Nations’ School Pledges Unmet

In 2000, as part of their goals for the new millennium, leaders of the richest countries pledged to guarantee free primary school education for every boy and girl in the world by 2015.

Five years later, the effort has registered some success. But overall, by most accounts, it is falling short of its goals, despite a “fast-track initiative” launched by the World Bank in 2002 to accelerate the effort.

Rasheda Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi representative to the Global Campaign for Education, a coalition of about 50 national and regional groups, said Sunday that there was an annual gap of about $5.5 billion between what had been pledged and what was required to achieve universal primary education.

“That’s just a few days of the world’s military spending,” she said.

Chowdhury spoke at a breakfast organized by the World Bank to discuss the fast-track initiative during the final day of its spring meeting.

Education was just one area in which the bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, came in for criticism during the meeting. They were also lambasted for not offering to cancel outstanding loans to highly indebted countries.

“As leaders board their luxury planes home, they again leave nothing behind for the world’s poor,” said Caroline Green, a spokeswoman for Oxfam International. “When will they stop talking and show us the money?”

According to World Bank figures, more than 100 million children of primary school age -- about 10% of the worldwide total -- did not attend school in 2001. About three in four lived in sub-Saharan Africa or southern or western Asia.

Some countries have made considerable progress. Hilde F. Johnson, Norway’s international development minister, said Tanzania had boosted primary school enrollment from 58% of the eligible population four years ago to 95%. In sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, according to the World Bank, 59% of primary-age children attended school in 2003, up from 50% in 1990.

But progress, Johnson said, requires money for teachers, administrators, school buildings and supplies and more. “I would appeal to the G-7 to put the money on the table,” she said, referring to the group of seven biggest industrial democracies.

These seven countries -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States -- have fallen well short of the goal rich countries adopted in 1970, that each should contribute 0.7% of its national income to poor nations. Chowdhury pointed out that the foreign ministers of the G-7 countries said nothing about education in the communique they issued after meeting Saturday.

According to a survey by the Global Campaign for Education, the United States placed last among the 22 donor countries in the fast-track initiative, reserving only 0.15% of its national income for foreign aid. At the head of the class was Norway, at 0.92%, followed closely by Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden, all about 0.7%. France, the highest-ranked of the G-7 countries, registered 0.41%.

James D. Wolfensohn, the outgoing president of the World Bank, said he thought the bank had made progress at this weekend’s meeting toward the goal of universal primary education.

“I regard this meeting as an overture to an opera,” he said. “It isn’t the arias -- they come later, in the first and second acts -- but I think it’s a decent overture.”