The 6th High Level Group Meeting on Education for All (EFA) ended in Cairo Thursday with participants urging for "higher spending and more targeted efforts" to meet the "large and urgent" EFA challenges by 2015.

 

The meeting, co-hosted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Egyptian education ministry, opened Tuesday night. The meeting "takes place towards the end of another significant year for development and for education," said a final communique. "Education is higher on the political agenda and many countries have made efforts to raise educational budgets," it said.

 

The newly-published 2007 EFA Global Monitoring Report indicates that further progress has been made by the EFA with over 37 million more children in primary school from 1999 to 2004, said the communique.

 

And more countries have abolished school fees and education aid is on the rise. Two-thirds of the 181 countries with data have now achieved gender parity at primary level. But the remaining EFA challenges are large and urgent. For example, of 781 million adult illiterates only 100 million will achieve literacy by 2015 at current rates of progress, said the communique.

 

The communique recommends that countries spend 4-6 percent of national income on education and that donors raise levels of predictable and long-term financing to reach the US$11 billion required annually for universal primary education, adult literacy and early childhood care and education (ECCE).

 

Participants worldwide committed themselves to a stronger focus on ECCE and advised that governments and aid agencies increase funding to ECCE substantially above current levels.

 

As education is a key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals participants called for stronger integration of education sector planning with broader development objectives at both national and international level, said the communique.

 

The communique said attendees to the meeting stressed the central role of education in responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and urged stronger links be developed between the education sector planning and the commitment to universal access to HIV/AIDS prevention, care, treatment and support by 2010.

 

The communique also called for "innovation and new investment" in adult literary saying the current situation in which one adult in five lacks literacy skills was "unacceptable."

 

Some 35 education ministers worldwide, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura and leaders of aid agencies and civil society organizations attended the three-day meeting. Senegal will host the next High Level Group Meeting on EFA on December 11-13 of 2007.

 

(Xinhua News Agency November 17, 2006)