Photo of the week: are we on track for the Millennium Development Goals?

On Friday 13 2010, ActionAid held the second part of a seminar series with the Asia Pacific Masters of Human Rights and Democratisation in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney.

Guest panellists from ActionAid, the University of Sydney and the Australian Education Union participated in a panel discussion titled “Are we on track for the Millennium Development Goals?” with regard to the MDG 2, which centres on universal access to a full course of primary education.

Children study at the school set up five years ago by women’s advocate Rubeena Gulnaar in the town of Mohamadbad in Uttar Pradesh, India.

ActionAid India’s Anjela R V Taneja was first up, speaking about the difficulty in getting a quality universal education program set up in India. Anjela mentioned in particular, the issue with the quantitative emphasis on statistics by the Indian government, rather than a qualitative approach to universal education. This approach, alongside many discrepancies in data collection has meant that education has not received the priority in attention it deserves. For example, government data estimates that only 4% of students are currently not attending school, while in reality, this is likely to be much higher. Similarly, there is a lack of coherence in many statistics, such as those which fail to define what a child actually is in terms of age, or those that don’t differentiate between drop-outs and children who go to school on an irregular basis.

Anjela outlined additional problems in staying on track for MDG 2. India has the highest rate of child labourers in the world; taking these children away from the workforce would have significant economic consequences for both the employers of these children and the families that are forced to send their children to work. Adding to this are issues of marginalisation of children from tribal groups and disadvantaged castes, as well as inadequate facilities for children with disabilities (34% of children with disabilities under 16 are not in school). A lack of political and economic will has continued to make it difficult for moves to base universal education under national law.

Dr Elizabeth Cassity, of Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney continued on the theme of disparate and inadequate data collection on the progress of universal education. Of all the Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015, Elizabeth noted that MDG 2 was the least likely to be achieved. Elizabeth explored the notion of a holistic approach to universal education that encompassed both children and adults, including making schooling accessible for those who’ve already dropped out. In addition to this, Elizabeth looked at ways of getting more women in school. Some of these methods included the education of mothers and making schools safer and female friendly, as well as focusing on adolescent education.

Darcel Russell from the Australian Education Union mentioned that getting a global consensus on the MDG was an achievement itself, but also noted the discrepancy between government figures and reality pointing out that governments have been driven by the “data collecting beast”. For example, in the Cook Islands, the government had released figures that showed equal numbers of girls and boys attending school when this was quite different in practice, and decidedly more so in rural areas. Darcel affirmed that to counter this, we would need to challenge the mythologies before they become orthodox. To maintain a qualitative approach to education, there would need to be greater transparency and accountability (especially in relation to data collection) as well as community inclusion.

There are only five years left until the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on world leaders to attend a summit in New York in September to accelerate progress towards the MDGs.

Are we on track to reach MDG2? Is universal education a probability rather than a possibility?