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Het rapport 'Learning Generation' roept donorgemeenschap terecht op tot actie
19/09/2016

On 18 September, the International Commission for Financing and Global Education Opportunities (or simply Education Commission) published its report ‘The Learning Generation’. The message is sobering: “[…] if current trends continue, by 2030 just four out of 10 children of school age in low- and middle-income countries will be on track to gain basic secondary-level skills. In low-income countries, only one out of 10 will be on track.”

It goes without saying that this is not the education goal (SDG4) set by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. And yet, international assistance to education declined by nearly 10 percent in recent years.

With more than 250 million children out of school and another 330 million not achieving the most basic learning outcomes, the Education Commission is understandably calling governments to urgent action if we want to achieve the promise of SDG4 by 2030.

The Commission has devised a four-stage plan to turn this worrying trend around. It is a roadmap for creating the ‘Learning Generation’ and envisions to put all children on track to enter school by 2030:

  1. Put in place the proven building blocks of delivery, strengthen the performance of the education system, and put results first;
  2. Develop new and creative approaches to achieving results, capitalizing on opportunities for innovation in who delivers education, where and how, in order to meet the education challenges ahead;
  3. Reach everyone, including the most disadvantaged and marginalized. The learning gap will not be closed unless leaders also take additional steps to include and support those at greatest risk of not learning – the poor, the discriminated against, girls, and those facing multiple disadvantages;
  4. Successful education systems will require more and better investment. This investment must be based upon the primary responsibility of national governments to ensure that every child has access to quality education, free from pre-primary to secondary levels. It must be supported by the resources and leadership of international partners.

(Source: The International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, “The Learning Generation: Investing in education for a changing world” Executive Summary, p. 6, 2016)

VVOB already contributes to the ambitious but achievable Learning Generation vision in plentiful ways, whether it is through tackling barriers to learning in South Africa, building partnerships between the private sector and technical and vocational schools in Ecuador, establishing professional learning networks for effective school leadership in Rwanda or improving teacher quality in community schools in Zambia. Constructive cooperation with the education systems already in place in our partner countries, as well as (gender) equality is at the heart of all our capacity building efforts.

As VVOB’s programmes and actions are fully in line with SDG4, we too are worried by the lack of ambition of the international community to push for universal learning and equitable access to school. “Through effective collaboration with ministries of education in our nine partner countries, the change our programmes foster is real”, comments Sven Rooms, programme director at VVOB (small image above). “This approach has now also been recognized as one of the strategies the Education Commission prescribes for quality education.”

VVOB’s education programmes yield results both in the short and long term, and have an important impact on the ways in which teachers teach and learners learn. But international cooperation cannot be sustainable without financial investment: “We believe in our expertise and want to keep working towards SDG4, and we count on our donors to keep supporting us to do so. They are absolutely essential in this process.”