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17. Table 2 illustrates differences in the orientation of aid for education. For donors such as New Zealand, Australia or France, aid includes a great deal of funding for students from developing countries in the donor country. Australia allocated 70 per cent of its aid to education to scholarships for foreign university students studying in Australia, while French aid for education benefited some 100,000 foreign students in France and 8,000 French teachers working in French-speaking Africa ¹⁴. Technical cooperation generally accounts for about two thirds of bilateral aid for education, with "60 to 80 per cent of all education aid commitments spent in recipient countries ¹⁵.

18. Aid flows from the major donors for basic education (Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway) reflect congruence between declarations and allocations, and are likely to be reinforced by the recent shift to a sector-wide approach (already denoted by its own abbreviation as SWAP), under which it is aimed to abandon previous donor projects in favour of long-term budgetary support to the education sector as a whole, and to strengthen governmental structures rather than continuing parallel donors. set-ups. Different from what the name indicates, sector-wide approaches are routinely confined to basic education, which has become the priority for donors, at least at the level of policy. One reason for this is the size of each donor. s contribution. All of them combined are often much too small to support a whole education sector. Another reason is that strategies for the entire sector of education have yet to be developed while the focus on basic education does not lead in this direction.

B. Concordance and discordance in international policies        [ Go to Contents ]

19. Three major groupings generate common approaches for international cooperation and related definitions and statistics: OECD/DAC, the World Bank Group, and the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF). Similarities and differences between the three do not cloak their parallel and separate existence. Similarities include a priority for basic education, as well as a great deal of attention to the education of girls; differences revolve around the basis for and the purpose of international cooperation.

20. Constantly diminishing aid flows have shifted international cooperation from seeking new and additional public funding to match the scope of the challenge to converting debt created through previous cooperation into funding that can be used in debtor countries. The ambitions have been lowered, as reflected in the postponement of the commitment to universal access to basic education from the year 2000 to the year 2015, in the shortening of schooling by two years (from the 6th to the 4th grade), and the marginalization of secondary education due to the focus on basic education. Since the focus of aid policies in the 1990s is poverty alleviation, while there are as yet no definitions and standardized measures on what anti-poverty aid means in theory and in practice, the impact on education is likely to be significant but as yet unpredictable. The Special Rapporteur feels that education cannot be expected to lead to poverty eradication before education itself is rescued from poverty.

21. As the Special Rapporteur noted in her preliminary report, UNICEF has had the pioneering role in adopting and conceptualizing rights-based programming. Amongst bilateral donors, the United Kingdom has led the way (E/CN.4/2000/6/Add.2, paras. 20-26). These initiatives may lead to the mainstreaming of human rights but, at present, the place of education in donors. policies exhibits a great deal of variety. Some subsume it under the meeting of basic human needs, others define education as a pillar of the development of human resources (or human capital), yet others view education as part of social development, while some see it as a path towards empowerment, especially for girls and women. This variance replicates the proverbially large number of diverse domestic expectations of education but does not bode well for future international accomplishments, because the minute political and financial commitment to education cannot possibly meet such varied expectations.

22. An improvement towards concordance in international cooperation has recently been attained concerning debt relief. As the Special Rapporteur noted in her report on Uganda (E/CN.4/2000/6/Add.1, paras. 30-34), divergent policies of creditors and donors could, on the one hand, promote education through the allocation of savings from debt relief to increase enrolments in primary education while, on the other hand, aggravating the pupil-teacher ratio by inhibiting recruitment of teachers so as not to increase the civil service. Although the Special Rapporteur could not ascertain the figures, it is possible that the pupil-teacher ratio could have been 300 to 1 or even more. In September 1999, it was announced that Uganda would benefit from additional debt relief (an annual $80 million), which would enable the halving of the pupil-teacher ratio ¹⁶. At the time, a new Poverty Reduction Growth Facility was announced in replacement of the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF), with a promise that "social and sectoral programmes aimed at poverty reduction will be taken fully into account in the design of economic policies ¹⁷".

C. The World Bank. s education strategy        [ Go to Contents ]

23. As announced in her preliminary report, the Special Rapporteur has carried out an analysis of the evolving World Bank approach to education because the Bank has become the major provider of loans for education, "the single largest source of finance for education" as it is fond of saying. The Special Rapporteur has established a dialogue with the World Bank and much correspondence has been exchanged with regard to the many questions which she has sought to clarify. Quite a few could not be clarified and the Special Rapporteur is therefore planning to visit the World Bank in January 2000 and will provide an update to this section of the report in her oral presentation before the Commission on Human Rights.

24. Two recent reports illustrate differences of approach within the World Bank on human rights. The Education Sector Strategy (published in July 1999) is silent on the World Bank. s position, unlike Development and Human Rights: The Role of the World Bank (published in September 1998). The latter is apparently supportive of the Bank. s engagement in human rights, the former not.

25. The Bank. s Education Sector Strategy makes a factual statement that many States recognize the right to education, not adding the corresponding governmental obligation to secure that primary education is available to all school-age children, compulsory and free of charge, which is legally binding upon almost all the Bank`s borrowers ¹⁸. The Bank. s commitment to ensuring that everyone completes "a basic education" reflects one component of international human rights law, which requires individual States to make primary education all-encompassing and to seek international cooperation if they are unable to comply with this obligation. The blurred boundaries between "basic" and "primary" education are reflected in the tendency to statistically confine basic education to the 6-11 age group, while its proper definition (primary and lower secondary school) has not yet generated internationally comparable data.

26. Another factual statement posits that Governments remain the largest funders of education. Funding is addressed in various parts of the Education Sector Strategy - free primary education not being advocated, as it had been by the Bank earlier from time to time ¹⁹, but rather a line of argument being developed whereby fees paid by non-poor beneficiaries could facilitate the targeting of governmental funding towards the poor. This could imply that non-poor parents should pay fees, even if a State. s international legal obligations and constitutional guarantees posit that primary education should be free of charge. The Bank. s present position is unclear, at least to the Special Rapporteur. The Bank. s own education lending does not prioritize primary education (it constitutes 30 per cent of education lending) nor the poorest countries (International Development Association loans account for 40 per cent of all lending for education). In the Special Rapporteur. s view, the Bank. s loans do not facilitate making primary education free of charge because loans have to be repaid while the ability of primary school leavers to generate income is insufficient to facilitate such repayment. More than half of the Bank. s education lending is concentrated in the seven biggest borrowers (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Turkey), none of them in Africa and none of them among the least developed countries.

27. The Bank. s Education Sector Strategy does not refer to individual rights and freedoms guaranteed under international human rights law, whether those of learners, their parents or teachers. The factual reference to the fact that forgetting teachers. salaries and conditions can "grind change to a halt" hints at the frequent practice of not involving teachers in educational reform and its detrimental consequences. A subsequent reference includes teachers in "consultation with the civil society ²⁰", but there is no mention of applicable law. The protection of the teachers. freedom of association (as developed by the International Labour Organization) is legally enforceable, domestically and internationally. In the Special Rapporteur. s view, education is not exempt from the rule of law. Since the Bank has explicitly committed itself to ensure that human rights are fully respected in projects which it supports, the absence of an explicit recognition of the rights that ought to be respected creates a risk that such rights may be violated because the staff designing and implementing projects have not been informed that such rights are universally recognized and ought to be respected. Initial steps have been outlined in-house for other human rights issues ²¹, and it is thus not self-evident - at least not to the Special Rapporteur - why human rights problems that typically emerge in education have not been addressed.

28. A possible conflict between different (non-rights-based and rights-based) approaches can be described taking the language of instruction as an example. The World Bank praises the flourishing private sector publishing industry as the supplier of textbooks but also emphasizes the language barriers which are a considerable obstacle for many learners ²². It is estimated that 90 per cent of learners in Africa are not completely familiar with the major languages of instruction and publishing, which also happen to be the colonial languages. Because the publishing industry flourishes in big international rather than small minority languages, a clash between these two objectives - a flourishing private sector publishing industry and instruction in indigenous/minority languages - is inevitable in the view of the Special Rapporteur. For its part, the content of school textbooks is defined as a "technical" issue by the World Bank, despite its well-known political sensitivity. More importantly, retrospective studies of genocide and inter-ethnic or inter-religious warfare have often identified school textbooks as a factor leading to warfare or genocide. Failure to address such issues can thus be deadly.

29. Addressing the human rights dimensions of education reduces the risk of unknowingly supporting education that amounts to brainwashing, or schooling that actually does not happen because teachers have not been paid for months or years. The human rights rationale builds upon good professional standards in education, although it goes beyond. The Special Rapporteur is concerned about the blurring of the roles of States and non-State actors. A reference in the Bank. s Education Sector Strategy to the commitments by "155 nations and 150 NGOs ²³" obfuscates the role of States, whose human rights obligations have generated a great deal of domestic and international jurisprudence, as the following section demonstrates.

III. REALIZATION AND LEGAL ENFORCEMENT OF THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION
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30. As the Special Rapporteur noted in her preliminary report, the general question of whether economic, social and cultural rights are justiciable does not apply to the right to education, which is litigated both domestically and internationally. Owing to space constraints, the Special Rapporteur has included in this report only a couple of references to pertinent court cases through which various dimensions of the right to education have been enforced.

31. The adoption of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women ²⁴ promises to increase international remedies for gender discrimination. It has also reinforced the conceptual universality of human rights because remedies will be provided for civil and political, as well as economic, social and cultural rights ²⁵. On the domestic level, Norway has set a commendable precedent, having incorporated in its domestic law both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Such developments promise to broaden and strengthen the work of domestic courts which have mapped out the nature and scope of the right to education.

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