day in 2015, thereby missing the MDG target of halving the number of people at
that level by that date, and 2.8 billion people living on less that $2 a day, reflecting
the rising number of people living on between $1 and $2 a day.
sense and gender parity in education as particularly important in ensuring equit-
able and sustainable development, including food security. These basic truths were
recognized in the two of the MDGs, which are to ensure that all children had
access to primary education by 2015, and that gender disparity in primary and
secondary education should be eliminated by 2005 and in all levels of educa-
tion no later than 2015. The goal of extending a basic level of education to all
was a major outcome of the World Conference on Education for All in 1990. It was
reconfirmed in the series of UN conferences and summits throughout the 1990s
and `re-specified' as six major goals at the World Education Forum (WEF) in Dakar,
Senegal in 2000, two of which, as noted above, were included in the MDGs.
ments and international agencies should be held accountable for progress towards
achieving these educational goals. For this purpose, UNESCO instituted an annual
series of EFA Global Monitoring Reports starting in 2002. These reports are written by
an independent international team based in UNESCO, supported by UNECSO staff
and drawing from UNESCO's Institute for Statistics and commissioned studies by
researchers and institutes around the world. Of the four reports so far published in
the series: the first assesses whether the world is on track to meet the educational
MDGs (UNESCO, 2002), the second examines the question of gender disparity
in education (UNESCO, 2004), the third looks at the important question of the
quality of education (UNESCO, 2005) and the fourth focuses on literacy for life
(UNESCO, 2006).
conclusion is that `the pace is insufficient' for the educational MDGs to be met by
2015. There have been some encouraging trends that show considerable achieve-
ments in many low-income countries. Primary school enrolment is up sharply in
both sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia, with nearly 20 million new
students in each region. Some 47 countries out of 163 for which data are avail-
able have achieved UPE, and another 90 are on track to achieve UPE by 2015: 44
countries are making good progress but are unlikely to achieve the goal. Enrol-
ment of girls in primary schools has risen rapidly in some low-income countries in
sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. Gender and quality goals are increas-
ingly more visible in national educational plans of developing countries, where
public expenditure on education has increased as a share of national income in
about 70 countries out of the 110 countries with available data. And aid for basic
education more than doubled between 1999 and 2003 and could rise further to