.”
In 2003 Kenya similarly abolished user fees which also led to a significant increase in enrolment. In 2003 there were an additional 1.2 million children in school, taking the total enrolment to 7.2 million in 2004 – 84 per cent of primary school age children.
In 1994, the newly elected democratic government in Malawi abolished education user fees which resulted in an immediate jump in enrolments of 50 per cent – an increase of more than 1 million children going to school. Public recurrent spending on education in Malawi more than tripled. Spending on primary education increased over five-fold in real terms between 1990 and 1995 and its share increased from 45 per cent to 71 per cent of total recurrent public spending.
In 1996, Uganda abolished user fees for up to four children from each family (two of whom should be girls), and all orphans. This led to a more than 70 per cent increase in total enrolments overnight – an increase of over 2 million children in education. The share of education in the overall national budget rose from 22 per cent in 1995 to 31 per cent in 1999.
Overall, across sub Saharan Africa the primary school enrolment rate has increased from 74 per cent in 1990 to 87 per cent in 2001. 30 million more children have enrolled in primary school since 1990. And secondary enrolment in the least developed countries has increased from 18 per cent in 1990 to 30 per cent in 2000.
But despite these successes, over a 100 million children in sub Saharan Africa are still denied the chance to go to school
25 countries in sub Saharan Africa are unlikely to meet the 2005 target that girls should have the same opportunities as boys in primary and secondary education – and indeed, on present trends, 16 countries are unlikely to achieve this gender equality for girls even by 2015.
And, on current trends, sub Saharan Africa as a whole will not achieve the 2015 goal of universal primary education until 2130.
So we must do more.
We want to give all developing countries the support they need to abolish user fees which are the single biggest barrier to increasing the number of children in education. But the issue of user fees is part of a broader government commitment to education such as more effective teacher recruitment and training, greater provision of teaching and learning materials, and improvements to school buildings and sanitation facilities. And all this must also be accompanied by wider health and anti poverty strategies.
And because we know about the particular benefits of women’s education – boosting their average earnings and reducing their chance of becoming infected by diseases like HIV/AIDS - developing country governments know that they also need to make a special effort to get girls into school – for example through setting up bursaries for girls education, reimbursing families for the loss of domestic work when girls go to school, or ensuring that new schools are equipped with adequate sanitation facilities.
The international priority is to meet the Millennium Development Goal for education by getting every child into primary school by 2015 but this cannot be achieved without investment in secondary and tertiary education as well. Massive increases in school enrolment require more teachers and to achieve an increase in the number of teachers - and of doctors, nurses and other vital professionals - further investment is needed in secondary and higher education. This is not a question of competition between secondary and primary education, as it is sometimes presented, but a matter of adopting a comprehensive strategy at the country level to invest in both.
But even when developing countries do have universal education strategies in place that address all these issues, many - like Niger for example - do not have the funding necessary to implement them. Indeed all the public spending on sub-Saharan African education taken together is, per pupil, still less than $40 a year, less than one dollar per week.
Because of debt relief, debt payments being made by eligible countries are down from an average of nearly 25 per cent of national income to 11 per cent, with an average of 40 per cent of the income gained from the relief now going to education.
Many donor countries are providing more aid for investment in education - the UK for example has already committed, for the next four years, over £1 billion for educational aid across the world.
And the Education Fast Track Initiative is encouraging donor co-ordination and funding around countries’ own national education plans.
But when, overall, meeting the Millennium Development Goals on education requires $6 billion dollars more a year - $2 billion a year for sub Saharan Africa - we know we still have a long way to go to achieve the scale of the financing that is needed.
Funding for education also needs to be more predictable. Up to 80 per cent of education spending goes on recurrent expenditure, mainly teachers’ salaries, so a country cannot commit to training and employing the huge numbers of extra teachers needed unless they know that the funds will still be there to pay their salaries in three, five or ten years’ time.
Of course, in the long term, we want all African countries to be able to pay teachers’ salaries themselves, as economic growth leads to increased domestic revenue. And it is its contribution to increased growth rates in the long-term which makes funding education now such a priority. Financing education today will result in a population tomorrow that is better qualified, more productive, healthier, richer and increasingly able to carry the burden of financing education for the next generation. So by making this investment upfront we can ensure that the need for donor support in the long term is significantly reduced.
That is why the UK Government has set out proposals for an International Finance Facility which would make funding for education a priority.
The International Finance Facility would be founded upon the additional $16 billion in development aid already promised at the UN Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey.
Donors would make this additional funding a long term and binding pledge.
And using these commitments and more as security the IFF would leverage in additional money from the international capital markets to raise the amount of development aid for the years to 2015 by $50 billion a year including billions more a year for education.
The IFF would provide a predictable flow of aid so developing countries would no longer have to suffer from an up to 40 per cent variance in the amount of aid they receive from year to year.
And the IFF will enable us to frontload aid so a critical mass can be deployed as investment over the next ten years when it will have the most impact -- making schooling for all not just a distant dream but a practical reality and ensuring that, in the future, African governments are not dependent on foreign aid to provide necessary services to their citizens. Investment in education now is not only the right thing to do, it is the sensible thing to do to reduce the need for aid in the future.
Economic development is the key to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and long term prosperity. And no country has escaped poverty other than by participation in the international economy and focusing on macroeconomic stability and encouraging private investment, with a clear sense of country ownership of their policies.
So the IFF is part of our general strategy to help developing countries build the capacity – the monetary and fiscal policies, the infrastructure, the support for private investment and the necessary transparency – essential for their development. The focus on transparency is that it is only in an open, accountable and corruption-free environment that progress will be sustained.