The nearly man

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THE INSIDE VIEW

The tentative economic recovery in Africa that we report on pages 8-9 should not obscure the worsening crisis in education. Last year’s financial crisis pushed up food prices and unemployment but also prompted governments and institutions to cut education funding. Now the United Nations says its campaign to get every child into primary education by 2015 is faltering. Two reports published this week – from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and the British aid agency Oxfam – say this education crisis requires the same type of effort that was launched to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic. UNESCO estimates there is a US$16 billion shortfall in financing primary education in developing countries and that some 72 million children do not receive any education at all, although that is down one-third on a decade ago. To address this, Oxfam proposes a Global Fund for Education to be launched at the G-8 and G-20 summits in June. More than half of young adults in eleven African states have less than four years of education; in countries such as Burkina Faso and Somalia, more than half of all school leavers have less than two years of education. In northern Nigeria, more than 97% of poor Hausa-speaking girls have less than two years of schooling. Some governments are protesting at UNESCO’s reporting of ethnic differences in educational access, yet others are calculating the political cost of continuing to ignore the educational needs of their poorest voters.