Overview: Education
Education is the best tool we have in the fight to end poverty. Yet 77 million children – 60 percent of them girls – around the world are denied their right to a primary education. Girls are hit the hardest by these barriers. Each year a girl spends in school reduces her risk of being infected by HIV & AIDS, of early marriage, and increases her financial well-being.
In 92 countries around the world, children have to pay to go to primary school, effectively denying the poor families from hope of a better future for their children. Additionally, The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) unduly restrictive restraints prevent developing countries from hiring the teachers they need. The move to have corporations take on state functions is undermining the contract between the state and its citizens.
ActionAid’s education work is renowned and rooted in 30 years of solid work in the field. We were awarded the United Nations International Literacy Prize for our Reflect approach to adult learning, which is now used by 500 organizations in 70 countries. ActionAid plays a key role in energizing national campaigns and co-founded the Global Campaign for Education.
Our Approach
ActionAid’s education work encourages and relies upon the active participation of the communities we target. ActionAid developed the Reflect approach to learning and the Participatory Vulnerability Analysis. We were instrumental in developing Stepping Stones and STAR.
Reflect links adult learning to their empowerment in making decisions and leading within their communities, strengthening the voices of poor people in education decision-making all levels. Reflect is used by over 500 organizations in 70 countries to tackle a wide range of issues, from peace & reconciliation in Burundi, to community forestry in Nepal and holding government accountable in El Salvador.
Stepping Stones explores issues affecting sexual health – including gender roles, money, alcohol use, traditional practice and attitudes towards sex, death and ourselves. It encourages openness, understanding and tolerance of HIV & AIDS.
STAR recognizes the connection between gender, human rights and HIV and AIDS. ActionAid has evolved Societies Tackling AIDS through Rights (STAR) to promote the active participation of women and girls, people living with HIV & AIDS, poor and excluded in the decision-making. STAR is being tested in 10 countries.
Participatory Vulnerability Analysis brings the Reflect approach into emergencies and disasters to help local people analyze vulnerabilities and risks – and to ensure their voices are hear nationally. A school-based adaptation of this approach is being piloted in seven countries.
IMF and Education
The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) policies limit what countries can spend on education, directly through teacher wage limits and indirectly by setting unnecessarily low inflation targets that make spending increase impossible. The IMF frames economic planning around a three-year cycle, which makes it difficult for any country to justify the investment in education since the returns are found over the longer term.
ActionAid is working on the impact of IMF policies on education across 25 countries – getting education activists to interview Ministries of Finance and Central Banks about the constraints on education spending and how they are linked to IMF policies.
The impact of the IMF’s constraints on education budgets is felt most acutely in the inability of countries to hire more teachers. The IMF policies also impact women’s rights. As a result, many countries unfortunately will not be able to increase spending to levels necessary to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
At Abuja in May 2006, twenty-two African Ministers of Finance pledged to develop long term education plans – but there are real question marks over how these ministers will address the contradictions between developing ambitious education plans and satisfying the IMF.
Many well-known economists argue that the IMF’s fiscal and monetary targets are unjustifiably low. Yet the control that the IMF retains over the monetary and fiscal policies of other countries is astonishing. If countries do not abide by IMF policies aid can and has been cut off. This raises concerns around North-South power relations and adds up to a denial of sovereignty and democracy.
ActionAid is leading an economic literacy initiative with health, education, HIV/AIDS, and women’s advocacy groups in the United States, Malawi and Sierra Leone. This project widens discussions around the problems with the IMF’s policies and provides economic literacy training and awareness of viable alternative policies that would enable teachers to hire more teachers, doctors, nurses and health workers.
Participants will then draft and publish popular economic literacy materials and seek the active involvement of key parliamentarians, finance, health and education ministry officials, the domestic media, as well as other interested constituencies.
ActionAid’s robust approach to an education crisis which leaves 77 million children without access to education, offers both short-term and long-term hope. Our combination of providing innovative education programs on the ground while working for policy change offers meaningful and lasting solutions to the current education crisis. Support ActionAid’s innovative and community led education programs with your gift today.