Page 66 - Education for Development:George Psacharopoulos University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

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all countries of the world, they differ in intensity between high-income and low-

income countries.

Basic education coverage

A fundamental objective of education policy in all countries has been
to enroll and graduate all children aged 6 to 12 in primary education. This

objective has been achieved with a varying speed in several countries, mostly
high-income ones. Yet achieving this goal in low-income countries has remained
a challenge to date.

There is a long history of international organizations setting numerical
targets for education. As of today, none of these targets has been achieved. In
1961 Unesco convened a high level conference of African States in Addis Ababa

on the development of education Africa (Unesco, 1961a). A goal was set that
by 1980 primary enrolment in Africa should be 100%, relative to 40% in 1960
(Unesco, 1961b). Yet, by 1980 the net primary enrollment ratio in sub-Saharan

Africa stood at 56% (Unesco, 1993).
In 1990 the World Bank joined forces with Unesco, Unicef and the UNDP
to launch the Education for All initiative calling for universal primary education

by the year 2000 (WCEFA, 1990). Of course by 2000 the target was not
achieved, and it was shifted to 2015. The target was missed again, with about 60
million children out of school in 2015.

So a new target was set in the United Nations Post 2015 Millennium
Development Goals to achieve universal primary education by 2030 (UNDP,
2013). Based on past enrollment trends, this target very likely will be missed

again. According to the latest Unesco data, over 200 million children are still
out of school.