http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/19/5906
US, Japan Stingiest Givers for Education
by Alison Raphael
Washington, DC - Eight years ago the world's wealthiest countries promised to provide the funding needed to ensure that all children worldwide can attend school. But now, halfway to the global 2015 deadline for universal primary education, developed countries are failing to come up with the aid.
This was the conclusion reached at the close of a high-level meeting in Dakar, Senegal, on funding for globally agreed goals for education articulated at the 2000 "Education for All" meeting and reflected in the Millennium Development Goals.
The failure is laid out country-by-country in an innovative global "report card" on progress in education released Dec. 11 by a coalition of NGOs, the Global Campaign for Education.
By 2015, all children are supposed to have access to complete, free, compulsory, quality primary education, and gender disparities in education should be completely eliminated.
Now, mid-way to the 2015 deadline, there appears to be little hope of success.
At the meeting in Dakar, developed countries refused to set a target for spending on global education, even though developing countries agreed to devote 10 per cent of their national budgets to the sector.
Nicholas Burnett, director of the 2008 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, called the outcome of the Dakar meeting "a major disappointment." Burnett's group said an additional $11 billion is needed to reach global education goals by 2015.
UNESCO chief Koichiiro Matsuura agreed, remarking: "I cannot be very optimistic."
Meanwhile, the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) charged that at current rates of progress, global goals "will not be realized by 2115, let alone in the next seven-and-a-half years."
The GCE's report card, entitled "No Excuses," ranks every country with a grade from A to F for its efforts in education, including donor nations. It points to the U.S. and Japan as two of the stingiest givers. Norway and the Netherlands are the most generous.