1

WHAT THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION MEANS TODAY

By David Archer

Introduction

Education is one of the most universally recognized human rights yet it remains widely
violated, poorly understood and under-utilized by education advocates. Indeed, the Education
For All (EFA) framework, first developed in Jomtien in 19901 and reiterated in Dakar in 2000
(and soon to be revisited in Incheon)2 is more widely used by policy makers and campaigners
than human rights reference points – even though the EFA framework lacks the weight and
enforceability of human rights instruments. When people do refer to the right to education it
is often in a limited and reductive form, focusing on access to school rather than the richer
framing on rights that has been developed through diverse international treaties. Most
worryingly, even in its most reductive form the right is routinely violated, with over 58
million children not even accessing primary school.3 But progress is being made in
popularizing a deeper understanding of the right to education and rights based approaches to
education are gaining traction. Though some aspects of the right to education are subject to
progressive realization, creative approaches to tracking the financing of education and
mobilizing citizen action offer some exciting possibilities for the future.

The right to education has been recognized by UN member states since the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Article 26 of the Declaration proclaims that:
“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and
fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory…education shall be directed
to the full development of human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human
rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship
among racial or religious groups…”4 The right to education has been further elaborated in a
range of international conventions, notably including the International Covenant on

1 UNESCO, “World Conference on EFA, Jomtien, 1990,” accessed March 4, 2014,

http://www.unesco.org/en/efa/the-efa-movement/jomtien-1990/.
2 UNESCO, “World Education Forum,” accessed March 4, 2014,
http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/wef_2000/.
3 UNESCO, EFA Global Monitoring Report (Paris, 2008).
4 United Nations, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” accessed December 3, 2012,
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml.
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Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966), the Convention on the Elimination of
all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1979), the Convention on the Rights
of the Child (CRC, 1989), and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
(CRPD, 2006). Regional treaties have added further reference points and perhaps most
importantly, most national constitutions guarantee the right to education in one form or
another. A useful reference point on the provisions in national constitutions is the database
maintained by the Right to Education website.5

Despite this plethora of reference points, most ministries of education, bilateral and
multilateral donors, non-government organizations and other education actors have little
knowledge of the human rights provisions around education. Instead they are more likely to
refer to the six Education For All Goals6 or the two of these (universal access to primary
schooling and gender parity) that were recognized as education-related Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs).7 These goals however, have no mechanism for enforcement.
When 70 countries failed to meet the goal of achieving gender parity in primary and
secondary education by 2005,8 very little happened. The leaders who agreed to this MDG
were not held to account. Indeed, the UN General Assembly in 2005 passed without any
significant reference to the failure to meet this target. As we approach the deadline for most
of the other EFA and MDG goals, set for 2015, the focus seems to be much more on agreeing
on a new set of goals for the future than on any effort to scrutinize or address the failure to
meet existing goals.9 This is perhaps inherent to the loose political agreements set at big UN
conferences. In contrast, some of the human rights conventions (e.g. CRC, CEDAW) do
require regular reporting, and (at least in theory) there is legal recourse for those whose rights
are violated. But the human rights treaties have been largely disregarded by education
advocates - until recently.

5 Global Campaign for Education, A Taxing Business: Financing Education for All through Domestic
Resources, 2013, http://www.right-to-education.org/sites/right-to-education.org/files/resource-
attachments/GCE_A_Taxing_Business_2013_en.pdf.
6 UNESCO, “Dakar Framework for Action,” 2000.
7 United Nations, “Millennium Development Goals Framework,” 2000.
8 UNESCO, EFA Global Monitoring Report, 2008.
9
United Nations, “United Nations Millennium Development Goals and Beyond 2015,” accessed
March 4, 2014, http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/beyond2015.shtml. Goal 4 of the new Sustainable
Development Goals for 2015-2030 is to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and
promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Advanced unedited copy: Progress report on the
work of the General Assembly Open Working Group on SDGs at its first four session, available at
http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/1927interimreport.pdf [17 September 2013].
 3

Moving from Education Needs to Education Rights

The relatively low profile of rights-based approaches in education – and the recent shift
towards greater recognition - can be understood in part by looking at the work of non-
governmental organizations. A short history of ActionAid International10 illustrates this
evolution – which is typical of many other NGOs. It also helps to illustrate why a rights-
based approach to education is so important – as needs-based approaches are so often
unsustainable.

Set up in 1970s with funding coming from child sponsorship in the early years, ActionAid
gave direct support to individual children, especially girls from poor families, helping them to
access school. School fees would be paid, uniforms purchased, equipment provided. This
helped some children but was soon found by field workers to be far too random. Those
children who were picked for sponsorship did well – but others who were not picked gained
nothing. It seemed rather inequitable to be helping some and completely ignoring their
neighbors - and yet not all children could be sponsored. It was also far from cost effective.

In the 1980s ActionAid’s approach shifted to supporting schools in poor areas, particularly
focusing on infrastructure, with active community participation in developing low-cost
school structures with local materials. ActionAid had a significant influence on the policies of
other institutions, including the World Bank and the European Commission, concerning
community participation and ownership in construction projects, particularly in Kenya.
However, a self-critical internal evaluation of 16 years of building schools in Kenya 11 found
that it had no notable impact on school enrolment and none on achievement. There was even
evidence that poor children were more systematically excluded. The key reason for this was
the wider policy context. The government was under pressure from the World Bank to reduce
public education spending and recover costs from users. In this climate school management
committees were encouraged to increase school fees. Those schools that had an impressive
building felt most confident to raise their fees. It even became a question of the status of the
school. The relatively better-off parents who invariably dominated school management
committees rarely considered the impact – but the poorest children were excluded.

10 ActionAid, “ActionAid International,” accessed March 4, 2014, http://www.actionaid.org/.

11 ActionAid, Building Better Schools: 16 Years of School Building in Kenya (London, 1996).
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In the 1990s baseline data in areas where ActionAid worked showed that often the poorest
50% of children were unable to access school at all12 – particularly owing to the direct and
indirect costs involved. Working with existing schools no longer seemed to be justifiable for
a poverty-focused agency. With government systems over-burdened and slow to change,
ActionAid (and many other NGOs) focused on developing non-formal education (NFE)
centers in the poorest communities. These centers promoted the active involvement of poor
parents in management and developed flexible timetables and calendars to accommodate
working children. The curriculum focused on a core set of skills, usually taught in the mother
tongue with locally relevant materials and child-centered methodologies. Children learned
rapidly – often reaching the equivalent of fifth grade primary school within three years. At
last it seemed that ActionAid was reaching the poorest and making a difference.

However, in 1996 a review of NFE education experiences showed some fundamental

contradictions. Unintentionally ActionAid was absolving governments of responsibility and
becoming an agent of the privatization of education for poor children. As an NGO ActionAid
was unusual in making a ten-year commitment to an area – but you cannot run an education
center for children for just ten years – it needs to be permanent as a new generation of
children is continually born. In the medium or long term, centers needed to be handed over to
the Ministry of Education. Governments suffering from cut-backs in public spending due to
structural adjustment were reluctant to take on the centers – especially where they saw an
affluent international NGO like ActionAid. The government budget in a district could not
suddenly expand to take on new schools – especially where these were not compatible with
existing schools and failed to respect basic government regulations. The situation was not
helped by the tensions and rivalry that often set in. Locally, there was often rivalry, with
government teachers seeing NFE teachers as amateurs (distrusting them and seeing them as a
direct threat to the teaching profession). Meanwhile NFE teachers regarded formal
schoolteachers as lazy and bureaucratic. There was little love lost and most worryingly it was
the children who suffered. Those children who completed an NFE course were unable to
access government schools either because their learning was not recognized or because they
were not competent in one of the subjects taught in formal schools (usually the ex-colonial
language).

12 Based on internal data compiled through ActionAid’s monitoring system

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ActionAid realized that, however many centers it ran, it would only ever be a drop in the
ocean. Even huge national NGOs like BRAC in Bangladesh, who ran 35,000 centers at one
point (and attracted more support from bilateral and multilateral donors than the government
of Bangladesh), were still covering less than 8% of children in the country (meaning 92% of
children were in government schools that were largely ignored by donors and NGOs).
Moreover, whilst some centers run by ActionAid and other NGOs were good (and those were
the ones highlighted in reviews)13 some were bad, providing a second-rate education for poor
children. There was no coherent planning and no quality control. Working in this way,
NGOs were not helping children secure their right to education. So ActionAid came to
recognize that the real challenge lay in reforming the government system – in “moving from
providing to enabling”. Instead of directly providing education services, the appropriate role
for an NGO was to enable communities to demand quality education and to enable
governments to effectively deliver those services. This is the essence – the essential
foundation - of a rights-based approach.

Through the following years, from 1998 onwards ActionAid has refined its rights based
approach, continuing to learn from its mistakes.14 It has worked intensely on adult literacy,
especially with women from the most excluded communities, in order to help elevate and
organize demand for quality public education.15 It has helped to form national coalitions on
education in low-income countries – linking NGOs, teacher unions, parents groups and other
actors – so that there are strong domestic pressure groups that can hold their government to
account. ActionAid has also supported the emergence of regional and international
campaigns and alliances of advocates, notably the Global Campaign for Education. It has
published a guidebook on education rights for practitioners and activists16 and it has
prioritized work on education financing.17 A major concern has been to simplify, popularize
and apply human rights conventions. This is not simple because the legal terminology in
treaties and conventions sometimes obfuscates rather than illuminates.

13 Based on documents collected for an internal review ActionAid education meeting in Addis Ababa in 1997
14 David Archer, “The Evolution of NGO–Government Relations in Education: ActionAid 1972–2009,”
Development in Practice 20, no. 4–5 (2010): 611–618, doi:10.1080/09614521003763145.
15 Reflect Action, “Reflect,” 2009, http://www.reflect-action.org/.
16 Global Campaign for Education and ActionAid, “Education Rights: A Guide for Practitioners and Activists,”
2007.
17 ActionAid and Education International, “Toolkit on Education Financing,” 2009.
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Popularizing Rights Frameworks

The first UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, the late Katarina Tomaševski18,
was dedicated to communicating the complexity of education rights as clearly as possible.
Recognizing that all too often people perceived the right to education in a very narrow way –
as the right to access school - she developed the 4 A’s framework as a means to share some
of the key human rights provisions on education. The 4 A’s are:

Availability – that education is free and government-funded and that there is adequate
infrastructure and trained teachers able to support education delivery.

Accessibility – that the system is non-discriminatory and accessible to all, and that positive
steps are taken to include the most marginalized.

Acceptability – that the content of education is relevant, non-discriminatory and culturally

appropriate, and of quality, that the school itself is safe and teachers are professional.

Adaptability – that education can evolve with the changing needs of society and contribute to
challenging inequalities, such as gender discrimination, and that it can be adapted locally to
suit specific contexts

Whilst they work well for capturing the essence of education rights for policy makers, the 4
A’s are surprisingly difficult to remember and particularly to recall what makes each of them
distinct. At community level it has proved more difficult to popularize them, particularly
where English is not the dominant language (as the A’s do not translate as A’s in other
languages). The Right to Education project, started by Tomaševski and now run by a
coalition of agencies, has thus taken a further step to try to crystallize for parents, teachers
and communities what rights they can demand from government in relation to their local
school. This has been captured in a charter of ten core rights:19

18 Right to Education Project, “Report,” accessed March 4, 2014, http://www.right-to-education.org/node/226.

19
ActionAid, “Promoting Rights in Schools: Providing Quality Public Education,” n.d.,
http://www.actionaidusa.org/sites/files/actionaid/prs_-_english-final__4_may_2011_2_0.pdf.
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1. Right to free and compulsory education: there should be no charges, direct or

indirect, for primary education. Education must gradually be made free at all levels.
2. Right to non-discrimination: schools must not make any distinction in provision
based on sex, race, color, language, religion, political opinion, nationality, ethnicity,
ability, or any other status.
3. Right to adequate infrastructure: there should be an appropriate number of
classrooms, accessible to all, with adequate and separate sanitation facilities for girls
and boys. Schools should be built with local materials and be resilient to natural
risks and disasters.
4. Right to quality trained teachers: schools should have a sufficient number of trained
teachers of whom a good proportion are female; teachers should receive good
quality pre-service and in-service training with built-in components on gender
sensitivity, non-discrimination, and human rights. All teachers should be paid
domestically competitive salaries.
5. Right to a safe and non-violent environment: children should be safe on route to and
in school. Clear anti-bullying policies and confidential systems for reporting and
addressing any form of abuse or violence should be in place.
6. Right to relevant education: the curriculum should not discriminate and should be
relevant to the social, cultural, environmental, economic and linguistic context of
learners.
7. Right to know your rights: schools should teach human rights education and
children’s rights in particular. Learning should include age-appropriate and accurate
information on sexual and reproductive rights.
8. Right to participate: girls and boys have the right to participate in decision-making
processes in school. Appropriate mechanisms should be in place to enable the full,
genuine and active participation of children.
9. Right to transparent and accountable schools: schools need to have transparent and
effective monitoring systems. Both communities and children should be able to
participate in accountable governing bodies, management committees and parents’
groups.
10. Right to quality learning: girls and boys have a right to a quality learning
environment and to effective teaching processes so that they can develop their
personality, talents and physical and mental abilities to their fullest potential.
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This charter of ten rights is designed to engage parents, teachers, children, community leaders
and others in more systematic reflection and practical action locally – and to link this local
work to district and national-level research and campaigning. A resource pack called
“Promoting Rights in Schools”20 provides practical guidelines for how this charter can be
used to conduct participatory local surveys that can be compiled into district and even
national level Citizens’ Education Reports. Each of the rights is directly drawn from
international conventions and a set of key indicators for participatory tracking of progress on
each right is provided. This has been translated into practice in ten countries, including
Ghana, Uganda and Nepal, with positive results in terms of raising awareness and stimulating
an informed debate between citizens and their government around the right to education.

Progressive Realization and Education Financing

One of the biggest challenges in translating education rights into practice is that, as with most
other social and economic rights, many provisions are subject to progressive realization. This
means that governments in low-income countries are not expected to guarantee all aspects of
the right to education immediately but rather should do progressively as resources permit. Of
course, some aspects of the right to education are absolute, (such as non-discrimination which
is a minimum core obligation) but the clauses around progressive realization can give
governments an easy and credible excuse for non-compliance. However, a useful reference
point in this regard is , General Comment 3, adopted by the Committee on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights (which monitors implementation of the ICESCR). This interpretation of
the nature of States Parties’ obligations, which outlines core obligations on States in relation
to progressive realization, asserts that governments should take deliberate, concrete and
progressive steps to the maximum of available resources and should not allow backwards
steps.21

Civil society activists in some countries are applying this interpretation by systematically
tracking and influencing government spending on education in order to verify whether
governments are serious about progressive realization of the right to education. This work
takes many forms but a common foundation is producing simple guides to how much the
20 Right to Education Project and ActionAid, “Pomoting Rights in Schools: Providing Quality Public
Education,” 2010, http://www.actionaidusa.org/sites/files/actionaid/prs_-_english-final__4_may_2011_2_0.pdf.
21 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “CESCR General Comment 3: The Nature of State
Parties’ Obligations - Article 2 (1),” UN document E/1991/23, 1990, para.10.
http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/0/94bdbaf59b43a424c12563ed0052b664.
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government is spending on education and how that money is supposed to be spent at national,
provincial, district and school level. What is the budget supposed to be spent on and who is
supposed to be making decisions about it at different levels? Once this information is in the
public domain, NGOs or coalitions can support community level tracking of the budget to
determine whether the budget reaches the community and is being spent appropriately. Over
time this engagement in tracking can build to an engagement of citizens in budget
formulation processes, influencing levels of spending and the allocation of resources.22

In Uganda, the Federation of Education NGOs of Uganda has been tracking the education
budget for many years. District level coalitions in Bundibugyo and Apac have succeeded in
identifying cases of corruption with local officials and head-teachers being taken to court.23 It
seems that even a few cases like this will have a dramatic impact on the flow of funding –
with more money arriving in other schools in other districts as corrupt officials realize that
someone is scrutinizing the education budget. But the real value of budget tracking work
comes when it is linked to a rights-based perspective as a government cannot credibly claim
to be moving towards progressive realization of education rights unless it is at least
maintaining (and preferably increasing) education spending as a share of the national budget.
In the case of Uganda two startling facts emerge. Firstly, spending on education as a
percentage of the national budget has declined in recent years from 18.9% to 15.1%24 - a
clear sign that the government is failing to comply with the commitment to progressively
realize the right to education. Secondly, the education budget allocations may be around 14%,
but every year actual spending is substantially lower as the State House plunders the
education budget. Outrage at these injustices has led to the formation of a formidable new
coalition on the financing of education in Uganda, led by a prominent bishop.25

Tracking whether a government is truly delivering on progressive realization of education

rights is given greater weight when there are widely agreed benchmarks on the percentage of
budgets that ought to be spent on education. Two key measures have become widely used
over the past decade. Firstly the EFA Fast Track Initiative (founded in 2002 this has now
evolved into the Global Partnership for Education, which manages $3 billion to support

22 Commonwealth Education Fund and Save the Children Fund, Civil Society Engagement in Education
Budgets: A Report Documenting CEF Experiences (London, 2009).
23 Commonwealth Education Fund, Commonwealth Education Fund Final Report (London, 2009).
24
The World Bank, “Public Spending on Education, Total (% of Government Expenditure) | Data | Table,”
accessed March 10, 2014, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GB.ZS.
25 Federation of Education NGOs of Uganda, NGO Forum, and Ugandan National Teachers Union, The Quality
Public Education Campaign, n.d.
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education in over 50 low-income countries) popularized a benchmark that governments in

low-income countries ought to be spending 20% of their budgets on education. This
benchmark is based on research by Barbara Bruns at the World Bank.26 It was used as a key
measure for determining whether countries ought to receive coordinated donor support for
their education sector plans from the Education for All Fast Track Initiative (FTI). The
premise was that this should be a compact, according to which donor support is increased to
governments showing their own commitment of domestic resources as “good performers,”
that is, countries that could credibly achieve accelerated progress in basic education. This
benchmark has been widely picked up and used by civil society campaigners on education –
notably by the national education coalitions in over 70 countries that are active members of
the Global Campaign for Education.27

A second key financing benchmark on education that is widely used is that governments
ought to be committing 6% of their GDP to education.28 In practice there are wide variations
with some of the worst performing countries being those who are most off track from
achieving education goals. For example, Pakistan has been spending only 2.2% of GDP on
education.29 A broad-based national education coalition in Pakistan has been able to
embarrass the government into making a commitment to spend more – though substantial
increases in practice have not fully materialized. The broader point, however, is significant.
By demystifying government spending on education and tracking it in practice, national
citizens and organizations can make a credible evidence-based claim regarding whether their
government is delivering on the progressive realization of education rights. Where a
government reduces its budget year on year, or reduces its spending in practice, or is falling
far below the widely accepted benchmarks, serious questions can be raised. To date this has
not led to cases of legal action using international human rights treaties – but this cannot be
far off given the momentum behind this approach.

Some civil society activists are looking beyond these two basic measures (percent of national
budgets and percent of GDP) to look at two other broader issues that may impact whether a
government can credibly claim to be doing the maximum that they can to progressively

26 B. Bruns, R. A. Mingat, and R. Rakatomalala, Achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015: A Chance
for Every Child (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003).
27
Global Campaign for Education, “Members,” accessed March 10, 2014,
http://www.campaignforeducation.org/en/members.
28
Global Campaign for EDucation, Fund the Future: Education Rights Now, 2011.
29
The World Bank, “Public Spending on Education, Total (% of Government Expenditure) | Data | Table.”
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realize education rights. These relate to the macro-economic policies pursued and the extent
of the domestic tax base.

Education rights activists started to raise concerns around macro-economic policies following
the huge gains in education rights that followed campaigns for abolition of user fees in the
early 2000s. Following national campaigns in country after country (Tanzania, Kenya,
Malawi, Burundi, etc)30, governments agreed to abolish the user fees that had been charged
for children to go to primary school. This led to huge surges in enrolment – about 2 million
more children enrolled within a year in Kenya. A substantial part of the global gains (50
million more children in school since 2000)31 can be explained by these successes in making
more education free. However, these surges in enrollment were not matched by increases in
teacher numbers or in spending and it became clear that many education systems became
overstretched – with over a hundred children crammed into classrooms in early grades and
with an inevitable deterioration in learning outcomes. The most obvious problem was that
there was not a matching rise in teacher numbers.

ActionAid and the Global Campaign for Education began researching the reasons why
governments were not employing more teachers, interviewing Ministries of Education and
Ministries of Finance in eight countries.32 In every case the story was the same: governments
could not employ more teachers even if they wanted to because of agreements with the IMF.
When challenged on this the IMF argued they had nothing to do with spending on education
and that the research was mistaken but further investigation showed that in half the countries
where the IMF had a loan agreement it placed a specific cap on the public sector wage bill. It
was suggested that this was intended to stop bloated government bureaucracies, but in
practice teachers are the largest single group on the public sector wage bill usually followed
by doctors and nurses. Any government compelled to comply with such a cap could not
employ more teachers (or pay existing teachers more). In some cases the cap was even more
explicit. The government of Kenya had a direct cap on the number of teachers it could
employ (235,000 in 1997), which did not change even after the enrolment of millions more

30
See for examples the School Fee Abolition Initiative, hosted by UNICEF
http://www.ungei.org/infobycountry/247_712.html
31
United Nations, “Goal 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education,” 2013, 2,
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/education.shtml.
32
ActionAid and GCE, Contradictory Commitments: Why the Achievement of EFA Is Being Undermined by the
IMF (London, 2005).
 12

children.33 After three years of cumulative research that exposed these injustices, the IMF
finally acknowledged the problem and withdrew public sector wage bill caps as a loan
condition.34 Other challenges remained, including with wider macro-economic conditions
still imposed by the IMF (such as inflation and deficit targets) which limited the space for
governments to expand spending on education at the necessary speed to keep pace with
demand – but the withdrawal of wage bill caps was a significant breakthrough.

It is only more recently that education rights advocates have started to look seriously at the
domestic tax base, but this is certainly an area with huge potential. Most spending on
education, even in the lowest income countries, comes from the domestic tax base rather than
aid. This is particularly the case in respect of teacher salaries. Few governments are willing to
recruit and pay for teachers based on unpredictable inflows of aid – and yet teacher salaries
often account for over 90% of education spending. Any significant increased spending on
teachers therefore needs to come from predictable domestic resources. As education is often
largest single item on the government’s budget (often about 20% as noted above), the
education budget is also likely to be the biggest beneficiary from any increase in overall tax
intake. The focus of education campaigners in Africa has been particularly on corporate
taxation, challenging the tax exemptions and holidays given to multinational companies who
invest. In Uganda over $270 million a year has been lost through such exemptions,35 which
could dramatically increase domestic spending on education. There is a particular resonance
to linking the pursuit of education rights to tax justice work as people in poor communities
are almost invariably paying tax themselves (usually invisibly, through value added tax) and
becoming aware of this can deepen their sense that receiving quality basic education is a right
they can demand (rather than being a charitable act from government). When people
recognize that they are paying tax themselves but some of the richest companies and
individuals are avoiding tax, this becomes a powerful foundation for holding governments
accountable.

In summary, at the national level education advocates, rather than invoking Tomaševski’s 4
A’s, have called for increasing 4 “S’s” to protect and fulfill the right to education in respect
of education budgets, namely increasing scrutiny of the budget, sensitivity of the budget
33
Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and Development Partners in Education, “Appraisal Report:
Kenya,” 2005, https://www.globalpartnership.org/content/assessment-primary-education-components-kenya-
education-sector-support-programme-2005-2010.
34
ActionAid, Confronting the Contradictions: Public Sector Wage Bill Caps and the Case for Teachers (South
Africa, 2012).
35 ActionAid, Tax Competition in East Africa: A Race to the Bottom (South Africa, 2012).
 13

(prioritizing areas where rights are violated), share of the national budget as a percentage of
budget or GDP, and size of the budget overall.36 Actions on the financing of education in all
these areas can help the progressive realization of the right to education – and all of these
areas are ones that can be tracked to verify whether a government if fulfilling its
commitments to progressive realization.

The role of aid is a final element to examine in respect of the financing of education to
deliver on rights. There is a much-quoted phrase from the 2000 Dakar Framework for Action
that says “no government with a credible plan to deliver on education will be allowed to fail
for lack of resources”. This appears to be a bold commitment but this sort of promise has no
legally-binding element to it – and in some respects it is just an echo of the commitment in
the ICESCR “to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-
operation,” thus implying a duty on the international community to help countries that are
struggling to achieve economic or social rights.37 The most credible effort to take action to
deliver on this promise has been through setting up the Education for All Fast Track Initiative
(FTI) in 2002, which in 2011 evolved into the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).38 This
is the best effort in the education sector to deliver on the Aid Effectiveness agenda (as
defined in the Paris Declaration, the Accra Agenda for Action, and the Busan Partnership)39 –
and involves harmonizing donor efforts behind governments with credible plans. GPE is
managing over $3 billion of pooled funds (from about thirty bilateral and multilateral
agencies) to support governments in fifty low-income countries who have credible education
plans. There are however many continuing concerns about aid to education and in 2011 the
Global Campaign published a report, Fund the Future, which articulated ten key principles
for quality aid to basic education which would help the GPE to deliver serious progress on
education rights:

1. “Pay a fair share for basic education. Low-income governments dedicate an average
of 8.9% of their budgets to basic education but donors only allocate 4.1% of their aid
to basic education. It is time for donors to match developing country commitments
and both should target an allocation of 10% of their budget for basic education.

36 Education International and ActionAid, “Education Financing Toolkit,” 2009.

37 United Nations, “International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” 1966, article 2(1).
38
“Global Partnership for Education,” 2014, http://globalpartnership.org/.
39
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Aid Effectiveness,” accessed March 29,
2015, http://www.oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/
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2. Make aid real - untie aid and ensure technical assistance is country-led. All too often
aid to education is tied to scholarships or to the purchase of goods and services from
the donor country, rather than focusing on the MDGs and the EFA Goals.
3. Harmonise aid behind government plans. No more fragmented projects – use the
Global Partnership for Education as the best means to harmonise aid to education.
4. Use the most aligned aid modalities. The Global Partnership for Education must
commit to sector budget support, which reduces transaction costs and delays in
disbursements.
5. Deliver predictable aid to basic education and focus on teachers. Make commitments
for at least 3 years, preferably to 2015, so that funds can be spent where they are most
needed, especially on quality, trained teachers. Work out a mechanism so that the
Global Partnership can make collective commitments to partner countries that are
even more predictable over the longer term (5 years plus).
6. Ensure country ownership and civil society engagement. Do more to increase the
accountability of governments to their own citizens / parliaments. Recognise the
crucial roles of civil society, for example in budget monitoring (exposing corruption),
innovating, promoting dialogue and uniting citizens’ voices to speak truth to power.
7. Focus on Education For All and on education rights. Expand the agenda and recognise
the inter-dependencies within the 6 EFA goals and the indivisibility of education
rights. Recognise that making progress on the important priorities on girls’ education,
fragile states and learning outcomes for the most disadvantaged communities depend
on a holistic approach to securing education rights.
8. Address strategic issues in domestic financing of education. Be proactive in making
the case for education with Ministries of Finance and the IMF. Promote progressive
macro-economic policies and an expanding domestic tax base because education
systems will be a major beneficiary.
9. Deliver on promises. Making pledges is easy – but make sure that these are delivered
in practice. We will track commitments and will expose those who break their
promises!
10. Build a true Global Partnership for Education. In addition to meeting the
replenishment funding targets, work together to create a stronger, more independent,
more equal, more truly global and more ambitious partnership.” 40

40
GCE, Fund the Future: Education Rights Now, available at
http://www.campaignforeducation.org/docs/reports/ftf/Fund%20the%20future_education%20rights%20now.pdf
 15

Citizen Action to Hold States Responsible

To make the right to education real we need to look at the capacity of citizens to hold the
government accountable. Many significant advances in education rights have depended on
citizen action. For example the mass movements in India in the 1990s were vital for securing
the constitutional amendment on education, and eventually the Parliament of India adopted
the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act or Right to Education Act
(RTE), in 200941. But to truly sustain advances in education rights in many countries requires
ongoing citizen pressure at all levels – from local to district to national.

At a local level the importance of parental voice is increasingly recognized on all sides of the
political spectrum. Whether parents are involved formally in school governance bodies or
management committees, informally in parent teacher associations or more broadly in village
education committees there is a strong argument that active engagement will improve the
effectiveness of the schools. Of course school supervision or inspection by district education
officers, local education authorities, or independent inspectorates can make a significant
difference – but in the absence of a meaningful interaction with the community served by the
school there will be gaps in accountability. However, there are always challenges in securing
this local accountability. The parents most likely to engage in inspection are those who have
the time and skills to do so. Parents of marginalized children, those who are not literate
themselves or who are less educated, often have less confidence to assume these roles, thus
creating the risk that local accountability can sometimes increase discrimination. Further, the
voices of local elites can dominate and adopt policies that might disadvantage or exclude
some children. From a rights-based perspective, the priority is clearly to build the confidence
and capacity of the more excluded parents to engage. Finally, local accountability systems
should be matched by wider systemic accountability. These three priorities can ensure that
schools in poorer communities are not disadvantaged by lower levels of parental
involvement.

Local engagement of citizens is unlikely to be enough to hold government to account for

delivering on education rights. National level mobilization is also needed. Over the past
decade there has been a remarkable emergence of national education coalitions – broad-based
bodies in most cases, involving local and national NGOs, faith-based organizations, parents
41
See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_Children_to_Free_and_Compulsory_Education_Act
 16

groups, teacher unions, social movements, academics and individuals – anyone who is
passionate about education. The Global Campaign for Education (GCE) has played a key role
in supporting the development of these coalitions – as have the regional coalitions that have
emerged since 2000: Africa Network Campaign on Education For All (ANCEFA)42, Asia and
South Pacific Basic and Adult Education Alliance (ASPBAE43), the Latin American
Campaign for Education Rights (CLADE)44 and the recently formed Arab Coalition on
Education for All (ACEA).

This politically engaged work is not easy to fund. If you want to build a school it is relatively
easy to raise funds. If you want to ask why enough schools are not built, you face challenges.
Indeed playing a critical watchdog, budget monitoring, public campaigning, advocacy or
indeed any rights-based role is often questioned by donors who want to see tangible results
and instant impact. Effective advocacy work for education rights can take time and the
impact is not always easy to attribute. The Commonwealth Education Fund, set up in 2002,45
was a breakthrough in terms of providing coordinated financial support to education
coalitions in 16 low-income countries of Africa and Asia – run jointly by Oxfam, Save the
Children and ActionAid with funds from the UK Department for International Development
(DFID). Drawing on this experience the Civil Society Education Fund, run by GCE is now
supported by the Global Partnership for Education and supports education coalitions in 50
countries.46 As funding becomes more predictable these coalitions have matured and moved
on from their initial focus on simple campaigns, such as the campaign against user fees, to
focus on other aspects of education – becoming increasingly sophisticated in their
understanding and use of rights frameworks.

One of the challenges in advancing education rights going forward is ensuring that local
mobilization is linked to national and international mobilization. Too often local engagement
by School Management Committees and Parent Teacher Associations is isolated and
unsupported. And too often national coalitions can end up detached from grassroots
engagement – with different actors in the capital city coming together but talking to each
other rather than representing or channeling the voices of citizens whose rights are most
42
“ANCEFA, Education for All,” accessed March 9, 2014, http://www.ancefa.org/.
43
See www.aspbae.org
44
“Campaña Latinoamericana Por El Derecho a La Educación,” accessed March 9, 2014,
http://www.campanaderechoeducacion.org/v2/es.html.
45
Commonwealth Education Fund, Commonwealth Education Fund Final Report,
https://www.globalpartnership.org/content/commonwealth-education-fund-final-report.
46
Global Partnership for Education, “Civil Society Education Fund,” accessed March 9, 2014,
http://www.globalpartnership.org/civil-society-education-fund.
 17

routinely violated. The emergence of district level coalitions has helped to bridge this gap –
and these are growing rapidly. This is one of the priority areas of investment for the Civil
Society Education Fund.

Conclusion

There are many areas of education rights, which cannot be adequately captured in a short
chapter. I have not, for example, addressed the right to education in respect of early
childhood education or adult literacy (a second chance to learn)47 – where there are important
struggles in trying to determine the parameters of the right to education. Nor have I looked at
the range of litigation taking place around the world today to enforce the right to education –
from work on the Roma in Europe48 to work on equal education rights in South Africa.49
However, I hope to have articulated the importance of taking a rights-based rather than
needs-based approach, with a strong focus on how we can popularize rights frameworks and
use them in practice. I have highlighted the central importance of looking at financing of
education through a rights-based lens and emphasized the central role for citizen action in
advancing rights. Education is one of the most powerful equalizing forces in a society. It
should be conceived not just as a fundamental, intrinsic right but also as an enabling,
instrumental right – one that, if secured, accelerates people’s capacity to secure their other
rights and advance development. The right to education continues to be routinely violated but
people are better organized than ever before to achieve its realization through a rights-based
approach to development.

47
ActionAid, “EducationAction 24,” accessed March 9, 2014,
http://www.actionaid.org/publications/educationaction-24.
48
Amnesty International, “Press Release: Eliminate Second-Rate Education for Roma in the Czech Republic,”
January 13, 2010, http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/eliminate-second-rate-education-roma-
czech-republic-20100113.
49
NGO Pulse, “Equal Education Profile,” accessed March 9, 2014, http://www.ngopulse.org/article/equal-
education-profile.