The global community has 1,000 days left to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Success in getting all girls and boys in school and learning by 2015 will depend on driving support to the countries and communities that are the most left behind. The eve of International Monetary Fund-World Bank Spring Meetings presents an important window of opportunity to highlight the concrete actions needed for reaching the marginalized and accelerating progress in universal education and learning.
On April 17, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings hosted a discussion on two of the major roadblocks that are preventing all children from entering and staying in school: the financing gap and the quality gap. With donor aid for education decreasing and the health sector receiving 16 times more financing from the private sector than education, there is an urgent need to make more effective use of existing resources to education and to find new ways of significantly increasing resources available. In addition to resources, the quality of education is holding back progress, and new data shows the growing disparities between and within countries in providing all children equal opportunities to learn and complete their education. Panelists debated the best ways of addressing both of these important issues.
Editor’s Note: An interactive feature, highlighting the key findings from this report, can be found here.
Over a billion people worldwide live on less than $1.25 a day. But that number is falling. This has given credence to the idea that extreme poverty can be eliminated in a generation. A new study by Brookings researchers examines the prospects for ending extreme poverty by 2030 and the factors that will determine progress toward this goal. Below are some of the key findings:
1. We are at a unique point in history where there are more people in the world living right around the $1.25 mark than at any other income level. This implies that equitable growth in the developing world will result in more movement of people across the poverty line than across any other level.
2. Sustaining the trend rate of global poverty reduction requires that each year a new set of individuals is primed to cross the international poverty line. This will become increasingly difficult as some of the poorest of the poor struggle to make enough progress to approach the $1.25 threshold over the next twenty years.
3. The period from 1990 to 2030 resembles a relay race in which responsibility for leading the charge on global poverty reduction passes between China, India and sub-Saharan Africa. China has driven progress over the last twenty years, but with its poverty rate now down in the single digits, the baton is being passed to India. India has the capacity to deliver sustained progress on global poverty reduction over the next decade based on modest assumptions of equitable growth. Once India’s poverty is largely exhausted, it will be up to sub-Saharan Africa to run the final relay leg and bring the baton home. This poses a significant challenge as most of Africa’s poor people start a long way behind the poverty line.
4. As global poverty approaches zero, it becomes increasingly concentrated in countries where the record of and prospects for poverty reduction are weakest. Today, a third of the world’s poor live in fragile states but this share could rise to half in 2018 and nearly two-thirds in 2030.
5. The World Bank has recently set a goal to reduce extreme poverty around the world to under 3 percent by 2030. It is unlikely that this goal can be achieved by stronger than expected growth across the developing world, or greater income equality within each developing country, alone. Both factors are needed simultaneously.
In the ongoing debate over learning outcomes and measurement in the lead up to the post-2015 framework, the education community risks falling victim to the old English proverb, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” We want global education goals but local adaptation, if not local origination. We want goals that are practical and can be measured realistically while also sufficiently ambitious and forward-looking. However, we may indeed be able to “have our cake and eat it too” if we use very precise language and realize the need to put into place goal-seeking rather than goal-setting processes. This is the spirit behind an upcoming report from the Methods and Measures Working Group of the Learning Metrics Task Force scheduled for release in June 2013.
Crafting a Goal That is Both Global and Local
One key distinction needed is between goals versus metrics. Goals motivate while metrics measure. What is often overlooked is that goals can be lofty, long-term and universally applicable yet still be locally adaptable. An example of such a goal is: All children should be able to read at proficiency, by the end of the primary cycle in their country, according to their national curriculum. The metrics for this goal could be robust assessments of reading administered at the end of primary through a national assessment. Countries could then report on the percentage of children achieving proficiency based on their national curricula or, to use Keith Lewin’s concept of “yield,” they could report on the percentage of children completing primary school and achieving a certain level of proficiency.
Risks do exist, however, in defining a goal relative to national curricula. These same national curricula have been failing children in many countries for the last decade. Measuring a goal based on national targets may risk stagnating progress in learning outcomes and disincentize governments to make real improvements to education quality.
But this problem can also be addressed. In addition to a goal that measures outcomes relative to national curricula, countries can also measure their students’ achievement based on an international metric, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), or a regional one such as the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). Utilizing a robust metric and publishing the outcomes are good ways for national governments to make explicit their commitment to education quality and garner support from the global education and development community.
Practicality versus Long-term Ambition
In distinguishing between goals and metrics, there is also a tension between practicality versus long-term ambition that needs to be addressed. While we may want to have a goal to ensure that all children possess civic values and are prepared to be global citizens, we are confronted with a very practical reality that there are currently no widely agreed-upon metrics for these goals.
However, to propose that we not measure anything because we lack such measures is like throwing the baby out with the bath water (apologies for all the idioms). In fact, there are areas of learning where measurement is quite far along at the global level, such as reading and math. Therefore, there is a need for international bodies, like the International Bureau of Education, as well as civil society organizations, academia and other groups to have the resources to implement rigorous data collection for measurement and developing metrics.
In other cases, there are other competencies that are equally important but the metrics are not as well developed. However, not including these competencies would be setting our sights short, much like we limited ourselves a decade ago by only including access, and not learning, in the MDGs. In fact, research is currently underway to define and measure so-called “global competencies”, such as civic values, critical thinking and problem solving by the Learning Metrics Task Force and others. Choosing not to include these critical non-cognitive skills in an education goal that will span the next decade or two – when the metrics for measuring them may be available within the next few years – does a real detriment to the ultimate well-being of millions of children and young people worldwide.
Progress Needs to Be Measured
We also need to distinguish between metrics and setting benchmarks on those metrics. Goals should remain ambitious and long-term, and may use a both national metric and an internationally comparable metric. But countries may also wish to set intermediate benchmarks of progress on metrics as a way to set and chart progress. For example, if only 10 percent of a country’s children are currently proficient in reading, having a lofty, long-term goal of getting 100 percent of children to be proficient is daunting. An ambitious goal can depress more than motivate if taken seriously or, given its distant timeline, could simply not be taken seriously at all. Having intermediate benchmarks, with shorter timeframes and more realistic targets can motivate by setting attainable milestones and provide guide posts to reach the ultimate goal.
Finally, a distinction needs to be made between top-line reporting and sub-line tracking of indicators. For example, if the top-line reporting is on the percent of children who achieve proficiency in literacy and numeracy after nine years of education according to national curricula, there can still be multiple sub-line indicators that are essential to monitor. Participation in a common international or national assessment is one. Even if a country’s performance on an assessment is not its main metric, its outcomes on an assessment can still help explain and anchor the ultimate goal. It is also important to monitor measures that are pedagogical precursors: are children learning the basics of reading early on, so they can go on to become lifelong learners? Similarly, input indicators, such as teacher training and financing, are also important since they relate to and influence the ultimate goal.
What is Still Needed
What is clear from these debates is more work, and more coordinated work, is needed. Setting a simple top-down “requirement” that uses only one global curricular objective and only one metric is relatively easy but risks repeating mistakes from the past. Creating distinctions between goals, metrics, and benchmarks, and encouraging a subtle interplay between the global and the local, is harder but can ultimately lead to greater impact. This is something the Learning Metrics Task Force is grappling with in their global deliberations. A recommendation from the task force’s latest meeting is the need for an international multi-stakeholder advisory group that promotes collaboration among the different measurement processes and leverages financial and technical resources on measurement within the education sector. Such a body could help countries develop their own measurement systems, report learning outcomes, and stimulate work on measurement in areas where it currently does not exist. In other words, it could facilitate a goal-seeking rather than goal-setting process.
St. Louis Room The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW Washington, DC
Around the world today, there are more than 15.5 million refugees and over 28.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by conflict, in addition to some 32.4 million displaced in 2012 from their homes due to natural disasters. These displacement crises are not simply humanitarian concerns, but fundamental development challenges. Forced migration flows are rooted in development failures, and can undermine the pursuit of development goals at local, national and regional levels.
Linking humanitarian responses to displacement with longer-term development support and planning is not a new concern. Beginning in 1999, for example, the “Brookings Process” – under the leadership of Sadako Ogata and James Wolfensohn – sought to bridge humanitarian relief and development assistance in post-conflict situations. But the challenge remains unresolved, and has acquired new urgency as displacement situations are becoming more protracted, and situations such as the Syrian crisis show no signs of resolution.
The Brookings Global Economy and Development Program and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement held a roundtable on these issues on May 14, 2013 with Sadako Ogata, former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, former Director of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Megan Bradley, Fellow with the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, facilitated the roundtable, which followed Chatham House rules.
The roundtable addressed several key topics including:
The relevance of the concept of human security to addressing displacement and development challenges
Displacement as a development challenge in fragile states
Protracted displacement
Contrasts in the approaches and processes adopted by humanitarian and development actors
The event report provides a brief overview of the discussion.
While the next set of global development goals are being debated around the world, those who actually will be responsible for achieving them are also voicing their concerns. As reports are being drafted, working groups assembled and high-level panels convened, we shouldn’t forget that it is today’s young people who will be tasked with carrying out the next development agenda.
Time and again young people identify education as a primary concern and as a response to the myriad of development challenges we face. And more and more we are hearing that it isn’t just any education that is important, but one that imparts the necessary skills, values and competencies to develop productive, healthy and engaged global citizens. Through a series of youth consultations led in part by Restless Development, a global youth-led development agency, youth have outlined their priorities for the next development framework. In a summary report following online and in-person consultations with over 700 youth, there was resounding agreement that learning outcomes must be included in the post-2015 agenda and all young people “should have the right to be educated and literate, and have access to quality services that support that right. Access to nonformal education (such as youth clubs and youth groups) is also particularly important for young people’s growth and development.” Restless Development is also empowering young people with tools to conduct their own post-2015 consultations with other youth and providing a platform for young people to voice their priorities at each of the U.N. secretary general's High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Agenda's meetings.
As part of the official U.N. process to feed into the next set of goals, Genwa Samhat and Chernor Bah, two members of the U.N. secretary-general’s Global Education First Initiative’s Youth Advocacy Group, were invited to the U.N. Post-2015 Thematic Consultation on Education held in Dakar, Senegal. At the meeting, stakeholders from across the education sector came together to articulate priorities for education in the next development framework.
Genwa and Chernor brought a valuable youth perspective to the meeting by outlining the world they want to emerge as a result of the post-2015 framework. They also reminded participants of the world that children and youth live in now. Genwa, who grew up in Lebanon, spoke candidly to the discrimination millions of girls face, saying “I live in a world where I am defined not by who I am, but by my association with men: as a sister, a daughter, and ultimately the expectation that I will become someone’s wife.” She has borne personal witness to the many barriers to girls' education – one of her friends was forced to drop out of school and marry at the young age of 15 and now has three children to care for. Similarly, discrimination due to disability, race, class and sexual orientation deny many in her country the opportunities to study, work and fulfill their potential.
Chernor grew up in war torn Sierra Leone, where he stated that “simply being born in a poor country…could be an intrinsic disadvantage with limited opportunities to access education and hence limited opportunities in life. It’s a world where the advent of conflict…often means that schools are burned, teachers run away and hope of a better life through education is dashed.”
Speaking on behalf of the thousands of young people who have contributed to the post-2015 discussions they declared, “Young people want a world where location of birth is not a permanent life sentence, where everyone – irrespective of their circumstances – has access to that fundamental human right of good quality education. Young people also want a world where girls have the same opportunities as boys, where they are not forced into marriage but given the chance to have an identity and fulfill their dreams. It has to be a world where no form of discrimination is allowed to stand.”
In addition to participating in the global education meeting, youth have been engaged throughout the post-2015 process. On the United Nation’s World We Want platform, which housed 11 thematic e-discussions, young people contributed to, and even moderated, many of the conversations. In particular, they emphasized the need to improve education governance, address corruption and recognize the role a quality education can play in fostering global citizenship. Nina Tchangoue, a member of the Youth Advocacy Group, wrote: “learning should be linked to global issues that will develop the interest of youth to become engaged global citizens.” Similarly, according to the recent results of the My World survey, a global survey of more than 560,000 people from 194 countries, respondents under the age of 25 voiced “a good education” as their number one priority.
Youth representatives around the world are urging the United Nations, governments and education policymakers to move beyond a focus on access to schooling to include a commitment to children’s learning outcomes as well. They are encouraging policymakers to strive for a world where schooling and the lessons learned outside the classroom equip young people with the skills needed to be active global citizens, skills that go beyond reading and writing, such as critical thinking, technological literacy and comprehensive sexual education.
Upholding the Promises Made to all Children at the Millennium
While young people around the world have been participating in the post-2015 discussions, they have also made it clear that the next set of goals will hold little legitimacy if the global community does not honor its original commitments made in 2000.
One effort to ensure we don’t forsake the initial set of promises was a series of Learning for All Ministerial meetings held in Washington, DC in April. National leaders from seven countries – which are home collectively to half of the world’s out-of-school population – and development partners identified concrete steps to urgently deliver real results for the millions of out-of-school primary-aged children. Thanks to a commitment to meaningful youth participation by the meetings co-hosts, U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown, World Bank President Jim Kim and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, young people were included in many of the high level discussions and chosen to speak as experts on numerous panels. David Crone, a youth representative from Plan UK, spoke alongside World Bank and civil society experts about the marginalization and lack of opportunities young women in particular face in staying in school and learning. Similarly, Sumaya Saluja, another member of the Youth Advocacy Group, spoke on a Brookings panel about the critical role that youth can play in tackling challenges in the education system in India. Brookings also spoke with two of the members, Joseph Munyambanza from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Anna Susarenco from Moldova, about their personal stories and commitments to education for all.
One of the most valuable parts of having youth leaders at the Learning for All Ministerial meetings was that, alongside their expertise, they brought an untarnished belief that real progress is possible. The Youth Advocacy Group was given the last word in a morning of events convened by the U.N. special envoy for Global Education and they reminded the policymakers in attendance that they will be held accountable for the commitments made that week: “We can only hope that these past three days have been as empowering and inspiring for you as they have been for us. And do not think for even a moment that we have not been monitoring the outcomes and what has been said, because we have, and not to scare you, but you will be held accountable, because our progress depends solely on everyone's willingness and ability to commit to what they said they would do. Nothing is more depressing than progress hindered because of inaction.” The Youth Advocacy Group and young people worldwide are committed to doing their part to achieve the current Millennium Development Goals and design a next set of development goals that reflect the rights, needs and desires of the generation that will be at the helm of implementing them.
Data play an important role in global efforts to end poverty. Data are relied on to determine the prevalence of poverty and its characteristics, to quantify and allocate global resources devoted to reducing poverty, and to assess whether investments to help the poor ultimately work. Good data can inspire confidence in poverty reduction plans and enable results to be rigorously pursued; weak or absent data reduce the goal of poverty reduction to a matter of faith.
This paper is concerned with the central data issue in poverty analysis: counting the number of people who live in poverty around the world. It describes various problems encountered in calculating global poverty estimates and their implications for the accuracy and application of poverty data.
Understanding and awareness of how poverty is measured is generally very low in the development community. This is surprising given the focus on reducing poverty and the frequency with which poverty numbers are cited. Part of the reason for this is that poverty measurement is a deceptively complex field. This paper is intended to expand understanding and awareness by singling out the most important issues and explaining them in layman terms.
Poverty is defined here by the narrowly construed, but widely used, income-based poverty line of US$1.25 a day. This poverty measure is employed in the first and foremost Millennium Development Goal (MDG1a) – to halve the rate of global poverty by 2015 from its 1990 level. It will almost certainly be used again in any successor target as part of a new set of global goals. The reliability of poverty estimates based on this poverty measure is therefore pivotal to the credibility of the MDG and “post-2015” agenda.
The overarching message of the paper is threefold. First, counting the number of people living in poverty worldwide is difficult. It incurs technical, resource, coordination and institutional challenges. Second, the availability and quality of poverty data has improved dramatically over the past two decades. At the same time, however, certain weaknesses within the data have crystallised. Third, there is scope to significantly improve the quality and usefulness of poverty data through a combination of immediate reforms and longer term investments.
The paper is structured as follows. It begins by briefly explaining how global poverty numbers are obtained. It then explores weaknesses in the data organised around three core problems: the reliability of household surveys; adjustments for prices; and timeliness and frequency issues. Next, it describes the underlying constraints to improving poverty data. A concluding section looks at data solutions and the ways in which the scope of, and demand for, poverty data are changing.
In 1990, 56 percent of Africans lived on under $1.25 a day accounting for 15 percent of those in poverty worldwide. Over the subsequent 20 years, the region’s poverty rate dropped to 48 percent. However, given the superior pace of poverty reduction elsewhere and Africa’s faster population growth, Africa’s share of global poverty doubled. Our baseline scenario anticipates a continuation of these trends: sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate is expected to fall further to 24 percent by 2030, representing 300 million people, but its share of global poverty balloons to 82 percent.
The constraint facing these remaining poor can be characterized in two ways.
First, the poor may not be moving fast enough to reach the $1.25 threshold. This is a function of the rate of economic growth in the countries in which they live, and the degree to which this growth is equitable. Historically, sub-Saharan Africa has experienced long stretches of anemic growth. During the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the region grew at just 2 percent a year, which meant that GDP per capita fell given the rate of population growth. Though growth in the region as a whole has improved in recent years, some countries continue to underperform and there are concerns that the benefits of Africa’s growth are not being shared by those near the bottom of the income distribution.
Second, the poor in Africa may start too far behind the poverty line to stand a chance of reaching the $1.25 mark any time soon. Even under an assumption of strong and equitable growth, 20 years may be insufficient to lift these people out of poverty given the distance they have to travel. As critics of the Millennium Development Goals have shown, setting targets in absolute terms risks putting goals out of reach for those starting furthest behind.
Which of these impediments best captures sub-Saharan Africa’s challenge: are the region’s poor moving too slowly or starting too far behind?
To help answer this question, it is useful to first establish some parameters linking past regional trends, today’s circumstances and future prospects.
Over the last decade, sub-Saharan Africa’s economies have together mustered an impressive 5 percent growth a year, or around 3 percent in per capita terms (see Table below). Evidence from household surveys suggests that this has, on average, translated into gains for the poor: of the countries in the region with available data, half saw per capita consumption of the poorest 10 percent of their populations rise by 3 percent or more a year during the period. Forecasts indicate that growth rates should remain high in the foreseeable future, so it is not unreasonable to expect that a 3 percent annual increase in income is sustainable for many of those living in poverty.
This rate would be sufficient to lift those currently living on 70 cents or more above the $1.25 a day poverty line by 2030. This level happens to be around the average daily income of the poor in sub-Saharan Africa today. Twenty-two percent of Africans live between the 70 cent and $1.25 mark, while 25 percent live further back on under 70 cents.
Of course, Africa’s aggregate economic performance masks considerable differences between countries, and the location of the region’s growth engines doesn’t align exactly with the location of its poor. Over the past decade, 11 economies in the region experienced virtually no growth (Benin, Central African Republic, Comoros, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Madagascar and Swaziland), while four economies are expected to stagnate over the coming years based on present forecasts (Comoros, Madagascar, Malawi and Swaziland). For these sluggish performers, the pace of progress is such that living within reach of the poverty line today offers little assurance of escaping poverty in the foreseeable future. Three percent of Africans in 2030 are expected to be poor simply because their country growth rates lag behind regional performance. These individuals start between 70 cents and $1.25 and remain there two decades later. We classify these poor people as moving too slowly.
On the flipside, not all those living below 70 cents today are destined to remain in poverty. For those living in countries whose growth is forecast to exceed the regional rate (including Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana) a fast-track route of poverty may be possible. By 2030, 5 percent of Africa’s population could be out of poverty despite standing below 70 cents today, by virtue of super-charged growth rates.
For the majority of those starting below 70 cents however, the $1.25 mark stands too far in the distance. Many of these are accounted for by countries where the average daily consumption of the poor currently stands at under half the global poverty line: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and Zambia. By 2030, 21 percent of Africa’s population will be poor having stood behind the 70 cent mark today.
Of these individuals, three in five would have a chance of escaping poverty if they had started at the 70 cent mark, based on the speed at which their economies are growing. Their paltry initial income is their binding constraint. We classify these individuals as starting too far behind. For the remainder, starting at 70 cents wouldn’t be enough to bring them out of poverty as they also live in slow-growing countries. We classify these individuals as being both too slow and too far behind.
The pie chart below illustrates how the 300 million Africans that are expected to remain in poverty in 2030 are classified across the three categories.
What conclusions can be drawn from this exercise?
First, there is a danger in getting carried away by sub-Saharan Africa’s aggregate performance. The region’s renaissance over the past decade masks development failure in several African economies. The same holds for its distribution trends: while, on average, the benefits of growth are being shared by those at the bottom of the income distribution, this is clearly not the case everywhere. Moreover, a focus on aggregate trends misses one of the biggest historical challenges to Africa’s economies: their volatility. This is especially a challenge in Africa’s fragile states, where the benefits from growth episodes are quickly undone during periodic reversals.
Second, if the global community wishes to focus on the world’s gravest needs, then a greater focus on Africa is surely justified. The rise in Africa’s share of global poverty expected over the next two decades is startling, as is the distance from the international poverty line that most of the region’s extreme poor currently stand. The term “extreme poor” doesn’t seem to do these people justice. Furthermore, the large number of individuals whose escape from extreme poverty is constrained by both being both too slow and too far behind gives some indication as to the complexity of solving Africa’s poverty challenge. Without a concerted effort, the goal of eliminating poverty in a generation will remain just a vision.
The High-Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda and its secretariat are to be commended and thanked for its report, A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development. The paper is both visionary and realistic, places roles and responsibilities on government, civil society and the private sector, and should appeal to the responsible business person and the practical civic activist – a balance created by the thoughtfulness and comprehensiveness of the framework set forth in the report.
In picking up this report, don’t expect to comprehend it through reading only the executive summary or just focusing on the 12 suggested goals. The report sets out a single, comprehensive framework that needs to be read in its entirety.
From an American perspective, the overall frame reflects our approach to development. For several decades we argued whether development is best promoted through economic growth or human development. This nonsensical debate was finally put to rest with the 2004 legislation creating the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), whose statutory mandate is to pursue poverty alleviation and broad based economic growth – the same as the overarching approach recommended by the High Level Panel.
The report clearly articulates why a single, integrated sustainable development agenda is appropriate:
Without ending poverty, we cannot build prosperity.
Without building prosperity, we cannot tackle environmental challenges.
Without environmental sustainability, we cannot end poverty.
The report makes a careful transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to a new set of global goals. It gives full credit to the power and success of the MDGs and recognizes that 2015 does not close the chapter on them. It further recognizes that the world has dramatically changed since the MDGs were adopted and that they did not at the time nor today represent the full scope of development. So, the new framework continues the important goals of the MDGs and suggests additional ones that more fully incorporate the complexity of development by integrating the range of economic, social, environmental and governance aspects of development.
A close read of the report is required not just because it is the entire framework that must be understood, but also because it is the details that bring it to life and reveal the deep integration of the goals. Further, a quick skim leaves the impression that key ideas are missing – equity, democracy and free enterprise. But a full read reveals that these concepts are incorporated into the framework without using words that are apple pie to Americans, but loaded code words in certain societies.
Equity is not in the suggested goals or indicators, but throughout the framework is the notion of leave no one behind and that every relevant income and social group is to be reached before a goal is considered achieved. More explicitly and importantly, there is appropriate attention to the role of women and girls and the need to end discrimination and violence against them.
The word democracy does not appear, but the elements of democracy do – active civic participation, accountable government, transparency, independent media, freedom of speech and open political choice. These concepts should make democratic governments and organizations applaud the framework and autocratic governments question their own conduct.
The word free enterprise does not appear, but responsibility is put on governments to respect the rule of law and property rights, and to create the economic and regulatory environment in which enterprise can prosper.
The agenda presented in the report goes beyond assistance to other government policies and responsibilities, in both developed and developing countries, in areas such as trade, taxation, job creation, resolution of conflicts, management of natural resources and illicit capital flows. It is universal in that it applies to all countries and to all elements of society.
The report states that all parties are responsible for monitoring progress in these areas and are accountable for achieving the goals and indicators. In that regard, it appropriately recognizes the critical role of good data and calls for a data revolution to improve the quality of statistics and information, which should be available to all citizens.
It also goes further than prior reports and recommendations, which in recent years have recognized the role of government, civil society and the private sector, to also recognize the critical role of subnational government. It is the lower-level government institutions that often are responsible for the action that counts, such as administering rules and regulations, protecting the environment, creating jobs, educating children, etc.
While the report does set forth 12 illustrative goals, more importantly it identifies the criteria for selecting goals. The criteria for appropriate goals are: strong impact; compelling message; easy to understand; measureable; widely applicable; grounded in the voice of the people; and consensus-based. There will be considerable debate over the next two years as to the right goals and benchmarks, but these criteria seem to be a good place to start in assessing them.
Finally, a central theme of the report is the role of a new global partnership to bring together all elements of society to work together in pursuit of the new set of global goals and targets.
While the vision of eliminating poverty by 2030 will sound unrealistic to many, when you look at the financial resources available – the potential for developing countries to broaden the tax base, the opportunity of all countries to collaborate to reduce tax evasion, the untold rents in the resource extracting industries that are lost to constructive use, successful social support programs and the good jobs created by corporations that have integrated shared value into their business practices – it becomes clear that what is missing is the political will and the right policies and programs.
Hopefully the framework presented by the High Level Panel will create a frame for discussion and collaboration on a new set of global goals and targets that will help create the political will to end poverty in our time. But don’t take it from me, read the report in its entirety to see its great value.
Executive summary for the World We Want education consultation
Equitable, quality, lifelong education and learning for all.
Sustainable Development Solutions Network report
Effective learning for all children and youth for life and livelihood.
This is a welcome focus on access plus learning. Moreover, the HLP’s report specifically lists corresponding national targets for education:
increasing the proportion of children able to access and complete preprimary education;
ensuring that children can read, write and count well enough to meet minimum learning standards upon completion of primary education;
having access to lower secondary education and increasing the proportion of adolescents who achieve recognized and measurable learning outcomes; and
increasing the number of young and adult women and men with the skills, including technical and vocational, needed for work.
Taken as a whole, the HLP report builds upon the lessons learned from the current Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) efforts to get all girls and boys into school, but also lays the groundwork to ensure that children stay in school and learn.
Moving Forward
The HLP report identifies crosscutting development challenges including gender discrimination, conflict and crisis-affected environments, broader social inequality and an overall lack of – and urgent need for – data and better measurement. The High-Level Panel’s illustrative universal goals and national targets are not a prescriptive blueprint, but examples to frame continued debate. In order to achieve equitable learning for all, the education community cannot operate in a vacuum and will need to address gender, equity, conflict and other issues such as disability in the coming year as it seeks to refine its post-2015 agenda.
While the HLP report does not recommend a stand-alone goal for addressing inequality, it asserts at the outset that the transformative shift of leaving no person behind, regardless of ethnicity, gender, geography, disability, race or other status, is central to its vision. The report consistently reiterates the need to tackle inequality head-on in and across each of the universal goals they propose. In designing these illustrative universal goals “it would be a mistake to simply tear up the MDGs and start from scratch…new goals and targets need to be grounded in respect for universal human rights, and finish the job that the MDGs started.” For education this would include reaching the yet-to-be achieved MDG of universal access to primary education. The majority of the world’s 61 million out-of-school children are living in poverty, conflict settings or are consistently discriminated against populations such as girls, children with disability and ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities.
It was also encouraging to see the HLP report underscore the importance of both data and measurement. Reflecting on the success and weaknesses of the MDGs, the HLP report argues that goals without quantitative targets and deadlines will fail to provide the motivation and accountability necessary for progress. The education community, through the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF), has spent the last year tackling these same challenges in order to determine how best to measure learning outcomes. The recommendations of the LMTF on how to measure learning span across seven domains, ranging from literacy and numeracy to social-emotional learning and the arts. Subsequent LMTF reports will provide concrete recommendations for countries at various levels of capacity so that governments and organizations can not only track how they are doing, but also target policy to address areas of need. The HLP report calls for exactly this type of data across all sectors by recommending that new goals be accompanied by an independent and rigorous monitoring system, with regular opportunities to report on progress and shortcomings at a high political level.
The High-Level Panel’s optimism that the international community will succeed in eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 through a new global partnership that breaks with the outdated “high-income/low-income government-to government concept of the MDGs” is encouraging. While the panel’s recommendations are only the first stepping-stone in the longer-term process of developing the post-2015 agenda, we are encouraged by the holistic focus of the report as well as the specific education goal and associated national targets. As the Open Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals ramps up its discussions, including a focus on education in June, we hope that the recommendations of the High-Level Panel, and the broader consultation forums represented by the World We Want Education Consultation and Sustainable Development Solutions Network reports, are consulted and integrated into their deliberations.
InterAction 2025 M St NW #800 Washington, DC 20036
On June 20, 2013 the Brookings Center for Universal Education co-hosted an event with the Alliance for International Youth Development and Restless Development on how to ensure that youth feature prominently in the post-2015 development agenda. The recent release of the United Nations High-Level Panel (HLP) on the Post-2015 Agenda’s report, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development,” has prompted a conversation within the youth development community about how youth issues such as health, education, employment and political participation have the opportunity to be included in the post-2015 development agenda in an unprecedented way.
Speakers included Xanthe Ackerman, associate director at the Center for Universal Education at Brookings; Jamira Burley, executive director of the City of Philadelphia Youth Commission and member of the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative Youth Advocacy Group; Steven Feldstein, director of USAID’s Bureau of Policy, Planning, and Learning; and Victoria Forsgate, Global Advocacy manager at Restless Development. The event was moderated by Sarah Sladen of the Alliance for International Youth Development. The panelists discussed various challenges in ensuring that youth remain on the post-2015 agenda and the cross-cutting nature of youth issues overall. Panelists agreed that while youth have been included in the 12 goals suggested in the High-Level Panel report, having a specific thematic goal devoted to youth issues would provide more direction and accountability for the global community to make youth a priority.
Outcomes of the event included a discussion about specific actors at the global policy level to influence, such as high-level political targets like the Open Working Group, HLP members, U.N. agencies, donor governments, corporations, foundations and youth champions such as Queen Rania and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The participants also agreed to convene a conversation with different actors within the youth community to work collectively.
This weekend, global leaders, entrepreneurs, practitioners and public intellectuals will come together at the Brookings Blum Roundtable to discuss innovative ideas and advance groundbreaking initiatives to alleviate global poverty. This year marks the roundtable’s 10th anniversary and a time when the prospects for eradicating extreme poverty are arguably the best they have ever been.
In April, the World Bank confirmed that the first Millennium Development Goal to halve extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years ahead of schedule. Since 2000 alone, half a billion fewer people worldwide are living under $1.25 per day. In May, the U.N High-level Panel charged with developing a new global development agenda to succeed the Millennium Development Goals released its report and made ending extreme poverty by 2030 its central aspiration.
That report emphasized the role of the private sector, from small- and medium-enterprises to major global corporations, in accelerating progress on development. It argues that this role must expand to generate decent jobs for a rapidly expanding global labor force; to identify and scale up affordable solutions to meet people’s demand for food, quality education, housing, healthcare and other basic needs; and to plug the financial gaps associated with various global development challenges, such as the estimated $1-2.5 trillion annual shortfall in financing for climate change mitigation. At the same time, the private sector must become more accountable for its financial, social and environmental footprint and more models are required to demonstrate how the private and public sectors can effectively partner toward shared goals.
These issues will be front and center at this year’s roundtable, which will focus on the role of the private sector in the new development agenda. Among the topics for discussion are: the growth of private equity as a promising source of capital in the developing world; economic activity at the base of the pyramid, where businesses seek to serve poor individuals as consumers and suppliers, while also turning a profit; means of blending private and public finance to serve shared goals; barriers and solutions to enhance female entrepreneurship; and the work of the U.S. government in promoting and partnering with the private sector to support global development.
Over the past fortnight, India analysts have vied to offer the most compelling explanation of the country’s grim economic data—slowing GDP growth and a depreciating currency—and to identify policies that might turn these indicators around. Less than two months ago, the same experts were engaged in an equally excitable debate over a more positive set of economic numbers. After more than three decades in which the number of Indians living on under $1.25 a day consistently stood around the 400 million mark, the results from a new national survey unveiled by India’s National Planning Commission showed that this number had shrunk by around 100 million between 2009 and 2011. What had caused poverty to fall so far and so fast?
The two sides of the debate were provocatively captured in the title of an article in the Indian Express: The Great Growth-Dole Trade-off. Either India’s previously strong economic growth was sufficiently inclusive that the poor shared in its gains or expanding basic social welfare programs—in particular the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) and the food subsidy program—succeeded in reaching and helping many of the poor.
Two visions for ending extreme poverty
This dichotomy has a broader resonance. Today there is growing momentum behind the goal of ending extreme poverty worldwide over the next generation—a goal recently endorsed by the U.N. High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda and the World Bank. Behind this agenda are two competing visions for how extreme poverty can be eradicated which mirror the two sides of the Indian debate. One focuses on unlocking the potential for rapid and broad-based development through the economic transformation of poor countries; the other advocates the establishment of a global social safety net.
The distinction can be carried too far. The two visions are not mutually exclusive: they can be acted on simultaneously and can serve to reinforce each other. A social welfare program that guarantees adequate levels of nutrition, education and health provides the foundations for a productive and skilled labor force to drive economic activity and entrepreneurship. Conversely, a growing economy generates additional government revenues, which can be used to finance more comprehensive social protection.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to ask which vision offers the more likely path to a poverty-free world.
A recent study published by the World Bank provides some insights on this question. The authors analyze over a dozen countries that recorded a large decrease in poverty over the past decade. In each case they develop counterfactual simulations to determine the main drivers of poverty reduction. These drivers can be organized into three groups: increased labor income, whether as a result of increased wages or employment; increased non-labor income, reflecting social transfers, subsidies and remittances; and other factors, which include the demographic composition of households and their propensity to consume. The contribution of each set of drivers can then be quantified. (Note that this type of accounting exercise captures the proximate routes out of poverty but cannot explain the causes of poverty reduction, which would require an understanding of the relationships between different drivers.)
Figure 1 illustrates the contribution of the three sets of drivers to the reduction in $1.25 poverty recorded in each country. The results indicate that labor and non-labor income together account for the bulk of poverty reduction in all countries, but that the relative importance of each differs from country to country. In Bangladesh, Nepal and Peru, labor income, reflective of growing economic activity, was the predominant route out of poverty. In Argentina, Costa Rica and Moldova, public and private transfers played the leading role. In Brazil, Ecuador and Panama, both sets of drivers were significant. Aggregating across the results, labor income can claim a marginally greater role than non-labor income but the difference is small. In terms of the two visions for ending extreme poverty—inclusive growth or social transfers—both appear validated in equal measure.
Prospects for 2030
If that’s the past 10 years, what about the next 20? There are reasons to believe that the prospects for poverty reduction associated with each of these paths could change over time.
Consider first growth prospects. The last decade has seen a dramatic take-off in economic performance across much of the developing world with more countries converging with Western income levels, and convergence taking place at a much faster rate. Instances of super-charged catch-up are also becoming more common. Five years ago, the Growth Commission was able to identify only 13 countries that had experienced fast, sustained economic growth (averaging 7 percent or more over 25 years or longer) in the post-war period. If IMF growth forecasts are met, nine more countries, including five from Africa, will be added to this list by 2018.
Whether the turnaround in developing economy performance will be sustained is an ongoing question. One factor behind this turnaround, which there is every reason to believe is permanent, is the growing reverence for and practice of good economic governance across the developing world, such that fiscal balance, price stability, sustainable debt levels and current account balance are now the norm, including in many of the world’s poorest countries. (India’s macroeconomic ill-health looks decidedly tame compared to any historical benchmark.)
Questions have also been raised about the quality or inclusivity of growth in developing economies. The long boom in commodity prices has served as a catalyst for growth in some economies, especially in Africa, but resource extraction creates few jobs. The tried and tested model of inclusive development associated with East Asia’s economic miracle may become harder for others to emulate as supply chains unbundle and globalize, and as technology renders manufacturing increasingly capital and skill intensive. On the flipside, the rise of the global middle class will lead to an explosion in the demand for consumer goods creating manufacturing opportunities in which many countries can conceivably share.
Social transfers have enjoyed their own ascent in the developing world over the past decade. Inspired by the success of such programs in Brazil and Mexico, more than 40 developing countries are now experimenting with or establishing programs of their own. An estimated 750 million to 1 billion people are today beneficiaries of cash transfers in the developing world. A combination of new technologies—identification, communication, payment, digitalization and data processing—are being applied to make transfer programs easier to administer, more affordable and better targeted. And where governments show little appetite for establishing transfer programs, it has been shown that NGOs could conceivably pick up the slack.
However, for all the promise of social transfers, we remain a long way away from the establishment of a global social protection floor. In Brazil and Mexico where programs are at scale but impose conditions, it is notable that extreme poverty persists at a low level.
The relationship between poverty reduction and global development
Nevertheless, the attraction of social transfer programs is that they allow the goal of ending extreme poverty to be separated from the more ambitious but elusive quest for broader transformation with which global development is ultimately concerned. Inevitably some developing economies will struggle to grow consistently and to create good jobs over the next 20 years. In others, a fraction of the poor will remain excluded from the benefits of growth. In these cases, the potential for poverty reduction lies disproportionately with transfers.
In his excellent book, Getting Better, Charles Kenny documents the improvements in quality of life that have been recorded across the world, even in places where incomes have been stagnant. While advances in education, health and rights were possible over the past century despite the persistence of poverty, today it may be possible to eliminate extreme poverty despite the absence of development.
Poverty modeling exercises show that sustained, inclusive growth can drive massive progress in poverty reduction over the next 20 years. But they also reveal the limitations to this approach as the rate of global poverty approaches zero.
As poverty decreases, the share of the world’s poor living in fragile states is expected to rise. These are countries that by definition are prone to erratic, start-stop growth and where the benefits from growth episodes can quickly be undone during periodic reversals. Another group whose chances of making it out of poverty through inclusive growth are slim is those individuals who currently stand furthest below the poverty line. Of the 1.2 billion people living on under $1.25 around the world, 300 million survive on less than 70 cents a day and two-thirds of these are in Africa. Evidence from the World Bank study attests that the further individuals stand below the poverty line, the more reliant they are on transfers as the only feasible fast-track route out of poverty.
The best chance for ending extreme poverty over the next generation is to reconcile these two visions. The most viable route out of poverty for any individual below the poverty line depends on their particular circumstances. Neither an inclusive growth nor a social protection strategy can succeed on its own in all settings. Both strategies require greater support if they’re to be realized.
Last week, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings announced that former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has joined Brookings as a nonresident senior fellow. We are very excited to have Julia as part of Brookings and the CUE family and we are very much looking forward to working with her on our key initiatives on global education, particularly girls’ education in developing countries.
I recently interviewed Julia on her work on education reform in Australia, her decision to work with CUE on global education, and what advice she would give girls and young women around the world who are trying to overcome daily challenges just to get an education.
Rebecca Winthrop: When you were prime minister of Australia, you made education a top priority for your government. What was your motivation behind this and what do you think are your greatest achievements here?
Julia Gillard: Education policy was always the area closest to my heart because I knew from my own life experience the immense power of education to transform your future. My parents, both intelligent and hardworking, were denied access to education. They have both enjoyed long happy lives but undoubtedly they would have had different and richer lives if they had been given true access to education. In contrast, I was fortunate enough to get a great education and it made me. What is true for individuals is true for nations. I knew Australia would be a smarter, stronger, fairer country if we could improve education. I knew the lives of millions could be changed for the better. That's what drove me on.
RW: Why have you chosen to focus your efforts in particular on advancing global education after serving a long and distinguished career in government with achievements in many different policy areas?
JG: The same passion for transforming life's opportunities through education, which drove me in Australian politics, is driving me still. If we want our world to have the best possible future then we must maximize and harness the talents of all. If we want our world to have the fairest future then we must bring education's power to those now denied it.
RW: What do you think is the toughest challenge to improving education around the world, including in low and middle-income countries?
JG: The world has been mobilizing through the Millennium Development Goals to ensure universal access to primary school education. There is still more to do on access given we have around 50 million children not in school. But even as we address this and build access to more senior levels of education, the next tough challenge is ensuring the quality of the education provided. What lies before us is hard, rigorous work on measuring and improving quality.
RW: As the first female prime minister of Australia, you broke a lot of barriers. What advice would you give girls and young women around the world, particularly those in developing countries who face everyday challenges in just trying to go to school to get an education?
JG: I stand in awe of women and girls around the world who courageously strive to get an education and improve their lives despite the most hideous, violent persecution and grinding poverty. My life has been so incredibly easy by comparison. But if asked my advice, I would say always believe in your own power and strength to make a difference to your own life and the lives of others.
At last we have a roadmap. On 25 September, at a special event of the General Assembly, UN member states established a path and process for setting the post-2015 global development agenda. After an extended sequence of significant reports and recommendations over the past year, a short and matter-of-fact outcome document forged some core agreements, finessed some ongoing debates, and confirmed a basic timetable for the coming two years.
Many of the most important agreements were procedural. All countries agreed that the formal intergovernmental negotiations will start in September 2014 and will culminate in a summit of heads of state and government in September 2015. The word “summit” has a specifically elevated meaning in UN jargon, so this represents top-tier importance for the international system.
The General Assembly also commissioned Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to pull together “the full range of inputs” and to present a synthesis report before the end of 2014. Outsiders might consider this mandate trivial, but it represents a major de-escalation of intra-UN tensions. Following a series of intensive political debates, many General Assembly members have felt a need to remind the world that the Secretary-General works for them rather than vice versa. The mandate also provides clear space for Ban Ki-moon to make direct recommendations for post-2015, similar to Kofi Annan’s 2000 We the Peoples report, which helped to inform the landmark Millennium Declaration.
On matters of substance, countries made stepwise progress. They asserted poverty eradication as “the central imperative” of a post-2015 agenda, a subtle nod to continuing the core elements of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). But they also called for a “coherent approach” that “integrates in a balanced manner” the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, “working towards a single framework and set of Goals” applicable to all countries. This amounts to strategic ambiguity around whether the poverty and environmental sustainability agendas will be pursued through a unified or parallel set of goals. In plain English, “It will be nice if we can arrive at a single set of goals that applies to everyone, but we don’t know whether we will get there.”
Underpinning the universality debate is the hot-button concept of “common but differentiated responsibilities”. All countries have agreed to the concept but still fight bitterly about what it means in practice. At the core of cores, it asks the extent to which developing countries should pay a different price for fighting climate change and related problems compared to the rich countries that caused them in the first place.
A related debate pertains to peace, security and various components of governance. Many have critiqued the MDGs for their top-line agnosticism on issues such as human rights and the rule of law. The question is how to set measurable targets that all countries, ranging from China to the United States to Brazil and Nigeria, will agree to. The new outcome document agrees that a post-2015 framework should “promote” these things, but does not commit to set targets around them.
Finally, the General Assembly agreed that the key responsibilities over the coming year are delegated to its open working group on sustainable development goals plus a targeted expert group on “sustainable development financing”, both of which will need to make their recommendations before formal negotiations begin next September. Whatever the final composition of any post-2015 goals, at this stage the biggest unresolved issues hinge on decisions of economic policy and development finance, so the expert group will likely form a fulcrum for intergovernmental breakthroughs. It is co-chaired by Ambassador Pertti Majanen of Finland and former Nigerian Finance Minister Mansur Muhtar. If they can achieve the robust engagement of finance ministries and investment leaders around the world, they will have a strong chance change of success.
The world has never experienced such an intensive and broad-ranging intergovernmental process towards the confirmation of an agreed global agenda. Its multi-layered nature risks alienating outsiders who lack the time or inclination to master specialized diplomatic procedures. Fortunately, the General Assembly has also called for an inclusive approach that extends beyond traditional interactions with civil society and national parliaments and also includes local authorities, scientific communities, and the private sector. More than a million people around the world expressed their views over the past year. Empowered by the newly clarified timetable, hopefully hundreds of millions more will have the chance to share their perspective over the coming two years too.
Last week, I participated in a panel organized by the U.N. General Assembly Open Working Group, which is tasked with preparing a proposal on the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SDGs will build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and include economic, social and environmental dimensions. The panel included Amar Batthacharya, director of the G-24 Secretariat; Mukhisa Kituyi, UNCTAD’s secretary-general; and Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
What has become clear is that the current consensus for more and better financing for development will not be enough to meet the SDGs. In addition to the quality and quantity of finance, governments will need to come up with policies to associate financial flows with the other inputs of sustainable growth such as the transfer of skills and technology.
In the current vision for financing for development, which originates from the 2002 Monterrey Consensus and the 2008 Doha Declaration on Financing for Development, finance is a critical input for attaining the SDGs and governments should encourage more and better finance.
The more finance argument: Most of the money to finance sustainable development will continue to come from domestic resources. The High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda rightly stresses that countries should therefore continue efforts to invest in stronger tax systems, broaden their domestic tax base and build local financial markets. Raising domestic revenues to expand public services and investments remains vital for sustainable growth, and creates ownership and accountability for public spending. However, domestic revenues alone—especially in low-income and fragile countries—will not be enough given the scale of the resources needed to attain the SDGs. External finance, which includes official development assistance, private capital flows (foreign direct investment, portfolio and loan flows) as well as remittances and other flows will help complement domestic sources.
The better finance argument: External flows can bring risks such as the volatility associated with hot money (short-term and volatile capital flows). The vulnerability of countries to the volatility of private capital flows can be reduced by attracting more stable long-term finance from institutional investors including sovereign wealth funds, private corporations, development banks and other investors.
Encouraging more and better finance for development is good policy but it will not be enough. Beyond the quality and quantity of finance, it will be crucial for governments to “get a bigger bang for their buck” and ensure that the money they will raise will help achieve the SDGs in the most effective way.
The evidence on capital flows to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) illustrates this point, as the region has benefited from more and better finance since the 2002 Monterrey Consensus. Over the past decade, private capital flows to SSA have grown by 19.4 percent per year and have overtaken official debt assistance. Stable long-term flows in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) remain the engine of external finance to SSA with 75 percent of total private capital flows.
However, although SSA has attracted more and better finance in the form of foreign direct investment, about three-quarters of such investment went to resource-rich countries and in extractive industries over the past decade. The prospects for increased investment in this sector look strong given the discovery of new resources in the continent. Yet, in most SSA countries, the linkages between extractive industries, local firms and employment markets, and domestic financial systems are tenuous.
One way for governments to better leverage FDI flows for long-term economic growth in SSA is to associate them with knowledge and skills transfer from multinational companies to the domestic private sector. In the medium to long term, SSA policymakers can also anticipate the type of FDI their countries will attract and build a strategy in advance to develop the future technology and skills that will be needed for the expected investments. In the short term, policymakers can provide incentives for investors to include local businesses in the value chain and invest in education and training. This is increasingly happening, for instance, in the information, technology, and communications sector in SSA. Initiatives to develop local content legislation in resource-rich countries should take a flexible and strategic long-term view to meet the SDGs.
Other avenues for governments to better use finance to attain SDGs include the use of innovative technologies to increase financial literacy, financial inclusion and the use of green energy in power projects.
In sum, for finance to help attain the SDGs, governments will need to ask more than just money from financial flows. Including a requirement in the SDGs for governments to not only seek more and better quality finance, but also ensure that such finance supports sustainable development in the most efficient way would support this commitment. The process will also need to engage the private sector and an initiative like the U.N. Global Compact can provide a forum to discuss ways to make finance an effective input for achieving the SDGs.
The process for governments to extract non-monetary benefits from financial resources will need to include both domestic and foreign governments. In that regards, the recommendation of the High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda to infuse global partnerships and cooperation into all the SDGs should be supported.
The Millennium Development Goals conclude in just one year. As 2015 draws closer and closer, the development community, developing-country governments and African governments in particular are busy creating the Post-2015 Development Agenda, a framework for ending poverty and bettering the lives of all in the upcoming years.
As part of this effort, in May 2013 the United Nations High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons produced a report,A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development, that will guide development strategies globally and in sub-Saharan Africa. It outlines five “transformative shifts” crucial for the success of a future development agenda after the close of the Millennium Development Goals. Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Haroon Bhorat, director of the Development Research Policy Unit at the University of Cape Town, discusses what the findings of the High-Level Panel mean for Africa, and what is likely to be on the development agenda there for the upcoming year.
Importantly, the report identifies the importance of merging the demand for growth with sustainable development. The impetus is to grow economies without creating greater inequality. The report highlights this concept of inclusion in the first transformative shift: “Leave no one behind.” This idea is particularly relevant for Africa in 2014 because high level s of growth accompanied by rising inequality have become a major obstacle on the continent. In Nigeria, for example, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala estimates that only 10 percent of Nigerians are capturing benefits, such as increased income levels or employment, from the high levels of growth, leaving the remaining 90 percent behind. In his paper, Bhorat offers a number of suggestions on how to promote inclusive growth, emphasizing that African governments must focus on investing in sectors that have the potential for both growth and job creation.
Read Foresight Africa 2014, which details the top priorities for Africa in the coming year, to learn more about the need for inclusive growth in Africa’s development agenda.
For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice, and to make an end is to make a beginning. – T.S. Eliot
The year 2013 was a year of much discussion about learning. While conversations in years past often focused only on attending school, global events throughout 2013—post-2015 agenda consultations, Learning for All Ministerial meetings and the Global Education First Anniversary—focused on the more important question of how much knowledge students are actually gaining while in class. The essential discussion at these global events have put learning and the quality of education at center stage, spurred on by chilling estimates that 250 million children are not learning, even though many of them have spent time in school.
It makes sense to invest in the quality of education. A number of reports in 2013 have convincingly argued (and confirmed earlier research) that investing in quality education does not just transform individual lives, but helps achieve all development goals. Recent analysis by the Education For All Global Monitoring (EFA GMR) report shows that, if all mothers had a secondary education, physical stunting could be reduced by 26 percent and fertility rates would be cut by half, contributing tremendously toward healthy lives and family sizes that could be better cared for. Education also makes our planet safer and more sustainable. Education promotes tolerance and trust and people with more education have been found to care more about the environment. Others have highlighted that investing in education also makes business sense. Each dollar invested in education today by a typical Indian company returns more than $50 in value to the employer at the start of a person’s working years.
It will take time to move the needle but the collective knowledge about learning gathered in 2013 provides a strong basis for action in 2014. Four lessons stand out.
Let’s Measure What We Treasure
We cannot improve education outcomes without first being able to measure them. The United Nations’ high-level panel report on the post-2015 development agenda called for a data revolution to improve the quality of statistics and information available to citizens. In education this means improving the measurement and monitoring of learning, in addition to access. However, little is known about what children are learning in most developing countries. Less than 60 percent of all developing countries have national learning assessments and no international assessment covers more than half of those countries. Thanks to the Learning Metrics Task Force a consensus is emerging around global learning indicators and actions to improve the measurement of learning in all countries. Putting these recommendations into action will be the challenge for the coming year. This will require getting parents, communities and governments excited not only about getting children into school but also about what they are learning and how it is measured. The private sector can also play an important role. They can join efforts to develop appropriate assessment tools through initiatives such as the PISA for Development Initiative launched this year or support the development of technologies to collect and disseminate learning data. The predicted expansion of “leapfrog” technologies could also benefit the measurement and monitoring of education outcomes.
Equity is Key
In addition to measuring access and learning outcomes, improving education outcomes will require reviewing who gets what. Financing systems will need to be reformed to counteract existing inequalities. This is relevant for developed as well as developing countries. Recent studies have shown that countries that have adopted financing formulas that equalize the tax base and provide adequate funding for all districts, not just the wealthy ones, have tended to outperform others on the international PISA test (Canada is an example). In fact, the equitable allocation of funding may be more important than total spending in improving educational outcomes, which highlights the importance of establishing appropriate financial systems in nascent education systems in the developing world. (Here at Brookings, this topic is part of an ongoing work program on equitable finance at the Center for Universal Education (CUE). Findings will be presented at CUE’s annual symposium on February 24 and 25, 2014.)
Luckily, the “leave no-one behind” agenda has been at the core of development discussions this year and there is room for education to play an important role in putting this ambition into action. Equity targets in education have also been highlighted as fruitful stepping stones towards broader post-2015 equity goals that would be more difficult to address head-on, such as those related to income or wealth. Indeed, the EFA GMR estimates that over a forty-year period income per capita is 23 percent higher in countries with more equal education.
It can be done! It’s No Time to Scale Back Support.
Two striking facts should be driving those who choose where money is spent. First, done right, spending on education has fabulous returns. Second, it does not require huge resources to address the problem. After taking account of available domestic and donor resources, it is estimated that an additional $26 billion per year will be needed to make sure all the world’s children receive a quality basic education by 2015 (that is less than 4 percent of the U.S. defense budget). But some reports this year have highlighted that international support may be waning. Multilateral organizations have made education a lower spending priority. Private contributions are also falling short, amounting to just 5 percent of total aid from donor countries on the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD-DAC), a group of high-income states. A recent report by the Global Partnership for Education highlights a 16 percent decline in external aid for education in 2011 for its 58 low-income partner countries compounding an already challenging fiscal environment in many of these low-income countries. And while many countries have increased the share of funds put toward education in domestic public spending, many still fall short of the recommended 20 percent.
Efforts to scale optimal financing of education will also have to tackle the abysmal lack of financing data in education, and the lack of transparency and accountability in education spending. This year’s Global Corruption Report on education highlights huge financial losses due to misappropriation in education, amounting to $21 million over two years in Nigeria and double that amount in Kenya over five years.
Dynamic Systems—Not Blueprints—Are Needed
The Learning for All Ministerial meetings held in April and September 2013 highlighted that solutions to achieve proper learning outcomes for all are highly contextual, and attention will need to be paid to the political dynamics. While challenges in countries that participated in the Ministerial seemed remarkably similar, proposed solutions varied significantly. A summary of these solutions in 10 countries with the largest out-of-school populations will be presented in a series of blogs in the coming weeks. Lant Pritchett’s insightful new book underlines the need for a “Rebirth in Education” with fewer top-down, pre-determined “spider” system models and more open, flexibly-financed, locally-driven “starfish” systems. Successful systems will have common principles but lots of different methods for implementation. For example, Pritchett finds that financing systems can take different forms as long as resources are “flowing naturally into those schools and activities within schools that have proved to be effective”.The Center for Universal Education’s Millions Learning project, to be launched early 2014, will be examining those principles of successful scaling of learning in a number of developing countries. A better understanding of how to achieve learning goals will be important as the world gets ready to implement the post-2015 development agenda.
We have talked and learnt much about learning in 2013. Let’s hope 2014 is indeed a new beginning to put words and wisdom into action.
On December 11, the United Nations (UN) hosted the sixth session of the intergovernmental Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG). This session of the OWG served as a key opportunity for civil society voices from the Global South to inform policy discussions on the role of education in the post-2015 agenda. Though no specific goals have yet been determined, a consensus has emerged that improving learning should be at the center of the next development framework, including a focus on access to equitable learning opportunities.
Education experts from sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America shared recommendations at a side event arranged to promote an ambitious shift from the current Millennium Development Goal (MDG)—that focuses strictly on access to primary school—to a post-2015 education goal that would focus on access to equitable education and lifelong learning. Highlighting the problem of youth unemployment, Ambassador Csaba Kőrösi, co-chair of the OWG and permanent representative of the Republic of Hungary to the UN, called for not only keeping young people in the classroom but also making sure that the knowledge taught is applicable for the job market and society. Overall, there was broad consensus that learning must encompass not only literacy and numeracy, but also transferable skills like critical thinking, problem-solving and civic values—skills that prepare young people for the workforce and to be active, productive members of their communities. This shift will also require more support and capacity-building to enable education systems, teachers, parents and caregivers to better collect, disaggregate and analyze data on learning and identify the accompanying actions needed to improve learning outcomes in all countries.
Panelists from Colombia, Pakistan and Nigeria shared their experiences in working to improve learning outcomes and related proposals for the post-2015 agenda. Dr. Judith Ann Walker, co-founder and executive director of the Development Research & Projects Centre of Nigeria and a Brookings Echidna Global Scholar, called for the measurement of education inequality within countries, including the development of a regional parity index that goes beyond urban and rural. Moreover, she called for measurement of not only access to and completion of school, but also of learning outcomes through nationally applied metrics, drawing upon the recommendations of the Learning Measurement Task Force on improving learning outcomes worldwide.
Some cities have already begun working towards this goal of access plus equitable learning. The subsecretary of education for the City of Bogotá, Patricia Buriticá, shared the experience of Colombia’s capital city, where the government has been combining access to schools with “integral learning,” which includes math, natural sciences, mother-tongue literacy and a second language, social science, citizenship education, analytic skills, arts and sports. The city also focuses on offering good-quality preschool and inclusive education, strengthening secondary education and widening access to higher education. To support these efforts, the Bogotá government doubled its budget for education, spending an additional billion dollars per year in order to achieve public education excellence for all children and youth. Subsecretary Buriticá explained that the government believes this investment will pay off; with the most qualified human talent in the country, Bogotá will also have a stronger economy and government. This notion of viewing education spending as an essential long-term investment was echoed both by Ambassador Guilherme Patriota, Brazil’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, and Ambassador Kőrösi.
The OWG event also showcased progress toward the goal of access plus equitable learning in Pakistan. Baela Raza Jamil, director of programs at Idara-e-Taleem-o-Agahi, spoke about the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a citizens’ learning and accountability initiative that fills the gap in quality educational data by providing accurate, comprehensive and easy-to-understand disaggregated data across Pakistani households, villages, districts and provinces. Through household assessments carried out by citizens, ASER provides reliable data on children’s basic learning, compares the change in levels of learning from the previous year, interprets these results and uses them to affect public action and policy decisions at various levels. Reaching 251,444 children in 82,521 households, 4,033 villages, and 4,226 urban blocks in 2012, ASER’s results are shared with decision-makers to stimulate national debate and action. But ASER also takes the critical step of bringing the results back to their primary constituency of parents and communities to discuss and determine bottom-up action that can improve learning. As Dr. Raza Jamil explained at the event, “such a large data set is powerful because it renders data by geography, gender, income, and more. It is powerful and empowering for citizens to understand what this means; if it isn’t a wake up call for them, it won’t be a wake up call for the state.” If the goal of access to equitable, quality education and learning is to be attained globally, the post-2015 framework must be supported by reliable data and stronger accountability to children, parents, caregivers and communities. These stakeholders are uniquely positioned to hold education providers to account for learning, both through direct accountability relationships and through feedback to district and national-level duty-bearers.
Next Steps for the Post-2015 Process and the Education Community
The strategies and recommendations voiced on this panel can help to inform the post-2015 dialogue at national, regional and global levels in 2014. In advance of the beginning of inter-governmental negotiations at the UN General Assembly meeting in September 2014, the following four processes will be in play:
The Open Working Group will continue its work, gathering input until February 2014 and then, starting in March, negotiate a text for the new goals, which it will to present to the UN General Assembly in September 2014.
The UN's One Secretariat on Post-2015 will lead a new round of national, regional and global consultations focused on how to make the post-2015 agenda work, which will enable diverse stakeholders to share concrete strategies and models for implementing the post-2015 agenda, including strengthening capacities and institutions; participatory monitoring, existing and new forms of accountability; and partnerships with civil society and other actors.
This roadmap is important, as it provides clarity on the way that the global negotiations will proceed in advance of the final phase of UN member state negotiations, which will culminate in a summit at head-of-state level in September 2015 for the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda. This roadmap should give the education community an opportunity to engage with these key processes. In terms of informing the post-2015 discussions moving forward, it is now time for the education community to refine the WHAT and focus in on the HOW.
In terms of refining the WHAT, this means that the education community needs tospeak with one voice about what exactly we mean by learning and to put forward concrete targets and indicators for measuring learning. Fortunately, the education community has already begun this work through the Learning Measurement Task Force (LMTF), which has put forward a broad vision of learning represented by seven globally tracked indicators as a comprehensive package for member state representatives and other stakeholders to use in the post-2015 discussions (as well as outside of it, such as within Education for All discussions). The next step for the task force is to take collective action to develop the indicators and measures to track the seven areas globally, which will be completed in time for the post-2015 agenda implementation.
In terms of focusing in on the HOW, the education community must effectively communicate to policymakers at national, regional and global levels that an access plus learning agenda is feasible and share concrete evidence of where this is working and how. Much of the assessment data generated thus far on learning has been used effectively to communicate that education systems are not working in terms of improving learning. However, in the next phase of post-2015 negotiations with member states and post-2015 policymakers, the education community needs to use evidence to highlight what is working and to provide concrete strategies for achieving access to equitable, quality education and learningso that international community can begin to work toward not only the world we want to see post-2015, but also the world we need to see now.
In a recent op-ed in the Financial Times, Bill Easterly wrote “aid spending is a drop in the ocean of the budgets of governments that give it and the economies that receive it. Whether it works scarcely matters for development.” He goes on to say that “the obsession with aid is a rich-world vanity that exaggerates the importance of western elites.”
There is an alternative view that is probably closer to the truth. It is true that official aid, running at about $130 billion in net disbursements per year, is small compared to developing countries’ own revenue of $7.7 trillion (in 2010). But it is still the case that 20 countries rely on aid for over 40 percent of their total government expenditures. Some of these are post-conflict states like Liberia and Sierra Leone that desperately need to provide essential services to their populations in a peace dividend so as not to fall into a vicious cycle of recurring conflict and instability. Some have been ravaged by natural disasters, like Haiti. In almost all cases, these are among the least developed countries in the world, and in all cases aid is an essential ingredient of stability and a chance for progress. We would all cheer a reduction in aid dependency, but no serious person thinks that whether aid works scarcely matters for development in these places.
The true measure of aid’s impact lies in the difference it makes to the lives of people living in poverty. When used right, aid’s impact cannot be proxied by its magnitude in dollars. It is best viewed, as I have argued in a recent book, as an instrument for Catalyzing Development. There are countless examples of such catalytic impact, from China’s introduction of procurement reforms following their experience with international competitive bidding (and aid innovation) to the new mobile services that are ubiquitous in Kenya following the aid-inspired innovation of mobile money. The list goes on and on: insecticide treated bed-nets, antiretrovirals and many more examples. The impact can be measured in terms of lives saved, promoting gender equality, local accountability to citizens and empowerment of the poor, and ultimately access to jobs, livelihoods, social services and infrastructure. As any student of chemistry knows, a catalyst is an agent that provokes or speeds up action. It matters a lot, with small amounts affecting large changes. That is how the best form of aid is used.
But there is an easier way of telling whether aid matters. Ask people who are on the receiving end. I had the privilege of leading a small secretariat that supported a high-level panel of eminent persons on the post-2015 development agenda. That panel, co-chaired by President Sirleaf of Liberia, President Yudhoyono of Indonesia and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom, discussed the issue of the adequacy of aid and other forms of development financing at some length. The importance of aid was emphasized over and over again. Against that background, it is simply bizarre to imagine that “aid is a rich-world vanity...” It is a very pressing and central agenda for the heads of government of low and lower middle income countries, and for the civil society advocates from developing countries, who are surely not western elites. It is instructive that no serious academic from a developing country questioned the importance of aid. Many had views about how to use it better, but none questioned its importance. Easterly quotes Bill Gates as arguing that we should concentrate on how to make aid better. Based on my observations of the High Level Panel, Bill Gates is asking exactly the right question.
All this would be simply a matter of academic debate, if it were not for the fact that aid is today under serious pressure in OECD countries. Bilateral aid has fallen in several countries recently (and in aggregate) and replenishments of aid in important institutions like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria and the International Development Association have been smaller-than-hoped for. Partly this is the result of fiscal problems in these countries, but that is not the heart of the matter. Aid, as Bill Easterly rightly observes, is a small line item in the budget of those that provide it. A bigger problem is the political pressure from taxpayers in rich countries who are seriously ill-informed about the magnitude and impact of aid. Sweeping generalizations asserting how small the contribution is of aid to development are not only likely to be wrong, but can have real, adverse and unnecessary consequences for the lives of the least fortunate on our planet.
Of course, Africa’s aggregate economic performance masks considerable differences between countries, and the location of the region’s growth engines doesn’t align exactly with the location of its poor. Over the past decade, 11 economies in the region experienced virtually no growth (Benin, Central African Republic, Comoros, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Madagascar and Swaziland), while four economies are expected to stagnate over the coming years based on present forecasts (Comoros, Madagascar, Malawi and Swaziland). For these sluggish performers, the pace of progress is such that living within reach of the poverty line today offers little assurance of escaping poverty in the foreseeable future. Three percent of Africans in 2030 are expected to be poor simply because their country growth rates lag behind regional performance. These individuals start between 70 cents and $1.25 and remain there two decades later. We classify these poor people as moving too slowly. 
