Pakistan International Peace & Human Rights Organization
Nindo Shaher District Badin Sindh Pakistan

So far these announcements remain just rhetorical commitments, with no additional money being delivered on the ground. Even if all these commitments are delivered they represent a small fraction of the US$10 to US$14 billion9 in additional aid that will be needed to deliver universal primary education.

Rich countries must improve the quality as well as the quantity of their aid. In particular, they must coordinate their efforts at both the national and global levels. FTI has helped spur some improvements in donor coordination at the national level, but much more needs to be done. A recent study in Ghana found that in a single year the Ministry of Education hosted 54 donor missions10. More effective donor coordination is needed to eliminate competition among donors, to allow donors to identify gaps in the overall package of support given to a country, and to cut down on the number of reports donors request from education ministries. Education ministries should provide a single report to donors against a shared set of targets to the whole donor community. The existence of shared reporting, monitoring, and evaluation mechanisms should enhance the capacity of donors to monitor the effective use of resources and introduce more clarity into budget processes. The FTI�s emphasis on the PRSP should also help push forward donor coordination.

There is also a need for greater donor coordination at the global level. Most donors tend to concentrate their aid on a limited number of countries. When these �concentration countries� are selected by the donor according to need and the effectiveness of government, this targeting of countries would seem to have a strong logic. However, the lack of coordination among donors means that the sum of all donor preferences does not add up to a sensible distribution of aid among recipient countries. Instead aid globally is skewed in favor of certain countries, with other countries being almost completely deprived of aid flows. In the context of the FTI progress towards identifying financing for countries that have not traditionally received much donor support has been slow. A country like Niger which desperately needs additional aid and which has a government committed to poverty reduction is faced with the problem that no donor has made Niger a priority. When one adds to this equation the fact that much aid is still distributed to countries that are of economic, political or strategic importance to the donor country, the overall distribution of aid is extremely inefficient.

Another problem is the lack of predictability of flows of aid for basic education, and the unwillingness of donors to make commitments beyond the short term. Evidence of this is the failure of donors even to give details of the aid flows they will deliver over 3 years to the first 7 Fast Track countries to qualify for support. Developing countries need to be sure about the reliability of long-term donor financing commitments, especially for recurrent costs. Developing countries frequently protest that it would be risky for them to hire new teachers based on aid-financing unless there is reasonable assurance that the funds will be available over a significant number of years, providing time for countries to gradually assume responsibility for financing these expenditures. Again, the emphasis that the FTI makes on the PRSP assumes donors will provide more predictable support to countries, but in practice this is still not uniformly the case.

The most frequently repeated reason given by donors for their inadequate response to the Fast Track countries is that they are concerned about �absorptive capacity�. Clearly there are challenges that need to be overcome when rapidly increasing investment in the education sectors in poor countries. But these concerns have been grossly overstated. As a recent paper from the UK Government states11 �there is good evidence that poor countries can readily absorb higher levels of aid. The World Bank has estimated that two thirds of the countries that are unlikely, on current trends, to achieve the MDGs already have in place appropriate policy and institutional environments, and on-going reforms, to allow an additional $40 billion a year to be absorbed.

The burden of debt: blocking progress towards education for all

For many of the world�s poorest countries, the burden of debt is a huge barrier to progress towards education for all. 47 million of the world�s out-of-school children live in countries that are included in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). If current trends continue, this figure will rise to 57 million by 2015.
For the 17 HIPC countries for which data is available, in 2001:

10 spent more on debt service than on primary education
1. On average, all 17 countries spend just over twice as much on debt servicing as on primary education
2.In Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, the net enrollment rate for primary education is 31%, and that for girls just 28%. A quarter of the children that do enroll drop out before grade 2 and an estimated three-quarters of the population of primary school age are out of school. Yet the country will spend approximately one third more on debt service than primary education in 2002. Over 2002-2005 it will spend, on average, a quarter of the amount needed each year to achieve Universal Primary Education on debt servicing.