In light of the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals, Nonresident Senior Fellow Raj Desai gives reasons why many countries have been slow to make progress toward the 2015 targets. He states that the recent food and global economic crises have had an impact; and given these events, he does not see donor countries increasing their commitments within the next five years.

Video

• Uneven Progress Toward MDGs
• Recent Crises Slow MDG Progress
• Donors Unlikely to Increase MDG Commitments

The stars of the global development galaxy infrequently align to provide the education sector with an opportunity to advance progress for girls and boys around the world. However, there is currently a unique opportunity to put forth a common vision to reinforce the Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and to chart a forward-looking agenda for the post-2015 development goals that builds upon collective progress and lessons learned.

Three global policy windows are available to advance a common agenda:

1. Discussions and processes for establishing a new set of global development goals, following the expiration of the MDGs in 2015, are underway in the United Nations.
    
2. UNESCO has also started parallel conversations on the post-2015 EFA agenda.
    
3. The U.N. Secretary General will soon launch a five-year global education initiative that will span the time period leading up to and following 2015.

The Need for Action: Progress is Slowing 

Recent numbers from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics and the Global Monitoring Report suggest that despite advances in improving access to and the quality of education since 2000, progress is stalling. In Africa, the number of out-of-school children is actually increasing – not decreasing – due to population growth. To address this challenge of access and completion, evidence suggests that quality may be more severe than we thought. For example, recent studies estimate that nearly 200 million children are still unable to read despite spending several years in school, and in some regions of the world poor quality education causes parents to take their children out of school before they complete primary school. Moving backward in the final stretch to 2015 would discredit the progress made up to this point in the name of the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals.

Status Check: A Lot of Uncoordinated Activity

Based on an initial, non-exhaustive assessment, there are over 20 current education-relevant global initiatives, campaigns, processes or opportunities organized by multilateral institutions, bilateral donor agencies, civil society and country actors. These activities have the potential to raise the profile of international education goals. Although the level of activity is exciting, the multiple activities run the risk of uncoordinated messaging and duplicative—or even contradictory—efforts. While debate is healthy and necessary, better coordination is needed to remain connected at a strategic and functional level. Otherwise, standalone activities may not galvanize the political and financial attention needed to meet collective challenges.

The Opportunity at Stake

Taking advantage of the three global policy windows could reposition education in the center of the global agenda and realize the broader set of development goals. The following opportunities should not be passed by:

• Opportunity to define measureable, relevant goals. While recognizing the positive progress made as a result of the Education for All agenda, it is important to also reflect on where improvements could be made. Through healthy, targeted debate in this round of revisiting the EFA agenda, it is possible to add more specificity to the goals in order to move forward with measured progress.



• Opportunity to link education to the broader development agenda. While engaged in conversations about EFA, the education sector must simultaneously have a common strategy for the broader post-2015 development agenda. It is important to be able to justify the importance of education to achieving other development goals and explain how it links to the potential post-2015 frameworks without being afraid to make the case for standalone education goals that articulate the outcomes important for productive societies, such as equity and learning. The education sector must also be prepared to develop a baseline for whatever goals we recommend to these discussions.



• Opportunity to leverage support at highest political level. It is not often that the United Nations secretary- general decides to champion the cause central to the global education community. By calling his initiative “Education First,” the secretary-general indicates that he is ready to give the education sector increased political will for 2015. With numerous U.N. Special Envoys for health, climate change and conflict over the past several years, and with none devoted to education, the recent appointment of Gordon Brown as his special envoy for Global Education reinforces the secretary-general’s renewed commitment. The education community must now rally its networks, stand behind the secretary general’s vision and participate in the debates that stem from the initiative. Failure to follow his lead would lend poorly to the education sector and be a disservice to the millions of children – both out of school and struggling to learn – who could stand to benefit.

The Timeline

There is a limited timeline to seize these opportunities. However, given the high stakes of the policy windows, the education sector must organize and redouble its efforts to take full advantage of them.

• The U.N. Post-2015 Millennium Development Goal Process: The process is already underway to develop the next set of goals led by a U.N. Development Program and U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs Task Force—with the next six months critical in the lead up to high-level discussions in September 2013. U.N. agencies are holding thematic consultations (including UNESCO, UNICEF, ILO, UNDP, OCHA and more) from now until January 2013. While some of these consultations will be education focused, others will not. It is essential that stakeholders link education to all areas of development in the consultations. There will also be national and regional consultations in 50 countries from Angola to Zambia as part of this process. National education partners must be mobilized and supported to ensure that a few key messages are present in these conversations. 



• The Education for All Framework: While the agency, regional and national MDG consultations are taking place, UNESCO will also convene on the post-2015 EFA agenda. Although discussions have started, the consultation and debate period may not take place soon enough to reinforce education’s presence in the post-2015 MDG consultation process. This is a sector-wide challenge that must be addressed and opportunities must be created to ensure processes are coordinated and discussions build off one another.



• The Secretary General’s Education First Initiative: A high-level steering committee, technical advisory group and global heads of state champions group have been selected by the secretary-general to lead the new initiative, which will launch in September at the U.N. General Assembly in conjunction with global outreach efforts. The education sector has the opportunity to harness the five-year span of this initiative to position itself as a central priority for global development leading up to and beyond 2015.

What is the Education Sector’s Message? Moving Toward a Common Vision

The good news is that there is much the education sector has already agreed upon. Given the competing timelines it will be difficult, but not impossible, to engage in full debate within the education community while at the same time making recommendations to the post-2015 global development agenda. There are several steps that could be taken to advance a collective vision.

1. Embrace Education for All. First and foremost, the education sector must embrace the Education for All agenda as its foundation. A pledge by 164 countries in 2000, the agenda is a starting point of consensus for the global community.



2. Move forward with agreed upon objectives. While the education sector does not have to agree on everything – it can start to agree on some things, including the ideas that education is a basic human right and that all children deserve a quality education. Education can be defined differently based on context and relevancy, but quality education means that young people learn basic skills necessary to thrive in society. This includes both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Additionally opportunities to learn should be equitable and not only available to a privileged few. Special attention should be given to achieving gender equity and addressing education in emergency and conflict settings, children with disabilities, and other marginalized populations who we have collectively failed.



3. Advance the discussions to include outcomes and critical transition points, and insert consensus moments into the broader development agenda dialogue along the way. The Education for All discussion should draw upon our collective success and lessons learned. The Global Compact on Learning report, developed by the Center for Universal Education in collaboration with more than 80 organizations, highlights some of the vital challenges the education sector has confronted in realizing EFA that deserve more attention: the provision of early childhood development opportunities, ensuring positive learning outcomes are achieved in the early years and focusing on transition to and completion of relevant post-primary education, particularly for the most marginalized. This can be a starting point for forging a common policy agenda on education and learning as we move toward 2015.



4. Do not be afraid of learning, but be afraid of a bad learning agenda. The next set of discussions must add specificity to Education for All, especially in regards to goal six’s call for measurable learning outcomes in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills. Learning is the essence of EFA; no child should to go to school and not learn. It is time for us to form a careful and thoughtful consensus, setting forth an ambitious vision for a learning agenda that can rally political and civil society support.
   
   These broad discussions are important because we should be very afraid of learning done wrong. The counterfactual to a strong consensus on learning could be emphasis on high-stakes testing and pay-for-performance schemes without regard to critical contextual factors. The education sector knows these are not effective ways to advance the teaching and learning process at a national or global level.



5. Participate in global discussions about what constitutes learning. The education sector must have productive discussions about what it wants young people to achieve through education. Reading and math alone are a much too narrow way to think about education. There are many noncognitive skills and attitudes that are essential to global citizenship. It is time to have the following discussions: Are there learning standards that are collectively valued? If so, should they be measured? And if the answer is yes, how can this be done to support the teaching and learning process and allow policymakers to have enough information to identify issues of equity within and across countries? One process is the Global Learning Metrics Task Force, hosted by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics and the Brookings Institution and chaired by representatives from U.N. agencies, civil society and the private sector. The concept is to have an open forum for debate, starting now, to feed into the global agenda-setting processes before it is too late.

Many of the pieces that need to be in place are underway. However, they must become better aligned to not lose sight of the 2015 goals and make a significant impact over the next six critical months in influencing the post-2015 agenda to make sure that education and learning for all children and youth is central.

Governments around the world are grappling to find goals that can set a course for our planet’s shared long-term prosperity. They aim to do so before 2015, the expiration date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that have anchored global antipoverty efforts since 2000. The MDGs—to eradicate poverty, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empowerment, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat killer diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development—have been endorsed by all 193 UN member states, a huge feat considering how difficult international cooperation can be today.

Diplomats are wary as they face launching a post-2015 generation of goals. Many observers felt despair after the UN’s June Rio+20 event produced few concrete outcomes. A more pragmatic reaction would be to consider what system innovations could stretch beyond the walls of government to help achieve new goals.

Let’s start by asking what “global goals” mean today, and more important, for 2030. A generation ago they mainly meant officials coordinating government policies and investments around the world. At the time, rich and poor countries were clearly delineated and multilateral institutions helped broker conversations. Today’s geopolitical map is far more complicated. There has been a realignment of economic influencers and institutions, and dividing lines between developed and developing nations have blurred.

Read the full piece at the Stanford Social Innovation Review's website » (PDF)

With the deadly attacks on the U.S. embassy in Libya and mounting violence in Syria as a backdrop, the United Nations General Assembly has convened its 67th general session this week. World leaders will spend the next several days focusing on economic, political and environmental issues. Topping the list is the specter that violent outbursts could spread through the Middle East and an assessment of the Millennium Development Goals, notes Senior Fellow Bruce Jones.

Video

• A Preview of the 2012 UN General Assembly Meetings

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, the focused attention of African nations, the United States, U.N. agencies and other multilateral partners has brought significant progress toward achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in health and malaria control and elimination. The potential contribution of these strategies to long-term peace-building objectives and overall regional prosperity is of paramount significance in sub-regions such as the Horn of Africa and Western Africa that are facing the challenges of malaria and other health crises compounded by identity-based conflicts.

National campaigns to address health Millennium Development Goals through cross-ethnic campaigns tackling basic hygiene and malaria have proven effective in reducing child infant mortality while also contributing to comprehensive efforts to overcome health disparities and achieve higher levels of societal well-being.

There is also growing if nascent research to suggest that health and other humanitarian interventions can result in additional benefits to both recipients and donors alike.

The social, economic and political fault lines of conflicts, according to a new study, are most pronounced in Africa within nations (as opposed to international conflicts). Addressing issues of disparate resource allocations in areas such as health could be a primary factor in mitigating such intra-national conflicts. However, to date there has been insufficient research on and policy attention to the potential for wedding proven life-saving health solutions such as malaria intervention to conflict mitigation or other non-health benefits.

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• Download the full paper

What child survival goals should be included in a global vision of “getting to zero” on extreme poverty? This question will be increasingly debated as the world maps out a framework to succeed the Millennium Development Goals post-2015. As a first crack at an answer, I suggest a universal target of no more than 30 deaths per 1,000 live births for every community on the planet by 2030.

For context, one of the biggest global breakthroughs of the past decade has been faster progress in reducing child mortality. In statistical jargon, the developing world’s aggregate child mortality rate dropped from 80 per 1,000 live births in 2000 to 57 in 2011, en route to a projected 51 in 2015.

In plain English this means that, as of 2000, more than one out of every 12 children born in the developing world did not live to see their fifth birthday. By 2011, the figure improved to one in 17, and for 2015, it is on track to be one in 20.

But even though every developing region has seen progress quicken since 2000, mortality rates still vary tremendously, as shown in the table below.

In light of ongoing advances in programmes and technology, it makes sense to set an absolute minimum standard for all of humanity: no more than 30 per 1,000 by 2030, and perhaps even 25 per 1,000. For comparison, Algeria and Mongolia are currently at 30. Most rich countries are at around 4 or 5.

If Africa continues to improve at recent rates, its mortality will hit 59 per 1,000 in 2030. If it improves almost as quickly as East Asia did in the 2000s, it could get below 30. With slight acceleration, South Asia could also reach 20 or 25 by 2030, making sure averages don’t mask disparities and no community remains above 30. Technology improvements could accelerate things even more.

Nonetheless, it is important to remember that even a child mortality rate of 30 still tragically implies that more than 3% of babies do not reach their fifth birthday. That single sobering fact should serve as enormous motivation when considering how historic it would be to ensure every part of the world reaches at least that standard within the next 18 years.

As the U.S. public anxiously monitors the impending fiscal cliff, good things are quietly happening in the field of global education.  Last week, at the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) meeting at UNESCO in Paris, the board decided to allow funds to be dispersed for educating children trapped in humanitarian contexts.  For the first time, the world’s only global fund for education will be able to rapidly support interventions for children and youth struggling to continue their education during and immediately after emergencies.  This is very good news for an organization that was founded 10 years ago to support education in good performing countries and in recent years has been heavily criticized for not supporting education in humanitarian contexts and fragile states, where almost half the world’s children who are out of school live.  GPE has been slowly evolving and with this recent decision has clearly embraced its new vision of helping educate all children and youth, particularly those who are most marginalized.

This is not the only good news on the global education front.  There have been a remarkable number of new developments in global education this fall. Perhaps the most visible was the launch of Education First, a new global education initiative of the United Nations secretary general.  This five-year initiative aims to do three things: put every child in school; improve the quality of learning; and foster global citizenship.  The initiative provides a welcome broadening of the vision of global education that had previously been championed by the secretary general.  For the past 12 years, the main message coming out of the top UN leadership had been to enroll all girls and boys in primary school, as is called for in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  However, many have criticized the MDGs for being too narrowly focused on primary education (after all secondary education and early childhood are equally important). There has also been major criticism that the MDGs do not address the fact that even if you get children into school they are rarely mastering the foundation, life and citizenship skills needed to succeed in the 21^st century.  This new vision includes a necessary last push on meeting the MDGs (something for which recent trend data paints a pessimistic picture) and most importantly a vision for what the global education agenda should look like after the MDGs deadline of 2015.

As part of the continuing debate on what this new global education agenda should look like, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings will be hosting two days of events on how to take forward this agenda after the MDGs expire. On December 5, we will host a public event on global education and the post-2015 development agenda with former British Prime Minister and recently appointed UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown will be joined by White House Director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling, a leading advocate for improving education and learning in developing countries. The event will also feature discussions on the latest data on the status of global education, the next steps for implementing Education First, and the prospects for a post-2015 global development agenda. Other speakers will include: Carol Bellamy of GPE; Patrick Awuah, founder and president of Ashesi University in Ghana; Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report; and Homi Kharas, executive secretary of the UN secretary-general’s High-level Panel on the global development agenda beyond 2015.

We hope to engage the broader education and development community so please join the conversation on Twitter using #GlobalEdu. We will be live tweeting the event from @BrookingsGlobal.

Some of the other events we will be hosting include:

• A private meeting to engage broader international development stakeholders on the post-2015 agenda, including those in global health, agriculture and economic empowerment.
• A consultation with technical education experts to discuss how to develop better metrics to assess and measure learning and education outcomes globally.
• Final presentations by our guest scholars in the Global Scholars Program— a six-month fellowship for researchers from developing countries to come to Brookings to conduct research on global education issues with a specific focus on improving learning opportunities and outcomes for girls.
• A symposium with academics and international donors to identify the major gaps in the evidence base and research on global education with the goal of increasing research funding and quality in this area.

While these events are not open to the public, we plan on posting summaries of them and blogging about them after they are finished. Please visit our web page next week and beyond for all of these updates. 

Event Information

As the 2015 expiration date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) approaches, the goal of achieving universal access to primary education is unlikely to be realized. Worldwide, 61 million children still do not have access to primary school and millions more are in school but not learning basic skills. In response, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched a five-year global education initiative, Education First, at the U.N. General Assembly this September, calling on local governments and the international community to prioritize quality education leading up to and following 2015.

On December 5, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings hosted a discussion on the role of education in the post-2015 development agenda. Building on the launch of Education First, the panelists discussed how to reach the remaining children with no access to school, and improve the quality and relevancy of education for all children and youth.

Video

• Keynote Address: Education and the Post-2015 Development Agenda

Audio

• Part 1 - Education and the Post-2015 Development Agenda
• Part 2 - Education and the Post-2015 Development Agenda
• Part 3 - Education and the Post-2015 Development Agenda

Recently at the Brookings Center for Universal Education (CUE), we were joined by colleagues from around the world in a two-day conference to discuss the status of global education and strategies for future action. Activities during the two-day conference included: a public event with United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown and Director of the White House National Economic Council Gene Sperling; a private meeting with a delegation from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; a meeting convened by Women Thrive Worldwide; a private all-day research symposium on ‘Learning in the Developing World’; and presentations by CUE’s Global Guest scholars.

The central theme of the events was to understand the new opportunities that Education First, the U.N. secretary-general’s new five-year global education initiative, affords our community. There was broad agreement that this new initiative has the potential to be a game-changer in global education if it succeeds in its mission to, in the words of Carol Bellamy, get existing and new actors alike to “do more and do better.” Not only does Education First inject much needed leadership and energy into global education advocacy and provide a bold vision for the future, but it also puts forward a set of concrete steps for actors to take if they want to lend their hands to the effort. 

Education First aims to put children in school, ensure quality learning, and foster global citizenship and outlines 10 key actions to make these goals happen. In our discussions there was considerable interest in the specific targets set forth in the initiative and agreement that if Education First is to be successful, actors should focus on tackling different priorities in-line with their scope of work. In addition to governments, multilateral agencies and civil society organizations, participants expressed interest in ensuring business and private philanthropists align their efforts with the Education First agenda. The 10 key actions and the specific targets within them are collectively quite an ambitious and broad agenda. They include:

1. Enroll all children in school. This goal provides an extra push to meet the education Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and includes an important focus on gender, while also removing cost barriers and access inequities at both the primary and secondary level.  In his speech, Gordon Brown spoke about his plan to work closely over the next several months with World Bank President Jim Kim and several heads of state, including, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to accelerate progress toward these goals. He plans to hold an education summit with ministers of finance and education from these countries and others during the World Bank’s annual spring meetings to pressure governments and donors alike to ramp up action.
2. Sustain education in humanitarian crises, especially conflict. This goal shines a much needed spotlight on the plight of children affected by emergencies – which comprise a large percentage of those who miss out on quality learning opportunities. It calls for education to be protected during conflict and for development specialists to make sure national education plans have strategies for continuing learning if disaster should hit. But perhaps my favorite target is the call to “make education a central pillar of every humanitarian response – ensuring education is at least 4 percent (up from 2 percent) of the overall humanitarian budget.” Lori Heninger, the director of the Inter-Agency Network of Education in Emergencies, representing some 8,000 members around the globe, announced that they would be bringing their substantial weight to bear on this goal through a new advocacy initiative.
3. Ensure all children are literate and numerate. As Gene Sperling stated in the discussion, there are some times when you have to “walk and chew gum at the same time” and putting all children in school and ensuring they learn well while there is one of them. In this key action, the Education First initiative moves beyond the MDG mandate to focus on education quality by calling for all children to be fully literate and numerate after four years in school. This global learning target is being discussed in relation to the post-2015 development agenda. There is a need to work with ministries of education to make sure learning resonates at the country level. However it is also necessary to align targets within international donor agencies as different organizations currently have different goals: USAID identifies literacy at grade 2, the Global Partnership for Education at grade 3, and now Education First at grade 4. The role of the Learning Metrics Task Force, which is jointly convened by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics and the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, is helping to sort through some of these issues. The task force facilitates a process to begin a global dialogue between countries and actors on these learning issues. The focus of the task force is to find ways to measure a broad range of important metrics to ultimately help improve students’ learning achievement. Helping to identify a small number of those metrics that could go into the next global development agenda is one part of, but not the sum total, of the effort.  Indeed the task force’s work is very closely linked with one of the Education First strategies, which is to “track every student’s learning outcomes, and use the information to help improve their achievement.”  Interestingly the task force’s purpose parallels comments made by Homi Kharas, in showing an openness to identifying education and learning targets in the next global development agenda for which we do not currently have good measures.
4. Train more teachers. There is a major shortage of teachers, especially those working in low-income countries. During our conference, questions around how to best retain and support teachers were discussed, especially in light of Education First’s targets to hire 2 million more teachers, and ensure all teachers are well-trained and have improved conditions of service. Ensuring teachers who have left the profession are brought back was mentioned as an important strategy for addressing these issues. Education International and the Global Campaign for Education shared a new initiative they have launched, titled Every Child Needs a Teacher, to advocate that every child has a trained teacher.
5. Equip classrooms with books and learning materials. Education First calls for 4 million more classrooms to be built in marginalized communities, and for teaching and learning materials to be readily available. Also important for thinking about ways to go to scale, technology needs to be harnessed to both expand the reach of teaching and learning materials as well as improve their quality. How to leverage things such as e-readers with solar power, or mobile phones to help with this issue remains one of the key questions needing further research.
6. Prepare students for livelihoods. This key action seriously considers the secondary education needs by calling for the global community to halve the number of adolescents out of lower secondary school, ensure that education is relevant for local economies and livelihoods, and prepare young people with critical thinking and 21st century skills. It is also a call to provide alternative learning opportunities for those youth who have missed out of formal schooling.  Achieving this was discussed in depth both in reviewing this year’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report recommendations and in debating the issues with academics in our research symposium. The role of non-cognitive attributes – such as communication, collaboration, empathy and determination – was hotly debated in the research symposium.  During the research symposium, James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Larry Aber of New York University argued for a much more robust policy orientation around the cultivation of non-cognitive attributes in education systems. Building the foundation for these skills during early childhood and cultivating them through primary and especially during post-primary education is a missing link to improving life outcomes as well as learning outcomes.
7. Improve child nutrition. Ensuring young children get a successful start on life through proper nutrition is just as important for educational outcomes as is the range of education system inputs typically focused on.  Education First calls for the number of children under  age 5 who suffer from stunted growth be cut in half, as well as to improve social supports that deliver nutrition to those in need – either through schools or communities. Forging bridges between sectors is something that the MDGs have not been very successful in doing given their sectoral, and hence siloed, nature.  However, cross-sectoral collaboration is essential for human development, as discussed during the Women Thrive Worldwide side meeting.  Many of the presenters at our event discussed the common ground between health and education, agriculture and education, and women’s empowerment and clean water in particular as they relate to forging a common cause for the next post-2015 development agenda.
8. Instill life-long learning. Coupled with the target of reducing child stunting, these specific calls for action make a powerful case for how to move forward early childhood development, even if not labeled as such. This includes increasing the participation in quality early childhood development programs for marginalized children in low-income countries from 15 to 45 percent, as well as halving the number of illiterate women and men by 2015. As is too often the case, the question of adult education received very little airtime in these discussions, although early childhood development was fulsomely debated in the research symposium.
9. Foster global citizenship. What global citizenship means, why it is important, and how to measure it was discussed heavily during the proceedings.  Particularly insightful were comments from Patrick Awuah, founder of Asheshi University in Ghana, which uses a purposeful global citizenship model of education. The benefits are not only in the ethical development of students, as Patrick is quick to point out, but also in their employability. His university transitions students to employment at higher rates than any other institution in Ghana. The focus within Education First is to develop the values, knowledge and skills necessary for peace, tolerance and respect for diversity, cultivate a sense of community and giving back to society, and ensure schools are safe and free of any form of violence or harassment.
10.   Close the financing gap. Those who have critiqued the secretary-general’s initiative as not having clear financing targets, should think again. The call is for at least 5 to 6 percent of national GDP to be invested in education, and for the global community to support low-income countries with an additional $24 billion per year to fill the financing gap for primary and lower secondary education, and to ensure effective and accountable use of resources aligned with national education plans.

Clearly there is a wide range of important topics for all actors concerned with education to contribute to a part of this broad agenda. Indeed, combining all our efforts–from developing country actors to multi-lateral institutions, civil society, business, media and philanthropy—is the only way this vision will move from a potential game-changer to an actual force for change.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been a remarkable global political success. As targets established in 2000 to cut extreme poverty in its many forms in half by 2015, the MDGs have focused the world’s attention on tackling the integrated challenges of the poorest billion people on the planet – those who live on less than $1.25 a day and lack reliable access to food, safe drinking water, sanitation, or even the most basic education and health care. The MDGs have been fruitful enough in focusing attention that they have prompted a burgeoning global debate on what international goals should come next.

The post-2015 arguments have so many dimensions that any subset of global constituencies focused on resolving its own piece of the puzzle risks spending large amounts of time finding “solutions” that are untenable among players working on other key pieces. Even the jargon is tricky, since labels like “sustainable development goals” that took hold around the 2012 Rio+20 summit are loaded with disparate embedded meanings across a range of key constituencies, with some deeming the term essential while others consider it politically toxic. Meanwhile, in a case study of political semantics, the notion of setting “goals for sustainable development” has broader agreement as a more impartial conceptual starting point, surpassed by the even more neutral term of “post-2015 development agenda.”

To help distill the issues as the post-2015 debate grows, here is a cheat sheet describing what is on the table, who is involved, a typology of perspectives, the rough contours of a roadmap, and the implications for Canada.

The Substance

The post-2015 deliberations include four basic categories of topics, any or all of which might be included in a final intergovernmental agreement. First is the core MDG extreme poverty agenda, which has been most effectively advanced in recent years in areas of health and education. The world has made tremendous gains towards improving living standards and cutting the many forms of extreme poverty in half over the past generation. Many believe the time is now ripe to finish the job and set a goal of “getting to zero” on extreme poverty by 2030.

Concerns over the shortfalls have grown over the past decade as fast-growing emerging economies have struggled to manage their environmental footprints and we have seen an increase in global awareness of the threat of climate change.

Second is the issue of environmental sustainability, for which the MDGs have prompted less success, even though one of the MDGs’ eight headline goals draws some attention to the issue. Concerns over the shortfalls have grown over the past decade as fast-growing emerging economies have struggled to manage their environmental footprints and we have seen an increase in global awareness of the threat of climate change. Neither climate nor so-called “green growth” issues are addressed in the MDG framework, and many believe planetary boundaries can no longer be ignored in any global development strategy, especially as the world’s population is slated to grow by two billion people by mid-century. The politics around climate issues are particularly tricky, since the post-2015 discussions cannot outrun the UN intergovernmental process for climate negotiations, which has a 2015 deadline for a new agreement but faces formidable challenges to reaching a comprehensive global policy solution.

A third category focuses on governance, broadly defined. The term means many things to many people, from transparency to fiscal accountability to human rights to democratization to system building in fragile states. The MDGs did not include governance targets, in order to avoid ideological debates and focus on ends rather than means. But many think the global views have evolved to a point where at least issues like budget transparency can be agreed upon by all countries.

A fourth category focuses on inequality and social inclusion, in line with the growing concern that the spoils of global development are disproportionately benefiting the most privileged – whether the top 10 per cent, one percent, or even 0.1 per cent of any society – while the less privileged are either left behind or directly excluded. Many advocates worry that global goals based on country averages overlook primary concerns of discrimination, whether by gender, ethnicity, or age. Others are focused on jobs and unemployment, especially among youth. Concerns around inequality reflect perhaps the deepest zeitgeist of the post-2015 discussions, even if they remain among the most difficult to tackle through internationally agreed-upon targets. Everyone agrees, for example, that less child mortality is better, but there is ample room for debate on what counts as an optimal level of income inequality, and countries like the U.S. are unlikely to endorse an internationally agreed-upon number as a benchmark any time soon.

Who Is Involved

The MDGs took shape at the turn of the millennium, when concerns were rife over the divisions between the rich and poor countries. Amidst the ongoing transformation of the global economy, today’s world can no longer be neatly geopolitically divided between developed and developing states. Accordingly, there are big debates as to which countries should even be implementing post-2015 goals. There are still three-dozen low-income countries with annual per capita incomes of $1,025 or less. This includes an array of fragile states where governments still struggle to provide even the simplest services and progress is generally stuck. But the majority of the world’s extreme poor now live in relatively fast-growing middle-income economies, which face rapidly changing social and environmental pressures, with enormous consequences for the entire planet. Most of those emerging economies want to tackle domestic challenges, but have little patience for rich-country dictums on governance or the environment that might form roadblocks to shared prosperity. Meanwhile, many of the high-income countries are struggling to balance domestic and global priorities amidst long-term fiscal strains. Countries like the United Kingdom stand out for their courageous ongoing leadership on the MDGs, including the forthcoming achievement this year of the longstanding foreign aid target of 0.7 per cent of national income.

It remains to be seen whether a global intergovernmental framework of goals can foster a consistent yet decentralized system of goals for actors outside of government, too.

At the same time, there is a growing sentiment that global development goals should no longer be the preserve of governments alone. Companies increasingly want to contribute, and want transparent and predictable metrics for holding themselves accountable. Non-governmental organizations similarly want a voice at the table, and seek to ensure that powerfully resourced actors are accountable to citizens of all forms. Meanwhile, some key players like the Gates Foundation play a unique role in catalyzing and bridging innovations across governments, civil society, and scientific communities all at once. It remains to be seen whether a global intergovernmental framework of goals can foster a consistent yet decentralized system of goals for actors outside of government, too.

A Typology of Views

Across the complex range of issues and stakeholders, four distinct types of perspectives seem to be taking shape.

• A “conservative” view wants to stay focused on the specific challenges of extreme poverty, tweaking the MDG targets as needed, but warning that broadening the agenda weakens the focus on one of the greatest successes ever to come out of the United Nations.
• An “upgrading” view wants an MDG-plus agenda, modestly expanding the existing goals to include one or two other top-tier global priorities, like governance, inequality, or climate change.
• A “geostrategic” view wants to focus on the priorities of the rapidly growing large economies like Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia that account for nearly half the world’s population. Such countries face, in varying degrees, the middle-income challenges of managing very modest domestic resources, rather than the low-income challenge of having incredibly scarce resources. Their voices are increasingly heard in venues like the G20. In many respects, these countries’ forthcoming challenges of economic transformation amount to the world’s overarching challenge of sustainability.
• A “comprehensive” view sees 2015 as the one big chance to forge an integrated global agreement tackling all countries’ challenges of extreme poverty and social inclusion while operating within planetary boundaries. In this view, the fates of people and planet are too deeply interwoven to be subject to separate agreements.

How Will the Arguments Be Resolved?

It is impossible to predetermine political outcomes on any contemporary global issue. Nonetheless, there are a few key players and checkpoints on the road to 2015. The first is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is responsible for convening the global political negotiations and using his good offices to help distill and shape the agenda among UN member states. He has a talented team helping to guide the process, including Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson and Assistant Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. He has also commissioned a high-level panel co-chaired by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. That panel is scheduled to recommend its priorities later this spring, in time for the General Assembly’s consideration before a major MDG-focused event in September.

Concurrently, the General Assembly has formed its own “expert group” to recommend a path forward on sustainable development goals (however those end up being defined), in line with the agreements of the Rio+20 conference. Meanwhile, the UN Development Programme is actively engaging in country-level consultations in more than 60 countries, alongside the “MY world” online collaboration with NGOs to solicit citizen votes on priorities from around the world. It remains unclear how all of these pieces will fit together, and how they will align with the practicalities of negotiation among global powers. But there is a good chance that 2013 will bring clarity on the substantive priorities to be tackled through post-2015 goals, and that 2014 will then see gradual convergence around specific goals. By September 2015, there needs to be enough convergence for an intergovernmental agreement with teeth. Hopefully, this will include a serious agreement on climate change, either as part of a post-2015 deal or as a parallel UN agreement.

How Does Canada Fit In?

The post-2015 negotiations prompt two key questions for Canada, each of which merits significant public analysis and debate. First, how has the country performed on the MDGs? Canada has supported the MDGs rhetorically, and has made important contributions to global health and, more recently, hunger. But by any quantitative standard, the country has fallen short in matching the MDGs’ core issue of scale. The divergence between Canada’s relative stasis and the U.K.’s leadership path over the past decade is striking in this regard.

Second, what does Canada want to prioritize globally and how does it want to position itself in a post-2015 world? A senior government official recently told me, for example, that the further the post-2015 negotiations delve into climate issues, the less supportive Canada will be. Will the government ramp up its efforts on extreme poverty in order to divert attention from environmental issues? Will it latch onto governance as either a legitimate priority in development or perhaps a bargaining chip with emerging economies? Is there a possibility of changing course on climate and environmental policy if the second Obama administration takes a new approach? Everything is on the table.

Canada’s political leaders have ultimate responsibility to set these policies on behalf of the nation. But their decisions must be the product, rather than simply the driver, of active societal debate. Such deliberations require years to evolve and take shape. Canadian voices need to be heard, and to engage with the broader world. The year 2015 is fast approaching, but there is still time for rich discussion. On that note, let the deliberations begin!

Preliminary results from a global survey asking people to choose the most important issues for a better world reveals education is at the very top of the list. While the survey’s online response to date has been dominated by respondents from high Human Development Index (HDI) countries, people from over 183 countries – including both low and medium HDI countries – ranked “a good education” as the highest priority, above other issues such as better healthcare, access to clean water and sanitation or better job opportunities. A summary of the findings was presented to the U.N. secretary-general’s High Level Panel last month during their meeting in Monrovia, Liberia. This global My World survey is ongoing, and a second summary of the results will be presented at the next High Level Panel meeting in Bali at the end of March. Ultimately the results will be shared with world leaders in setting the next global development agenda.

But does this global prioritization among citizens guarantee a strong focus on education within the post-2015 development agenda? Not necessarily, since the roadmap to a debate on the agenda in the United Nations General Assembly this September – and beyond that to the eventual agreement on what the agenda will actually include in September 2015 – is much less clear. The United Nations Foundation has produced a useful graphic about this multilayered process:

Looking at this graphic, it becomes apparent that the education community must take a two-track strategy for influencing the post-2015 process:

1)Influencing the education thematic consultations and country consultations around an equitable learning agenda.

The current discussions within the United Nation’s global thematic consultations on education are an important consensus and community-building process for the education community around an equitable learning agenda. From the position papers released by Save the Children, the Basic Education Coalition, The Global Campaign for Education U.S. Chapter, among others, to the consultative discussions and outputs of the Learning Metrics Task Force, it appears that there is broad agreement that, while there has been significant progress over the last decade in getting more children into school, learning levels remain unacceptably low. Too often children leave both primary and secondary levels without acquiring the basic knowledge, skills and competencies they need to lead productive, healthy lives. It is the acquisition of knowledge and skills that promotes employability, productivity and growth, as well as the noneconomic benefits of education. Therefore there is broad support for a post-2015 education goal that focuses on equitable learning for all children and youth.

This week the last of the four education e-discussions on governance and financing within the consultation process was launched, giving education stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in on the following questions:

• What kind of strategies, policies and interventions will improve governance in the education sector at the subnational, national, regional and global levels?
• Who should be held accountable for ensuring that children receive a good quality education and how?
• What are the key challenges in financing education and what are the contributing factors to these challenges?

Recent research into possible post-2015 frameworks by Anda Adams indicates that it is also vital to ensure the importance of an equitable learning agenda is raised in the more than 50 national and 10 thematic consultations being conducted this year on environmental sustainability, growth and employment, governance, health, inequalities, hunger, food and nutrition security, population dynamics, energy, water, and conflict and fragility. While these consultations cannot perfectly include all voices, the use of social media and web portals are part of a concerted United Nations’ strategy to ensure greater inclusivity, open interaction and information exchange across a wide range of stakeholders, which is a major improvement from the consultation process that preceded the Millennium Development Goals in 2000.

In addition to the online thematic and in-person national consultations, from March 18-19 there will be a Global Leadership Meeting on Education on the post-2015 agenda in Dakar. Convened by UNICEF and UNESCO, the agenda and invitation list for this meeting are not yet public. However, there will be at least 50 high-level participants from governments, major civil society and NGO coalitions and networks, U.N. partners and members of the secretary-general’s High Level Panel (HLP) invited to review development priorities emerging from the HLP and implications for education as well as outcomes of the thematic education consultation. Participants will discuss regional priorities and cross-cutting issues in education and develop recommendations around an education goal, including how progress will be measured. Those who do participate should widely consult with their partners to ensure a multitude of voices are heard and are reflected in the meeting’s outcome document. This document will feed into a final summary report of the education consultations and will eventually influence the High Level Panel’s report and the debate on the post-2015 development agenda at U.N. General Assembly meeting.

2) Cultivating equitable learning champions within the high level processes

As is clear from the United Nations Foundation graphic above, the second track that will be important, and more difficult, to influence is the higher-level, less inclusive processes helmed by member states and eminent persons: the secretary-general’s High Level Panel on the post-2015 development process and the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG on SDGs, listed as SDG Working Group in the visual above). Furthermore as the ultimate framework for the post-2015 development agenda will not only emerge from the HLP and OWG, but also from the foreign ministers and heads of state taking part in the discussions at the U.N. General Assembly, these high-level politicians are also strategic targets. The education sector doesn’t yet have enough vocal high-level champions of the equitable learning agenda, and this area should be a focus in the coming months. As HLP members prepare to meet in Bali (March 24-27) and in New York (May, dates TBC), and OWG members begin their deliberations, education and development stakeholders should make a concerted effort to utilize connections to high-level decisions-makers within these bodies to brief them on the importance of an equitable learning agenda to poverty eradication and sustainable development.

The importance of education has been made clear throughout numerous post-2015 entry points thus far, from the High Level Panel meeting in Monrovia last month to the global My World survey. But as the consultation process concludes and the High Level Panel hones its recommendations, the urgency to ensure the right education goal is included becomes paramount. The next few months will mark a turning point in the global community’s engagement in the post-2015 process and the outcomes have the potential to make a cataclysmic difference in the lives on hundreds of millions of children.

Event Information

As President Barack Obama begins his second term, the U.S. global development community is taking stock of the reform efforts that began in 2010 to elevate development—joining defense and diplomacy—as a core pillar of U.S. national security and foreign policy, while advancing proposals for what the administration should focus on going forward. In January 2013, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), a reform-minded coalition that is focused on advancing the effectiveness and impact of U.S. global development efforts, submitted its recommendations to President Obama.

On February 19, the Development Assistance and Governance Initiative at Brookings and MFAN co-hosted a discussion on the current status and future of the U.S. global development reform agenda. Panelists included: Sheila Herrling, vice president, department of policy and evaluation at the Millennium Challenge Corporation; Steven Radelet, distinguished professor in the practice of development at Georgetown University; Susan Reichle, assistant to the administrator at the Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning at the U.S. Agency for International Development; and Connie Veillette, former director of the Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program at the Center for Global Development. Brookings Senior Fellow George Ingram moderated the discussion.

Video

• Full Event - The United States and Global Development: An Approach in Transition

Audio

• The United States and Global Development: An Approach in Transition

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20130219_global_development_transcript

For more than a decade, the Millennium Development Goals -- a set of time-bound targets agreed on by heads of state in 2000 -- have unified, galvanized, and expanded efforts to help the world's poorest people. The overarching vision of cutting the amount of extreme poverty worldwide in half by 2015, anchored in a series of specific goals, has drawn attention and resources to otherwise forgotten issues. The MDGs have mobilized government and business leaders to donate tens of billions of dollars to life-saving tools, such as antiretroviral drugs and modern mosquito nets. The goals have promoted cooperation among public, private, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), providing a common language and bringing together disparate actors. In his 2008 address to the UN General Assembly, the philanthropist Bill Gates called the goals "the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that I have ever seen."

The goals will expire on December 31, 2015, and the debate over what should come next is now in full swing. This year, a high-level UN panel, co-chaired by British Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will put forward its recommendations for a new agenda. The United States and other members of the UN General Assembly will then consider these recommendations, with growing powers, such as Brazil, China, India, and Nigeria, undoubtedly playing a major role in forging any new agreement. But prior to deciding on a new framework, the world community must evaluate exactly what the MDG effort has achieved so far.

WORKING ON A DREAM

The MDGs are not a monolithic policy following a single trajectory. Ultimately, they are nothing more than goals, established by world leaders and subsequently reaffirmed on multiple occasions. The MDGs were not born with a plan, a budget, or a specific mapping out of responsibilities. Many think of the MDGs as the UN's goals, since the agreements were established at UN summits and UN officials have generally led the follow-up efforts for coordination and reporting. But the reality is much more complicated. No single individual or organization is responsible for achieving the MDGs. Instead, countless public, private, and nonprofit actors-working together and independently, in developed and developing countries -- have furthered the goals. Amid this complexity, the achievements toward reaching the MDGs are all the more impressive. The goals have brought the diffuse international development community closer together.

Before the MDGs were crafted, there was no common framework for promoting global development. After the Cold War ended, many rich countries cut their foreign aid budgets and turned their focus inward, on domestic priorities. In the United States, for example, the foreign aid budget hit an all-time low in 1997, at 0.09 percent of gross national income. Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s, institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) encouraged developed and developing countries to scale back spending on public programs-in the name of government efficiency-as a condition for receiving support.

The results were troubling. Africa suffered a generation of stagnation, with rising poverty and child deaths and drops in life expectancy. Economic crises and the threat of growing inequality plagued Asia and Latin America. The antiglobalization movement gained such force that in November and December 1999, at what has come to be called "the Battle in Seattle," street protesters forced the World Trade Organization to cancel major meetings midstream.

The suspicions on the part of civil society carried over into policy debates. In the late 1990s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development proposed "international development goal" benchmarks for donor efforts. The OECD's proposal was later co-signed by leaders of the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. In response, Konrad Raiser, then head of the World Council of Churches, hardly a fire-breathing radical, wrote UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to convey astonishment and disappointment that Annan had endorsed a "propaganda exercise for international finance institutions whose policies are widely held to be at the root of many of the most grave social problems facing the poor all over the world."

That proposal never got off the ground, but the international community made other progress in the lead-up to 2000 that helped set the groundwork for the MDGs. Most notably, G-8 leaders took a major step forward when they crafted a debt-cancellation policy at their 1999 summit in Cologne, Germany. Under this new policy, countries could receive debt relief on the condition that they allocated savings to education or health. This helped reorient governments toward spending in social sectors after many years of cutbacks.

At the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, which was the largest gathering of world leaders to date, heads of state accepted that they needed to work together to assist the world's poorest people. Looking at the challenges of the new century, all the UN member states agreed on a set of measurable, time-bound targets in the Millennium Declaration. In 2001, these targets were organized into eight MDGs: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and forge global partnerships among different countries and actors to achieve development goals. Each goal was further broken down into more specific targets. For example, the first goal involves cutting in half "between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day."

In practical terms, the MDGs were actually launched in March 2002, at the UN International Conference on Financing for Development, in Monterrey, Mexico. The attendees, including heads of state, finance ministers, and foreign ministers, agreed that developed countries should step in with support mechanisms and adequate financial aid to help poor countries committed to good governance meet the MDG targets. Crucially, leaders set a benchmark for burden sharing when they urged "developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) as official development assistance to developing countries." At the time of the conference, the 22 official OECD donor countries allocated an average of 0.22 percent of GNI to aid. Thus, working toward a 0.7 target implied more than tripling total global support. The Monterrey conference established the MDGs as the first global framework anchored in an explicit, mutually agreed-on partnership between developed and developing countries.

THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION

These historic intergovernmental agreements have inspired much debate. Some NGO leaders, including participants in the annual World Social Forum, distrusted any agreement that involved international financial institutions and was negotiated behind closed doors. Human rights activists were dismayed that the MDGs excluded targets for good governance, which they considered a contributor to development and a key outcome unto itself. Some environmental activists were bothered by the narrow formulation of the targets, which ignored major issues, such as climate change, land degradation, ocean management, and air pollution.

To be sure, the MDG framework is imperfect. Several issues, such as gender equality and environmental sustainability, are defined too narrowly. The education goal is limited to the completion of primary school, overlooking concerns about the quality of learning and secondary school enrollment levels. In addition, some academics, such as the economist William Easterly, argue that the remarkable ambition of the goals is unfair to the poorest countries, which have the furthest to go to meet the targets, and minimizes what progress those countries do achieve. Sure enough, if the child survival goal were to cut mortality by half, instead of by two-thirds, 72 developing countries would already have met the target by 2011. Instead, the two-thirds goal has been achieved by only 20 developing countries so far. In addition, the MDGs' emphasis on human development issues, such as education and health, sometimes downplays the importance of investments in energy and infrastructure that support economic growth and job creation.

Nonetheless, the framework has provided a global rallying point. In 2002, with a mandate from Annan and Mark Malloch Brown, then the administrator of the UN Development Program, the economist Jeffrey Sachs launched the UN Millennium Project, which brought together hundreds of experts from around the world from academia, business, government, and civil-society organizations to construct policy plans for achieving the goals. Sachs also tirelessly lobbied government leaders in both developed and developing countries to expand key programs, especially in health and agriculture, in order to meet the MDG targets.

In the lead-up to the 2005 G-8 summit, in Gleneagles, Scotland, advocacy organizations worldwide championed the MDGs. In developing countries, NGO leaders, such as Amina Mohammed, Kumi Naidoo, and Salil Shetty, encouraged civil-society leaders to hold their governments accountable for meeting the goals. In developed countries, organizations such as ONE, co-founded by the activist Jamie Drummond, the rock star Bono, and others, petitioned politicians and conducted public awareness campaigns to demand that world leaders step up their efforts to meet the targets. At the summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then British chancellor of the exchequer, put the MDGs and foreign aid commitments at the top of the agenda. Leaders at Gleneagles committed to increasing global aid by $50 billion by 2010 and set the groundwork for larger commitments to be made by 2015. However, one powerful player on the world stage, the United States, remained hesitant to embrace the MDG agenda.

PLAYERS ON THE BENCH

U.S. President George W. Bush launched the Millennium Challenge initiative in 2002, promising a 50 percent increase in U.S. foreign aid within three years, with money going to countries committed to good governance. The initiative drew inspiration from the MDGs, as the name suggests, but confusingly, it did not directly link to the targets. Ten months later, in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush launched the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has dramatically improved access to AIDS treatment in the developing world. This program was in many ways in line with the MDG effort but did not explicitly link to the goals. Bush even endorsed the UN Millennium Declaration and the Monterrey agreements, but he refused to support the MDGs, largely because his administration viewed them as UN-dictated aid quotas.

Holding a similar view, State Department officials regularly claimed that they supported the targets of the Millennium Declaration but not the MDGs, despite the fact that the MDG targets were drawn directly from the Millennium Declaration. U.S.-UN tensions over the Iraq war were a critical backdrop, with the Bush administration reticent to support a major UN initiative. Washington's aversion was so strong that many U.S. advocacy groups avoided using the term "Millennium Development Goals" for fear of losing influence. When John Bolton became the U.S. ambassador to the UN in August 2005, one of his first actions was to suggest deleting all references to the MDGs in the drafted agreement of the upcoming UN World Summit. The subsequent uproar from other countries and U.S. media outlets forced Washington to modify its position. In his summit speech, Bush finally endorsed the MDGs, using the phrase "Millennium Development Goals" publicly for the first time.

By refusing to directly engage with the MDGs in their early years, the United States missed an opportunity to highlight its contributions to development efforts and foster international goodwill. In the early years of this century, the United States helped revolutionize global health, a central pillar of the MDGs, first through Bush's AIDS initiative and later through efforts on malaria and other deadly diseases. Furthermore, by resisting a project on which most of the world was actively collaborating, Washington missed easy opportunities to build political capital for solving much thornier and divisive international issues.

Diplomatic tensions have subsided under the Obama administration, which has given much stronger rhetorical support to the MDGs and has continued the previous administration's basic development policies, in addition to launching a major initiative to reduce poverty by supporting small farms around the world. Nevertheless, many officials in Washington remain either skeptical or disengaged when it comes to the MDGs, most likely because of a long-standing aversion to fixed foreign aid spending, especially when defined by an international agreement. This fear, however, is baseless. The MDGs do not dictate any aid commitments, and the only related figure, the 0.7 aid target, which countries agreed to work toward in Monterrey in 2002, was endorsed by Bush. It was only later that some countries, such as the United Kingdom, made timetables to meet this aid target.

The World Bank has similarly missed out. Although the bank has championed the framework at senior political levels, it has not adequately facilitated MDG efforts on the ground. Early resistance was in part due to bureaucratic resentment of the UN for its having been given such a prominent role on development issues. In addition, as an institution dominated by economists, the bank is prone to prioritize economic reforms over investment in social sectors. Even more, there is widespread distrust among the bank's staff that donor countries will provide adequate financing for the MDGs. Such concerns are not without merit, as the G-8 ended up falling more than $10 billion short on its Africa pledges for 2010 alone.

Nevertheless, the bank, as a main interlocutor with the developing world, should have helped poor countries assess how they could achieve the MDGs and sounded the alarm about donor financing gaps. Furthermore, the bank has a self-serving reason to get onboard: the MDGs spurred a major budgetary expansion for the International Development Association, the branch of the bank devoted to supporting the poorest countries. Fortunately, the United States and the World Bank are coming around on the MDGs, attracted by the proven success of the framework.

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

As of late 2010, five years before the deadline, the world had already met the overarching MDG of cutting extreme poverty by half. The estimated share of the developing-world population living on less than $1.25 per day (the technical MDG measurement of extreme poverty) had dropped from 43 percent in 1990 to roughly 21 percent in 2010. This statistic is somewhat skewed by progress that was under way in China and other Asian countries long before the MDGs were adopted. The framework is not solely responsible for all of the advancements of the past 12 years. Many other forces, such as the expansion of global markets and the creation of groundbreaking health and communications technologies, have helped the developing world. Moreover, the goals relating to hunger, sanitation, and the environment have not been met. Poverty reduction, however, has progressed in every region since 2000. Even excluding China from the global calculation, the world's share of impoverished people fell from 37 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2008, and forthcoming data should show an even greater drop.

Most important, the MDGs have kick-started progress where it was lacking, especially in Africa, where unprecedented economic growth and poverty reduction are now taking place. From 1981 to 1999, extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 52 percent of the population to 58 percent. But since the launch of the MDGs, it has declined sharply, to 48 percent in 2008. Much of this was likely driven by MDG-backed investments in healthier and better-educated work forces in the region. The global MDG campaign has also prompted support for small subsistence and cash-crop farms, which has boosted growth in many low-income countries, such as Malawi.

Primary education rates have increased around the world, too, with South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa experiencing particularly big jumps in enrollment. Much of this has been the result of funding from MDG-linked initiatives, such as the Global Partnership for Education, launched in 2002 by the World Bank and other development organizations to help poor countries "address the large gaps they face in meeting education MDG 2 and 3, in areas of policy, capacity, data, finance." These same efforts have helped nearly every world region achieve gender parity in classrooms.

The greatest MDG successes undoubtedly concern health. The MDGs have invigorated multilateral institutions, such as the GAVI Alliance (formerly called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), which seeks to achieve MDGs "by focusing on performance, outcomes and results." The goals have also inspired a huge increase in private-sector aid. Ray Chambers, a respected philanthropist and co-founder of a New York private equity firm, first learned of the goals in 2005. Since then, working with Sachs and others, Chambers has coordinated a worldwide coalition of policy, business, and NGO leaders in an effort to help the developing world meet the goal for malarial treatment and prevention. Thanks in part to this global effort, malaria-related mortality has dropped by approximately 25 percent since 2000, with most of those gains probably occurring since 2005. Many pharmaceutical companies have also put forth major efforts to make their medicines more widely available in poor countries, and new initiatives are continuing to take shape. The MDG Health Alliance, founded in 2011, is comprised of business and NGO leaders around the world working toward the MDG health targets, including the elimination of mother-to-child HIV transmission.

The combined results of these campaigns are remarkable. For example, in Senegal, child mortality has plummeted by half since 2000. In Cambodia, it has dropped by 60 percent. Rwanda has recorded a ten percent average annual reduction since 2000, one of the fastest declines in history. Even China has seen a significant decrease in child deaths, possibly because the expanded global emphasis on health has encouraged the country's policymakers to pay more attention to relevant issues. Overall, despite rapid global population growth, there has been a decrease in children dying worldwide before their fifth birthdays, from 11.7 million in 1990 to 9.4 million in 2000 and 6.8 million in 2011.

No issue has been more closely interconnected with the MDGs than the HIV/AIDS treatment campaign. In 2000, nearly 30 million people were infected, the vast majority in Africa, where only approximately 10,000 people were in treatment and over one million people were dying every year from the disease. The next year, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development publicly deemed large-scale AIDS treatment in Africa impossible. Undeterred, Annan launched the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which aims to achieve "long-term outcome and impact results related to the Millennium Development Goals."

Spurred by the launch of the MDGs, Jim Yong Kim, then head of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS department, introduced the "3 by 5" initiative in 2003, which aimed to have three million people living with AIDS in the developing world receiving treatment by 2005. By the end of 2005, only 1.3 million people were receiving treatment-fewer than half of the target. But thanks to the interwoven AIDS-MDG campaign, the notion of service delivery targets has sunk in globally, helping expand AIDS treatment by orders of magnitude: also in 2005, the G-8 and the UN General Assembly endorsed a target of universal access to treatment by 2010, backed by major financial commitments. The MDG movement has expanded the world's ambitions in tackling health crises and made extraordinary progress. In 2011, more than eight million people worldwide were receiving AIDS treatment.

NEXT-GENERATION GOALS

The MDGs have proved that with concentration and effort, even the most persistent global problems can be tackled. The post-2015 goals should remain focused on eliminating the multiple dimensions of extreme poverty, but they also need to address emerging global realities. These new challenges include the worsening environmental pressures affecting the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, the growing number of middle-income countries with tremendous internal poverty challenges, and rapidly spreading noncommunicable diseases.

The new goals also need to be matched with resources. Without the Monterrey agreements of 2002 and the financial commitments made at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, the MDGs might well have faded from the international agenda. It is crucial that the post-2015 negotiations not be left solely to foreign and development ministries. Finance ministries will need an equal say on many of the most central issues and therefore need to be included from the beginning. Other relevant ministries, such as those that deal with health and environmental issues, should be consulted regularly. Additionally, in preparation for 2015, multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank and UN agencies, should conduct independent external reviews of their contributions to the MDGs and identify benchmarks for post-2015 success based on the results. And the United States needs to join the international community in making a solid commitment to long-term, goal-oriented foreign aid.

The MDGs have helped mobilize and guide development efforts by emphasizing outcomes. They have encouraged world leaders to tackle multiple dimensions of poverty at the same time and have provided a standard that advocates on the ground can hold their governments to. Even in countries where politicians might not directly credit the MDGs, the global effort has informed local perspectives and priorities. The goals have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. They have shown how much can be achieved when ambitious and specific targets are matched with rigorous thinking, serious resources, and a collaborative global spirit.

Looking forward, the next generation of goals should maintain the accessible simplicity that has allowed the MDGs to succeed and also facilitate the creation of better accountability mechanisms both within and across governments. In addition, the new goals need to give low- and middle-income countries a greater voice in shaping the agenda. Most important, momentum matters. Just as progress in individual MDG areas has inspired other campaigns, so work done now, in the final stretch, will affect what happens in the future. The results achieved by 2015 will mark an endpoint, but even more, they will provide a springboard for the next generation of goals. There is no time to lose.

More than a decade after the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ample confusion persists regarding their genesis. In particular, many people misunderstand the relationship between the contents of the September 2000 UN Millennium Declaration and the original MDG Targets that were extracted from that Declaration. As recently as 2012, I have heard senior global policy figures state a belief that, “The Millennium Declaration did not establish any quantitative targets. Those were set afterwards.” This is not correct. All of the MDGs’ original formal Targets were established in the Millennium Declaration.

The roots of the misunderstanding probably lie in the U.S. government’s stance from mid-2001, when the MDGs were first used as a policy term, through September 2005, when President Bush first used the words “Millennium Development Goals” in public. During the interim period, U.S. officials would commonly state that, “The United States supports the goals of the Millennium Declaration but not the Millennium Development Goals,” or that “The United States supports Goals 1 through 7 but not Goal 8.” When looking at the actual contents of the Millennium Declaration and the original MDG Targets, neither statement is logical.

The following describes the issues through the form of an FAQ structure.

1. Which Targets were taken directly from the Millennium Declaration?
All of the original MDG Targets were taken directly from the Millennium Declaration. Following the September 2000 Millennium Summit, the UN General Assembly mandated Secretary-General Kofi Annan to prepare a long-term roadmap towards the implementation of the Millennium Declaration. Annan in turn commissioned Assistant Secretary-General Michael Doyle to coordinate a process to extract the development-related outcomes of the Millennium Declaration and thereby crystallize the priorities for follow-up.

In working through the prose of world leaders’ commitments embedded in the body of the Millennium Declaration, Doyle and his team (which included people like Jan Vandemoortele of UNDP and others from UNICEF, the OECD, World Bank, IMF, UNFPA and later WHO) identified a subset of 18 politically agreed commitments, which they categorized under eight overarching “Goals.” These 18 commitments were labeled as “Targets.” Ten out of the 18 Targets were quantitative in nature and nine out of ten set a deadline for 2015, the exception being the slum dweller Target for 2020. Table 1 lists the original 18 MDG Targets next to the relevant passage(s) from the Millennium Declaration. [The 18 Targets were later expanded to be 21, based on 2005 intergovernmental agreements, as described under point #6 below.] Appendix 1 includes the complete Development section of the Millennium Declaration.

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• Declaration of the MDGs

Last week, in two separate regional consultations (in Africa and in Asia) on education in the post-2015 agenda, a wide range of representatives focused on the importance of an equitable learning agenda that defined learning as going beyond literacy and numeracy.  This groundswell of support for the inclusion of a robust measure of learning was also reflected at the global Learning Metrics Task Force Meeting in Dubai.

African Regional Consultation

On February 28, 2013, 35 delegates representing civil society organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research institutes and think tanks consulted with the African Union on the post-Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) education agenda and recommended priority areas for the post-2015 framework.  The meeting, held in Addis Ababa, was organized by the African Union in collaboration with Save the Children, UNICEF and the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA).  In his opening address, Ned Olney, Save the Children’s Ethiopia country director, spoke on the current state of education in Ethiopia to emphasize that inequity and learning gaps remain key challenges to children’s education across the globe and must be addressed in the post-2015 development framework. 

The delegates at the Addis Ababa meeting developed guiding principles, priorities and strategies to inform the global and continental post-2015 framework based on a variety of position papers and views put forward by the Africa Network Campaign on Education For All, UNICEF, UNESCO, the Global Campaign for Education, the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, the Commonwealth Education Working Group and the Outcome Document of the Regional Consultations on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. In the guiding principles developed at the meeting, equity is highlighted as a major priority, including the need to focus on marginalized populations such as girls, ethnic minorities, communities in hard to reach areas, and children with disabilities.  The principles also call for equitable distribution of provisions and schools targeting these marginalized groups.  Another principle highlighted was ownership of and broad-based participation in policy processes at all levels, involving communities and civil society organizations.

The meeting identified three priority areas for education the post-2015 framework:

• Quality education, which translates into learning outcomes at all levels (early childhood development, technical and vocational training, and primary, secondary and tertiary education).
• Equitable and inclusive access to education at basic, secondary and tertiary levels.
• Literacy and skills development.

Among the strategies identified to meet these priorities were a focus on life skills training, the promotion of skills for youth employability, and strategies for measuring learning outcomes for 21st century skills (commonly defined as including critical-thinking skills, collaborative working skills, and skills for utilizing information and communications technology).  Dr. Bernice Njenga, the head of the Education Division of the African Union, will bring the recommendations from the meeting in Ethiopia to the Africa Wide Consultation on the Post-2015 Development Agenda in Tunis (March 11–12), which will inform the development of the African position on the post-2015 development agenda, which will then be presented to the African Union Summit in May for adoption by member states.

Asian Regional Consultation

At the same time as delegates were meeting in Addis Ababa, 4,193 miles away in Bangkok, Thailand, over 120 stakeholders from the Asia-Pacific region were meeting at the Regional Thematic Consultation on Education in the Post-2015 Development Agenda, co-organized by UNICEF’s regional offices for East Asia and the Pacific and for South Asia and UNESCO Bangkok.  Delegates included representatives from governments, international, regional, national and local NGOs, universities and academia, teachers’ unions, and organizations for youth and for persons with disabilities .

Throughout the consultation, there was a definite shift in the discourse from access to education to learning, which goes beyond literacy and numeracy to include cognitive and non-cognitive skills, psychosocial skills and critical thinking.  There was also a clear focus on equity and the need to ensure equitable learning across gender, ethnicity, caste, socio-economic class, disabilities, geographic region and age.  Delegates highlighted the importance of skills like resilience and the ability to adapt to and manage crises and disasters, given that the world is rapidly changing, politically, socially and climatically.  Young people in particular emphasized that education should be relevant to their context and linked to employment.  There was a welcomed focus on governance, moving beyond discussions of financing and budgets to the need for education systems that are more accountable to communities and less corrupt.  While delegates agreed that that education is the responsibility of the government, the delegates also deemed partnerships with civil society, the donor community (including the corporate sector) and local communities increasingly important for realizing the goal of quality education for all.

The outcome document of the Bangkok meeting articulates recommendations for a) equitable and inclusive access to and participation in learning, b) quality of learning, c) global citizenship, skills and competencies for life and work, d) governance, financing and partnership/cooperation, and e) possible scenarios and options for how to best articulate and position education in a post-2015 development agenda.  Within the recommendations for how to articulate an education goal, the outcome document asserts, “quality learning for all should be an overarching, universally relevant goal, with possibility of flexible adaptation in terms of target setting at national and local levels. In order to ensure that education goals contribute to narrowing disparities within a country, it is crucial to set targets for—and systematically monitor—disparity reduction.”  The draft outcome document also states that the goal for education in the post-2015 development agenda could embrace the following key aspects: “To guarantee equitable opportunities for all to participate in transformative quality learning at all levels aiming to provide the knowledge, skills, competencies and values vital to achieve inclusive and sustainable development.”

What Comes Next

These two regional consultions have revealed a collective vision regarding education priorities for a post-2015 development agenda: equitable learning that goes beyond literacy and numeracy to foster broader cognitive and personal development and ensure full participation in modern economies and societies. This vision is in line with the vision that has emerged from the global Learning Metrics Task Force and position papers released by Save the Children, the Basic Education Coalition and The Global Campaign for Education U.S. Chapter, among others.

The outcomes of these two consultations will contribute to the debate at the Global Leadership Meeting on Education on the post-2015 agenda in Dakar, Senegal, on March 18-19.  At that meeting, high-level participants will develop recommendations around an education goal, including how progress will be measured.  The outcome document will eventually influence the High-Level Panel’s report and the debate on the post-2015 development agenda at U.N. General Assembly meeting.  When it meets in Dakar, the education community should speak with voice on a goal that prioritizes the issues that have emerged across the consultation processes: to amend the current MDG emphasis on access to education to include a focus on equitable learning.

The remaining debate about how to balance global- and country-level targets and metrics and to do so in a way that measures learning beyond literacy and numeracy is being tackled by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Educations’ global Learning Metrics Task Force.  When the report from that bodies’ February 20-21 meeting in Dubai is released this month it will help to bring global voices and evidence to the remaining questions of targets and metrics.

From Kenya to India to the United States, world leaders are realizing the global learning crisis that threatens to rob millions of children of the fundamental human right to education, and the knowledge and skills required for well-being and prosperity in the 21st century. Well before Education for All (EFA) was endorsed in 1990, educators recognized that providing access to schooling without also ensuring student learning is an empty promise. With a new set of global development goals on the post-2015 horizon, what can the education community do now to catalyze a shift in global focus and investment from universal access to ensuring access plus improving learning opportunities and outcomes worldwide?

Beginning with the End in Mind

To help answer this question, the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) has undertaken an 18-month-long process of research, global consultation and consensus-building on learning measurement with education stakeholders around the world. Taking a cue from effectiveness guru Stephen Covey, the LMTF process is designed to force the education community to “begin with the end in mind.” Accordingly, Phase I of the project sought to identify the learning end-goal by answering the question, what do all children and youth need to learn in order to succeed in the 21st century?

Considering recommendations from a working group of experts chaired by Seamus Hegarty— visiting professor at the University of Warwick and former chair of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)—the task force decided in its first in-person meeting in September 2012 that indeed there were important competencies that all children and youth should master no matter where they live in the world. The first report from the task force, Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Learn, presents a broad, holistic framework of seven learning domains, with various competencies in each, as the aspiration for all children and youth across the globe. The seven domains are:

• Physical well-being
• Social and emotional
• Culture and the arts
• Literacy and communication 
• Learning approaches and cognition
• Numeracy and mathematics
• Science and technology

After establishing what children should learn, Phase II of the project works back to the preceding step: how will we know whether learning is occurring under each of the seven domains? More specifically, how can we measure and track progress in learning at the global and national levels? The Measures and Methods Working Group of 60 experts in education and assessment, chaired by César Guadalupe, Associate Researcher at Universidad del Pacífico in Perú, is currently working to provide technical guidance to help the task force address this question.

A Meeting in Dubai

On February 20-21, the working group presented its recommendations on this topic to the task force at an in-person meeting hosted by Dubai Cares. Representatives of the education community convened from all over the globe to focus their collective expertise on the issue of learning measurement. Among the 44 attendees were representatives of low, middle and high-income countries; stakeholders from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and Oceania; key U.N. and multilateral agencies; regional bodies; teacher organizations; civil society; and bilateral donor agencies. Not in attendance but still heard were the voices of the more than 500 individuals from 49 countries who submitted comments on a previous draft through public consultation. 

With so many diverse constituencies and perspectives at the table, task force members engaged in vigorous debate over the two days. Here we highlight a few of the most contentious topics, and then outline the decisions that emerged from the meeting.

Key Debates

Scope of Measurement and Unintended Consequences

In formulating its recommendations, the task force faced the challenge of striking a delicate balance: how to communicate the importance of all seven learning domains presented in the Phase I framework, while also identifying just a small set of measures for tracking at the global level.

Some members worried that pulling out just a few domains for global measurement might signal to policymakers and education systems that the other domains are less important. This might in turn have the unintended consequence of limiting diversity in national curricula or driving donor funding toward narrow learning goals. Others argued that the task force must limit its recommendations to no more than a handful of clearly articulated goals, or risk having noneducationalists do the job and potentially leave learning out of the post-2015 agenda altogether.

In the end, the task force agreed that it was necessary to identify a small number of measures for tracking at the global level and selected six specific domains of measurement. To guard against unintended consequences, the task force proposed a new global measure that would track the breadth of learning opportunities young people received; namely, are children and youth being given the opportunity to learn across all seven learning domains? The task force also emphasized the need to operationalize the global domains of measurement while simultaneously helping to build measurement capacity at the national level. 

International Comparability and Statistical Rigor

Assessments such as PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA are regarded as the gold standard for internationally comparable learning assessment. However, a country can spend up to $250,000 to participate, plus the costs to administer the tests, which can be substantially more. On the other hand, some national assessments have high levels of statistical rigor and provide information that is often more relevant to the individual country context.

The following questions regarding international comparability were hotly debated, both within the working group and at the task force meeting:

• Should global learning goals be measured in an internationally comparable way, that is, using the same measures everywhere? Or is it also valuable to use a common tool globally that would allow some basic information to be compared globally but would mainly enable countries to track their own progress over time?

• Do all countries have the interest or the resources to participate in the international assessments currently available? Drawing a parallel to the pharmaceutical industry, should the education community make available “generic” (as opposed to branded) test items as a global public good?

• How do large-scale international assessments impact policy and practice to improve learning outcomes? Is the information generated from assessment more useful to high-income countries? How can international assessments provide information beyond “static league tables”?

Task force members finally agreed that international comparability was important in some areas, such as reading comprehension and mathematics, but measuring learning using a common tool to compare progress over time, or equity in learning outcomes, could also be useful in tracking progress toward global goals.

Measuring Learning in School and Out of School

Some task force members argued it is pragmatic to focus measurement efforts in schools not only because it is economical, but also because the primary aim of large-scale assessments is to influence education policy and school systems. And after all, isn’t the goal to get all children into school? But other members were concerned that a continued focus on measuring learning within schools, where the majority of current assessment efforts are focused already, would lead to further exclusion of out-of-school children and youth. With an estimated 61 million primary-age-children out of school, clearly the access agenda is unfinished. Still others pointed out that given current trends and the proliferation of learning technologies, learning might take place in a wider range of contexts in the future. How can the task force’s recommendations allow for these innovations?

The task force decided that access indicators (on enrollment and completion) should be paired closely with learning indicators to maintain a focus on getting children into school while also improving learning outcomes. Furthermore, the task force promotes a broad definition of schooling that allows for a range of intentional learning contexts (e.g., job-embedded learning, nonformal programs, distance learning), beyond the walls of the traditional school building.

Accounting for a Diversity of Contexts and Learning Levels

The task force recognized that while some (mostly high and upper-middle-income) countries participate in rigorous national and internationally comparable assessments, others have a very limited “culture of evaluation” and therefore limited information on how well their education systems are functioning. Another challenge is how to account for existing learning levels in countries where a large proportion of learners would score below the lowest internationally benchmarked levels. Expanding internationally comparable tests to these contexts would not give policymakers, educators or the general public information about what the problem is or how to fix it.

There was general consensus among task force members that building on internationally comparable assessments was advisable in some contexts, but may not be a good fit for countries where vast numbers of children are unable to read in the language of the test. In these environments, additional tools would be necessary to capture all learning levels.

Task Force Decisions

After hours of debate and deliberation on these topics, both in small break-out sessions and as a whole group, the task force came to consensus on the following set of decisions.

The task force has identified six domains of measurement that represent important learning opportunities for children and youth to enable them to become effective global citizens:

1.) Access to and Completion of Learning Opportunities

Rationale:Children and youth must access, and most importantly complete their education.This domain addresses the unfinished access agenda for out-of-school children and youth and emphasizes the importance of tracking completion, which currently is not done systematically. It also allows for a broad definition of schooling, including any intentional learning programs, whether formal, nonformal or virtual. Evidence shows that the skills and knowledge needed for global citizenship are rarely learned outside of intentional learning activities.

2.) Exposure to a Breadth of Learning Opportunities Across all Seven Domains

Rationale: Children and youth should have a breadth of learning opportunities that, at a minimum, covers the seven learning domains. It is expected that an even broader set of competencies is necessary at the national and local levels; however, the task force recommends that the breadth of learning that education systems offer, at least across these seven domains, be tracked globally.

3.) Early Childhood Experiences that Result in Readiness for Primary School

Rationale: The early childhood years are critical to later learning and development. Entry to primary school is a key milestone in a child's learning trajectory, and measuring school readiness can help drive improvements in preprimary education, health, family services, etc. Because of the varying rates at which young children develop, a holistic measure across multiple domains is the best way to capture learning at this stage. School readiness is broadly defined and typically includes aspects of learning related to at least five of the seven domains: physical well-being, social and emotional, literacy and communication, learning approaches and cognition, and numeracy and mathematics.

4.) The Ability to Read and Understand a Variety of Texts

Rationale: Children and youth must be able to communicate in their mother tongue and in the primary language of instruction. Foundational reading skills necessary for learning to read are critical for functioning in modern society, in addition to the ability to comprehend and analyze complex texts through a variety of media. This domain encompasses both primary and lower secondary levels.

5.) The Ability to Use Numbers and Apply this Knowledge to Real-Life Situations

Rationale: Children must be able to count and understand mathematical concepts both to make informed economic choices and to pursue advanced learning in such disciplines as science, engineering, economics, research, technology, etc. This domain also encompasses both the primary and lower secondary levels.

6.) An Adaptable, Flexible Skill Set to Meet the Demands of the 21^st Century

Rationale: Beyond literacy and numeracy, children and youth need a variety of skills across the seven learning domains to succeed in the 21st century. Administered in lower secondary, this domain of measurement might cover multiple competencies such as environmental awareness, collaborative problem solving, information communications technology digital literacy, and social responsibility.

Information for these domains of measurement would be collected using internationally comparable assessments in some cases, such as reading comprehension and mathematics, and using alternative assessments for others. Data collected against these domains of measurement should describe average achievement levels in addition to progress over time and equity across groups (girls/boys, urban/rural and wealth levels, at a minimum).

The task force also recognizes that a system of global measurement will only be effective in improving learning outcomes if there is a simultaneous focus on improving capacity within countries to conduct and use learning assessments. The Measures and Methods Working Group proposed the establishment of a neutral international body, which may be an expansion of an existing agency, to operationalize these recommendations. In Dubai, the task force agreed to explore the feasibility of such an advisory group to track progress against the global domains of measurement and help build national capacity for measuring learning. In Phase III of the LMTF project, the Implementation Working Group will investigate this idea further and conduct an analysis of how to best translate these recommendations into practice.

Next Steps and Phase III

The next steps in the process include the April release of the task force’s final recommendations from the meeting in Dubai. A more detailed technical report on the Phase II process and results will follow.

The third and final working group on implementation will convene from March though August 2013. Led by Dzingai Mutumbuka—chair of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) and former minister of education of Zimbabwe—the Implementation Working Group will consider, among other things:

• The feasibility of setting up a neutral international advisory group on global learning measurement.

• How governments can convene stakeholders to improve learning measurement across the seven learning domains.

• What resources and financing would be needed to implement task force recommendations.

• How to operationalize the two proposed domains of measurement for which there are currently no global measures (i.e., breadth of learning opportunities and 21st century knowledge and skills).

In July 2013, the task force will meet for a third time in person to hear the working group’s proposal.

Finally, a word on project scope. As originally conceived, the job of the Learning Metrics Task Force is to build consensus around global aspiration for learning and the measurement of learning outcomes. The task force recognizes that this is only one small piece of the larger quality puzzle, albeit an important one. Assessments alone will not improve the quality of instruction or learning environments; rather, they provide a better understanding of outcomes to enable policymakers and educators to develop strategies for improving learning, while taking into account many other factors. In response to multiple requests for the task force to make recommendations regarding inputs, such as curriculum, instruction, etc., discussions are now underway to explore whether there should be an LMTF Phase IV to expand the project scope beyond learning metrics.

To receive regular updates on the task force’s progress, send your name and email address to LearningMetrics@brookings.edu. Or visit brookings.edu/learningmetrics for more information.

More than 120 education stakeholders from civil society, youth, private sector, foundations, academics, governments and the United Nations met last week in Dakar, Senegal to review global education progress achieved since 2000, discuss the remaining challenges, and develop recommendations around an education goal for the post-2015 development framework.

Gordon Brown succinctly captured the spirit of the conference discussion in a blog based on a video message he delivered to the Dakar conference, writing that “universal learning is a goal of goals, or a super goal,” because without education we cannot unlock the other development goals, such as employment opportunity, gender equality, environmental care and good health. He concludes that “this is not just about education. It is about achieving the promise of globalization: that there is opportunity for all. Education should be reversing, not reinforcing, inequalities. Let us make sure that with stepping stone targets for education that focus not just on enrolment but on learning too, we can make the next 15 years even more successful for education than the last.”

In their deliberations, the delegates reviewed a wide range of existing proposals and inputs, including recommendations from the U.N.-led global thematic consultation on education, on how to address these challenges. Despite differences on a range of issues, a clear consensus on four priorities emerged during the discussion. The organizers summarized the deliberations as a call for: “equitable, quality life-long learning for all.” The four areas of consensus include:

• Equity: A post-2015 education goal must include a clear focus on reaching the marginalized, and in particular populations affected by conflict and disaster were frequently mentioned, as were people living in poverty, ethnic minorities, rural girls and those living with disabilities.
• Quality Learning: The goal must also include a strong emphasis on improving the quality of learning outcomes and experiences, something which the existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have failed to do.
• Expanding Access to More than Just Primary Education: The goal must include a continuum of learning opportunities from early childhood on.
• Cross-Cutting Nature of Education: The post-2015 development agenda must include education as a cross-cutting issue that supports other development goals. One way for this to be operationalized is to produce targets that integrate education is into other development sectors such as health and the environment. The idea of conceiving of education as helping building resilience across a range of other issues was introduced in this light.

A similar consensus around these themes of equity, learning and the need for a learning continuum from early childhood through adolescence was cited in the summary report of the global thematic consultation on education: Education in the Post-2015 Development Agenda. This report, which is still in draft form, presents the main themes from the education consultations that have taken place since late 2012, including the global online forums focused on equitable access to education, quality of learning, global citizenship, jobs and skills, and governance and financing of education. The report highlights two priority themes, or imperatives, for the post-2015 development goals on which there is consensus within the global education community: equitable access and equitable quality education, and specifically learning, within a rights-based approach that focuses on tackling inequalities.

Priority One: Equitable Access

As the report from the global thematic consultation on education notes, equitable access to all levels of education remains a key gap in the education agenda. The education Millennium Development Goal focuses on universal primary enrollment; however, there is abundant evidence that education begins at birth and continues in post-primary opportunities, whether through secondary schooling or nonformal technical and vocational education. Thus, the global education report asserts the need for a “foundational commitment” in the post-2015 framework to a goal focused on equitable access across the learning continuum. Within the report, the learning continuum is conceived of as universal coverage for early childhood care and education, from birth to school entry (0 to 8 years), through to basic education, or nine years of schooling that includes lower secondary education.

Priority Two: Equitable Quality Education, Specifically Learning

The global education report states that good quality equitable education and learning emerge “at the heart of the post-2015 education agenda” and that there is an emerging consensus on an education goal with learning as a proxy measure of quality. The report notes that this could be couched in broad terms such as ensuring that all children are prepared for school entry and “leave school with measurable learning standards and the skills, knowledge and values to become responsive, active and productive members of society and the world.”

This is in line with the recent vision laid out by the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF)— a global effort engaging over 800 people, the majority from the global south, across 70 countries— in its report, Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Learn. The report presents a broad, holistic framework for learning beyond literacy and numeracy. While being able to read and write are critical for enabling all girls and boys to access a broader education, these core skills are far from sufficient. In addition to reading and numeracy, children need to learn relevant transferable skills such critical thinking, problem solving, civic values, mental health and well-being, and 21st century skills such as communication and technological literacy, to prepare them for the workforce and to be active, productive members of their communities.

The global education report and discussion in Dakar also highlighted the importance of having equity as a cross-cutting aspect underpinning these two priority areas of equitable access and equitable learning, with a strong focus on marginalized and vulnerable groups. In particular, gender equality and the needs of children and youth affected by emergencies have been singled out.

The Next Challenge: Targets and Metrics

As noted in the global report and discussed at the Dakar conference, now that there is broad agreement on the themes of an education goal, the challenge will become setting targets and metrics. Across all discussions, there is a debate about balancing global and country-level goals and metrics. It is clear that global goals must reflect national priorities and that more attention must be paid to neglected contexts such as conflict and post-conflict contexts, as well as to those countries with the least promising education metrics. However, one of the lessons from the Millennium Development Goals is that clear internationally comparable measures of progress have acted as a significant spur to global progress. Striking this balance between such goals and allowing for national or regional-level discretion is one critical question, not just for education in the post-2015 framework, but for all policy areas.

The Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) met last month to discuss these challenges and identified a small number of measures for tracking at the global level that should feed into the discussion of targets and metrics moving forward. The task force emphasized the need to operationalize these while simultaneously helping to build measurement capacity at the national level. The six areas for measurement that are important to enable children and youth to constructively participate in a globalized world are:

1. Access to and completion of learning opportunities through enrollment and completion indicators.
2. Early childhood experiences that result in readiness for primary school through a schoolreadiness indicator.
3. The ability to read and understand a variety of texts through a learning to read indicator and reading to learn indicator at the primary and secondary level.
4. The ability to use numbers and apply this knowledge to real-life situations through numeracy indicators at the primary and secondary level.
5. An adaptable, flexible skill set to meet the demands of the 21st century through an indicator still to be developed (e.g. collaborative problem solving).
6. Exposure to a breadth of learning opportunities across all seven domains (physical well-being, social and emotional, culture and the arts, literacy and communication, learning approaches and cognition, numeracy and mathematics, science and technology) through an indicator still to be developed.

Information for these areas of measurement would be collected using internationally comparable assessments in some cases, such as reading comprehension and mathematics, and using alternative assessments for others. Data collected against these domains of measurement should describe average achievement levels in addition to progress over time and equity across groups (girls/boys, urban/rural and wealth levels, at a minimum). The work of the LMTF on this front will continue to inform the discussion on targets and metrics within the education community and an open consultation process will begin in mid-April.

The Dakar meeting discussions and outcomes will result in a synthesis report that combines all of the consultation outcomes to date, which will eventually inform the deliberations of the secretary-general’s High Level Panel (HLP) this spring and the secretary-general’s report to the U.N. General Assembly this fall. An explicit education goal focused on equitable access to learning opportunities should resonate well with the HLP as it addresses issues that are integral to ensuring sustainable development, equity and inclusive growth in the post-2015 development agenda. It is also a goal that is relevant to high, medium and low-income countries alike. The focus on equity, learning and a learning continuum from early childhood through to adolescence will also bind together the education discussion within the process to develop sustainable development goals with the post-2015 development framework. For the education community, this prioritization of equitable, quality life-long learning within the post-2015 development agenda will help bring a more coherent approach to the post-2015 development framework and the Education for All goals by addressing the most notable gaps and weaknesses between them.

Welcome to Education + Development, a new blog by the Center for Universal Education. Our blog will cover issues on global education, learning and international development, with a particular focus on the post-2015 development agenda process. Over the next two years, we will regularly blog on the process toward creating the new development agenda that will replace the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to expire in 2015. In addition, we will track the progress toward achieving MDG 2 – to provide high quality education for all boys and girls.

Our blog will also examine issues at the heart of the global education and development debate, provide updates on the Learning Metrics Task Force, and analyze the latest research, policy initiatives and developments impacting global education, including:

• Addressing inequality and improving equity in education financing
• Reaching marginalized communities
• Providing access as well as quality learning opportunities for all children
• Promoting youth skills and livelihoods
• Weighing education provision through the strategic use of public and private funding  
• Engaging corporate philanthropy in global education

Our hope is that the Education + Development blog will serve as forum for Brookings scholars and guest contributors to have a dynamic dialogue on the critical issues impacting education in developing countries and also serve as an online space to collectively share information and new ideas.

We have included several previous blog posts on the progress thus far in the post-2015 discussions, which serve as a foundation for continued debate and engagement from all members of our community.

We look forward to sharing new blog posts with you and welcome your thoughts and input.

Warm regards,

Rebecca Winthrop
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Universal Education 
@rebeccawinthrop

Following the final meeting of the U.N. secretary general’s High-Level Panel (HLP) of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda in Bali, Indonesia from March 25-27, panel members are now engaged in drafting a report that will recommend the vision and shape of a post-2015 development agenda that responds to the global challenges of the 21st century.

Last week, in an effort to inform the writing of this report, HLP members received a consensus brief, Equitable Learning for All elaborating on a vision and goal for education within the post-2015 development process. This brief was developed in response to members of the HLP’s request for consensus from the education community around a specific theme and vision for the post-2015 agenda. It was developed from an analysis of the many voices that have provided input for the post-2015 education consultation process, and it has been endorsed by 93 civil society organizations (CSOs) and other partners around the world, the vast majority of which are from the global south.

Given the role that quality education and learning play in empowering people to make informed decisions that impact their families’ well-being and equip them with the skills to live healthy and productive lives, the brief recommends that the post-2015 development agenda include education as a cross-cutting issue that affects all development goals. In addition, it calls for an explicit education goal focused on ‘equitable learning for all,’ encompassing equity, learning and the need for a learning continuum from early childhood through to adolescence. The brief states that the post-2015 development framework must focus on reducing the learning gap between the poorest and richest children, and girls and boys, through targets that promote equity, emphasizing the need for particular attention to rising inequality within countries. Finally the brief identifies six measures for tracking learning for all at the global level drawn from the work of the Learning Metrics Task Force, itself a global effort engaging over 800 people across 70 countries, the majority of which are from the global south.

Voices from the Global South

Civil society organizations play key roles in working with communities to ensure that global and national-level policies reach those for whom they are intended. As such, CSOs are strong advocates for social change at the community level, with their success rooted in their ability to organize, build consensus and mobilize community stakeholders who are willing to work for the change they desire.

Therefore, local and national CSOs from Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as regional and global CSOs such as the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), the Global Fund for Women, Pratham and ASER Centre were eager to give input into and eventually sign onto this brief as a show of solidarity around a common global goal. Organizations requested their names be added while articulating the importance that they saw in having a unified global voice for action; for example:

Tanzania Home Economics Association stated:“because we believe [in] one voice to positive change and [that] Education is the only possible way to escape poverty…[we] would like to be officially signed on to the brief.”

“[We] ask you to have Chikanta's name added to the brief as a sign of consensus around the importance of equity, learning, and the need for a learning continuum.... Indeed we would like to take part.” - Chikanta Community Schools Development Zambia.

“African democracy and good governance will not prosper without investing in education. We strongly support united international action for access to quality education for all and let the post 2015 MDGs speak!”– Pemba Island Relief Organization (PIRO) in Tanzania.

CSOs are already working to improve learning within their communities. Building consensus with and among them will only lead to faster change at the grass-roots level. Indeed, it is through the consensus building amongst and between CSOs, and the many stakeholders invested in educational improvement, that an equitable learning for all agenda can gain momentum and have a real chance to succeed beyond the pages of a post-2015 framework. Hopefully members of the HLP will heed this call.