Post-Muscat: On track for equity, finance and measurability in the post-2015 education goals?

Pauline Rose, professor of international education at the University of Cambridge and former director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, reflects on progress and potential stumbling blocks towards finalizing agreement on a post-2015 education framework.

It was a great pleasure to attend UNESCO’s Global Education Meeting in Muscat this week to present the2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report. It was encouraging to receive feedback that the report is considered by many as an important reference point not only for progress towards the current goals but also for helping to inform the post-2015 global education framework.

There has been considerable progress in developing a post-2015 framework since the global meeting in Dakar in March last year. Until a few months ago, there were serious concerns about whether an education framework would be developed. It is now clear that there is a joint commitment for a new education framework to be integrated with a broader development framework.

We now have a robust draft, including an overarching goal with seven targets, which was widely supported and constructively debated at the Muscat meeting. While the targets were not changed at the meeting itself, the intention is to update them based on key points raised by participants at the meeting. The intention is to ensure that this framework is clearly linked with the broader development framework that is currently under preparation.

The EFA Global Monitoring Report has advocated for targets to be equitable, with sufficient finance, and measurable. How did the discussions in Muscat, and the document itself, fare on this basis?

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Member states, donors, and NGOs in Muscat universally criticized the targets for not including explicit language either on narrowing equity gaps or giving a specific focus to the marginalized. One outcome of the meeting is a commitment to edit the targets so they each include a particular reference to the issue. The sobering analysis in the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report that poor, rural girls only spend around three years in school in low-income countries, and that they are unlikely to achieve primary school completion for several decades, was an important source of evidence that helped to focus discussions on disadvantage in education.

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