Education is held up as the key strategy to empower girls and break the cycles of poverty, to propel social and economic development in poor countries, and to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. Many girls from poor families have little or no access to even a primary education, because the costs are beyond their families' means. In this information sheet Amnesty International calls o governments to eliminate direct and indirect fees for primary schools and take steps to make secondary schools accessible to all.

In this policy brief, the Global Campaign for Education, outlines ten clear recommendations for the Education Financing Commission, which will launch its report on 18th Spetember, 2016. The recommendations are:

 

 

  1. Ensure harmony with existing education efforts (the right to education and Education 2030) as wells as existing mechanisms, such as the Global Partnership for Education
  2. Support free education
  3. Support public education
  4. Ensure long term, predictable, and sustainable financing
  5. Ensure inclusive and democratic country-led processes
  6. Emphasise the diverse aims of education and look beyond standardised testing to a wide range of indicators
  7. Ensure governments allocate at least 20% of their budgets to education
  8. Ensure governments increase budget size
  9. Budgets should prioritise equity
  10. Budgets should be transparent and subject to scrutiny

This is a brief on MDG 2 (Achieve Universal Primary Education), with a focus on target 2.A (Ensure that, by 2015, all children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling). It highlights that quality education is a right, must be free and compulsory at least at the primary level, and must be a major part of the national budgets.

Public education is often critiqued as ineffective and inefficient. However, where shortcomings in public education are identified, they can often be attributed not to lack of capacity, but lack of political will. Reviewing seven examples of public education in developing countries, this research shows that, in direct contrast to widely disseminated ideas, public education can be the most effective, efficient, and transformative approach to education, and, crucially, it is possible to develop quality public education everywhere.

ESPAÑOL   FRANÇAIS

Key resource

This report, jointly produced by Right to Education Initiative; La FAGE, Fédération des Associations Générales Etudiantes; and Global Students Forum, focuses on the right to higher education, questioning France’s compliance with its obligations regarding article 2.2 and article 13.2 (c) of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

It is based on a five year research project developed by the Right to Education Initiative (RTE) in collaboration with students from Sciences Po Law School Clinic (Paris) and researchers from the University of Geneva, University of Orléans and ENS Paris Saclay

This submission highlights that the public policies aiming to reduce inequalities in access to higher education implemented by the French government since the last periodical reporting session are insufficient, and need to be reinforced and expanded. It argues that structural, territorial, and socio-economic inequalities as well as the State’s higher education financing policy hinder equality and non-discrimination in access to higher education and increase the privatisation trend.

 

FRANÇAIS