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Universal access to education is vital to the future health and well-being of our global society.

Date Posted on Global Envision: September 18, 2007

One of the silent killers attacking the developing world is the lack of quality basic education for large numbers of the poorest children in the world’s poorest countries—particularly girls. Yet unlike many of the world’s most grievous ailments, this is a disease with a known cure. We know what tools are needed and what models are proven to work. We also know that the cost of that cure—perhaps $7.5 billion to $10 billion per year—is minuscule compared with the enormous benefits such education would bring for health, economics, women’s empowerment, and basic human dignity.An estimated 110 million children—60 percent of them girls—between the ages of 6 and 11 will not see the inside of a classroom this year. Another 150 million are likely to drop out before completing primary school.

More than half of all girls in sub-Saharan Africa do not complete primary school, and only 17 percent are enrolled in secondary school. Rates in rural areas are even worse. For instance, a 1996 study in Niger found that only 12 percent of girls in rural areas were enrolled in primary school, compared with 83 percent of girls in the capital.

The situation can be even worse for vulnerable children. In developing nations, those with disabilities and those affected by AIDS face even greater obstacles to education, while orphaned children are less likely to be enrolled in school than their peers who live with at least one parent. Only 6 percent of children in refugee camps are enrolled in secondary education, and opportunities for internally displaced children are even more limited.Access is only part of the story. The other crucial factor is quality. As highlighted by Education for All: The Quality Imperative, the 2005 Global Monitoring Report by UNESCO, too many children leave school without mastering a basic set of skills. “Ensuring a decent quality of education is an essential component of reform.”

Strong Evidence

The good news is documented in What Works in GnU Education, a 2004 Council on Foreign Relations report that I co-authored with Barbara Herz, and is reinforced in a Mother’s Day 2005 report by Save the Children: we have extremely strong evidence both on the high returns on girls’ education and on what works to get girls in school. What is striking is the breadth of benefits derived from educating girls—not only economic benefits in terms of higher wages, greater agricultural productivity, and faster economic growth, but also health benefits, HIV prevention, and women’s empowerment.

Two 1999 World Bank studies found that dosing the education gender gap in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa would have led to faster economic growth between 1960 and 1992, while increasing the share of women with a secondary education can yield growth in per-capita income. Another 63-country study attributed 43 percent of the decline in malnutrition achieved between 1970 and 1995 to more productive farming as a result of increased female education.

Even more impressive are the gains to health that come from educating girls. An extra year of female education can reduce infant mortality by 5 percent to 10 percent. In Africa, children of mothers who receive five years of primary education are 40 percent less likely to die before age 5 than are children of uneducated mothers. Across both Africa and Southeast Asia, mothers who have a basic education are 50 percent more likely than uneducated mothers to immunize their children.

Education has also proven to be one of the most powerful tools to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. A recent study in rural Uganda found that, in comparison with young people with no education, those with some secondary education were three times less likely to be HIV-positive, and those with some primary schooling were about half as likely to be HIV-positive. In Kenya, a study of 17-year-old girls found that those in secondary school were almost four times as likely to be sexually inactive as those who had dropped out after primary school. In Swaziland, a 2003 study found that more than 70 percent of in-school youths were not sexually active, while nearly 70 percent of out-of-school youths were sexually active. And school-based AIDS education programs have been shown to reduce early sexual activity and high-risk behavior. According to the Global Campaign for Education, seven million cases of AIDS might be prevented over the next 10 years if all children completed basic education.

What Works

In making progress on girls’ education, there are three things to keep in mind.

First, while sending girls to school may be clearly beneficial both for the girls themselves and for their countries, in most poor nations it is the parents who make the ultimate choice on schooling, and for them this calculation may not seem so clear. Rightly or wrongly, such extremely impoverished parents often feel they need their girls’ labor for extra income or, more frequently, just to help with the grueling requirements of life, such as the long hours spent collecting water or firewood or caring for the younger children in the family.

The good news is, when you reduce the cost and increase the benefits of sending girls to school, most parents will choose a better future for their children. It is critical to develop and widely implement policies that work to align the temporary interests of parents with the long-term well-being of their girls and their societies.

The simplest and most basic strategy to reduce costs for parents is to eliminate the per-child school fees that are still charged in many developing countries. We know this strategy works because countries that have reduced or eliminated school fees have seen enrollment skyrocket overnight. In Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, enrollment increased dramatically in the very first year after fees were abolished: from 3.4 million to 5.7 million students in Uganda in 1996; from 5.9 million to 7.2 million in Kenya in 2003; and from 1.5 million to 3 million in Tanzania in 2002.

Beyond eliminating fees, even modest additional incentives to parents have made a huge difference. Scholarships and conditional cash transfers have been shown to lift attendance of both girls and boys in countries such as Bangladesh, Mexico, and Brazil. School-based health and nutrition programs have also proven successful. In Kenya, for instance, school meals were found to raise attendance by 30 percent and to boost test scores.Reducing the distance children must travel to school is also critical because it both cuts down on the time children must spend away from home and alleviates parental concerns for the safety of their children, especially their girls, as they walk to and from school. Policies that both build parental trust and make schools more girl-friendly—such as hiring more female teachers, forming parental committees, and providing latrine facilities for girls—have all been shown to increase girls’ enrollment.

Second, while it is crucial that countries make an extra effort and institute special initiatives to target girls’ education, these endeavors will work only in the context of a broader focus on universal basic education for all children. Though the educational gaps for girls are especially large, the problems for boys—particularly poor, rural boys—are also dramatic. Furthermore, efforts to get girls into schools will never be successful unless there is a decent quality of education—respectable class sizes, trained teachers, quality instructional materials—for both girls and boys.

Third, while the impetus for all major education reforms must come from the local and national levels of countries themselves, it is critical that there be a global compact that pairs a commitment from developing countries to institute necessary reforms with a clear contingent commitment from donors to provide resources to countries that fulfill their part of the compact. This is especially critical because the major cost for poor countries seeking universal basic education is the recurring cost of teachers’ salaries.

The key to such a compact is certainty. Donors must feel certain that there is a commitment to good governance, careful monitoring, and national ownership of any plan to expand basic education. Leaders of developing countries, on the other hand, must have the certainty that, if they are willing to take on the enormous task of mobilizing political will and resources to seek universal basic education, then donors will live up to their part of the compact by providing the substantial funds needed to fill their financing gap.

This was the promise of the Dakar meeting hosted by UNESCO in 2000, where more than 180 nations—including the United States—committed to the simple yet profound goal (which later became a Millennium Development Goal) of achieving universal basic education by 2015. The global compact on education that emerged from Dakar required developing countries to demonstrate a real commitment to the goal of universal basic education by developing their own national education plans—based on political will, domestic resource mobilization, and accountability—while rich countries pledged that “no country seriously committed to Education for All will be thwarted in its achievement of universal primary school completion by 2015 due to lack of resources.”Instilling confidence that donors will live up to their pledge is particularly important in light of the multiple crises facing most poor countries and the reality that many of the economic benefits of achieving universal basic education will not be realized until after current leaders have left office. When the leaders of a poor nation consider taking on such a challenge even though the political payoff may flow to their successors, it is essential that the global community at least make it dear that those leaders will not be left without the resources to succeed.

In the five years since Dakar, there has been some progress on these promises. The world established the Fast Track Initiative (FTI), a new global financing mechanism designed to direct coordinated funding to low-income countries that have developed quality national education plans. As of July 2005, 16 countries had been endorsed by FTI, and an estimated 44 others could be ready over the next two years.

FTI represents an important step toward a certain and viable global compact on education. Unfortunately, donors’ contributions have to date been far short of what is required. As the World Economic Forum’s Global Governance Initiative reported, donors in 2004 delivered less than 10 percent of what is needed annually to achieve universal primary education. The global community will ultimately need to provide another $7.5 billion to $10 billion annually, above the pathetic $2 billion that is now provided in external assistance for basic education.

While reform must always emanate from the local communities and national governments of poor nations, it would be inexcusable if educational and political leaders in developing nations were discouraged from taking bold steps to provide all of their children a free and quality basic education simply because they lacked confidence that donor nations would hold up their end of the global bargain.

Contributed by Gene B. Sperling, Senior Fellow for Economic Policy and Director of the Center for Universal Education.

To read another Global Envision article about the benefits of access to education, see Private Education in India can Benefit Poor People.

By Paul Eccleston
Telegraph.co.uk, 22/11/2007

Richard Heinberg, one of the world’s leading experts on oil reserves, warned that the lives of billions of people were threatened by a food crisis caused by our dependence on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.

Higher oil prices, the loss of farmland to biofuel crops, climate change and the loss of natural resources would combine with population growth to create an unprecedented food shortage, he claimed.

The only way to avoid a world food crisis was a planned and rapid reduction of fossil fuel use - oil, coal and gas - and a switch to more organic methods in the growing and delivery of food. It would mean a return to living off the land not seen for 150 years.

The stark predictions were made by Heinberg in a lecture to the Soil Association in London.

Heinberg, an author and former advisor to the National Petroleum Council, specialises in ‘Peak Oil’ - the point where oil production reaches its maximum and begins to decline - and the implications it has for climate change and food security.

He said for thousands of years, until the 19th century and the onset of the Industrial Revolution, all food production had been local. In good years there was enough to eat and to store and in bad years there was starvation.
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The invention of the petrol engine increased the amount of arable land available to grow food, the size and efficiency of farm machinery improved, and better pesticides were developed - all of which contributed to a better food supply.

As food became more plentiful and cheap, the threat of famine disappeared and obesity became more widespread than hunger. Food, grain, meat and vegetables began to be exported around the world and the world population increased six-fold.

By the 1960s industrial-chemical practices had been exported to the third world and in the next half century food production tripled - but at an unrecognised cost of water and soil pollution and enormous environmental damage.

Heinberg said that, unfortunately, it was all unsustainable and the abundance of food depended on depleting, non-renewable fossil fuels whose burning produced climate-altering carbon dioxide.

The depletion of oil stocks, the demand for biofuels as an alternative, environmental degradation and extreme weather caused by climate change, were coming together to pose massive problems for world food production.

The situation would be made worse by a shortage of fresh drinking water. According to UN estimates, one third of the world’s population lived in areas with water shortages and 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. The situation was expected to worsen dramatically over the next few decades.

While the human population had tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources had grown six-fold.

The UN Environment Program had concluded that the planet’s water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks were all in “inexorable decline” much of it due to agriculture, which constituted the greatest single source of human impact on the biosphere.

Heinberg said that to get to the heart of the crisis a comprehensive transformation of world agriculture was needed - greater than anything seen in many decades - which would produce a system that was not reliant on fossil fuels.

He cited Cuba as an example of what could be achieved. In the 1980s it had become reliant on cheap fuel supplied by Russia and was using more agrochemicals per acre than even the US. But after the fall of communism, supplies dried up. The average Cuban lost 20lbs in weight, living standards collapsed and malnutrition became widespread.

Cuban authorities responded by redesigning the food supply system. Large state-owned farms were broken up and given to families and they were encouraged to form co-operatives, biological methods were used for pest control, oxen replaced tractors, urban vegetable gardens flourished and people began to keep chickens and rabbits for food. Twenty years later food production was 90 per cent of its former levels.

Heinberg said what was needed was a return to ecological organic farming methods which would require the transformation of societies.

And with oil supplies rapidly running out the full resources of national governments would be needed to achieve it.

The amount of food transportation would have to be reduced, food would need to be grown in and around cities, and producers and consumers would need to live closer together.

The use of pesticides would have to be reduced in packaging and processing, draft animals would be reintroduced and governments would have to provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. Land reform would be needed to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots and population growth would have to be curbed.

“All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying mere techno-fixes - will almost certainly lead to dire consequences,” he said.

” All of the worrisome trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.”

Heinberg added: “The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society.

“A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as organic food, whether or not we act.

“But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.”

While I have a number of reservations about some views in this Sydney Morning Herald article by author and psychotherapist Steve Biddulph, it overall certainly provides food for thought on the future political landscape in Australia and other parts of the world.

The party’s over and Liberals will soon be history

Sydney Morning Herald, November 29, 2007

The Liberal Party is in trauma. The corporate sector is attempting to calm its nerves, and even the victors in the Labor Party cannot quite believe the seismic change in the landscape of power. But the ramifications of last Saturday may be much greater than just one election won or lost. In a way that seems unthinkable to us now, 2007 may mark the end of the Liberal Party itself. It won’t happen overnight, but just watch it happen.

We are so conditioned to the idea that two main parties define politics, we even call them left and right as if they were parts of our body. But parties spring up in response to the primary tensions in a certain time and place. In the 20th century that polarisation was capital versus labour. A century earlier, before even the idea of power among the working poor, politics was aristocrats versus tradesmen, the growing middle class of shopkeepers and artisans that formed the basis of the Tories.

This is no longer the central tension in modern democracies. Centrist governments cover all the bases, and conservative politics has begun to wither away. This is a change that has come late to Australia. But social evolution is now speeding up and even this alignment is becoming dated.

The issue of the future, coming down on us now like a steam train, is of course the environment, the double hammer blows of climate change and peak oil. Energy, weather and human misery are the factors that will define our lives for decades to come. You can cancel your newspaper, those are the only four words you need to know.

Linked to this, but compounding it in frightening ways, is the imminent demise of the United States economy. In fact the whisper, the subplot in economist circles, was that this election was one to lose. That whoever inherited Australia in 2007 inherited a coming economic collapse in globalised trade that would suck Australia and much of the rest of the world down with it. For two years now the best predictions have been that the subprime meltdown would act as merely the detonator of a much larger explosive charge created long ago by US consumer debt, concealed by Chinese and Arab investment in keeping that great hungry maw that is America sucking in what it could not begin to pay for. The avalanche-like fall of US house prices will be closely followed by the same in linked economies worldwide, and presage a harsh and very different world than the one we have lived in. In short, the party is over. We are a civilisation in collapse.

Labor is the right party to manage this. Despite the widespread belief after years of cynical politics that politicians are all the same, Rudd and Gillard are not in power for power’s sake. I am willing to stake my 30 years as a psychologist on this, but I think many observers have also come to this conclusion. Kevin and Julia, as Australia already calls them, want to make this country a better place for the people in it. In the coming times of deprivation, they have the value systems that will be needed to care for the sudden rise in poverty, stress, and need. They also have the unity.

So what will be the new polarity in future elections? It’s the ecology, stupid. The Greens will emerge as the new opposition, though this will take probably two election cycles. By the 2010 election, 20 per cent will vote Green, simply because peak oil and climate catastrophe will have proven them right, and thinking people will see the need for austerity now for our children’s tomorrow. The Liberal Party will be lucky to attract 30 per cent, which is the habitual, rusted-on portion of the community that thinks greed is good.

By 2014, we will have a struggle between a new left and right - Labor and Green - and the issue will be simply how green, how to balance the need for a much simpler and more communal kind of life, with the need to give people comfort and amenity now. This issue will continue to define life for the rest of this century.

Climate change will bring horrific costs this century unless a global effort is rallied in a way that has never been done before to regulate our gluttonous use of the air and water. Perhaps a billion lives are at risk, let alone 2 to 3 billion refugees, as agriculture and water supplies collapse across southern Asia and elsewhere, and producer countries, like Australia, find they can barely feed themselves.

The big lie of Liberal supremacy was economic management. In fact, they knew how to generate income, but not how to spend it. We could have been building what Europe built in this past decade - superb hospitals, bullet trains, schools and training centres, low cost public transport of luxurious quality, magnificent public housing. We pissed it all away on tax giveaways and consumer goods. On bloated homes that we will not be able to cool or heat, or sell, and cars we won’t be able to afford to drive. A party based on self interest may evaporate along with our rivers and lakes, and have no role to play in a world where we co-operate or die.

Climate change is paving a “highway to extinction” which could see billions of people perish from hunger, malnutrition, disease, extreme weather events, heat-induced stress and lack of drinkable water by the year 2050, according to the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due to be released in Belgium next Friday.

Climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia told the Associated Press that the report maps out the consequences of climate change degree by degree, as temperatures rise. He said this presents a clear “highway to extinction, but on this highway there are many turnoffs. This is showing you where the road is heading. The road is heading toward extinction.”

Dr Weaver is one of the lead authors of the first IPCC report, issued in February. That report confirmed the strong scientific consensus that climate change is real and is caused by human activity related to greenhouse gas emissions.

If the global temperature rose by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) up to 1.7 billion people would not have enough water. Infectious diseases and allergenic pollens would also substantially increase, and amphibians would begin to go extinct.

A further increase of 1 degree Celsius would see one-third of the world’s species approach extinction and at least 2 billion people facing death as a result of hunger, malnutrition, disease, extreme weather events, heat-induced stress and lack of drinkable water. Life on the planet would reach this threshold by the year 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions were not reduced substantially.

A further doubling of temperatures would see one-fifth of the world’s population affected by catastrophic flooding, up to 3.2 billion people facing extreme water shortages, and major extinctions around the globe.

Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Environment Program, told Reuters that “We are talking about a potentially catastrophic set of developments.” He believes the public, governments and businesses now realize that the substantive debate is over and that there is overwhelming consensus on climate change in the scientific community.

“We’ve passed the tipping point,” he said. “It’s no longer about whether climate change is happening – but about how we deal with it.” The next report of the IPCC, due out in October 2007, will assess the range of options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise mitigating climate change.

Reports of the IPCC draw on the research of 2,500 climate scientists and reviewers. Only conclusions and projections beyond dispute make it into the final drafts of the reports, which are then signed off by more than 120 governments.

A draft of the current IPCC report has been circulated to major media organizations and lists a range of potential climate change related consequences including:

• vast tracts of low-lying nations, island-states and coastlines around the world being swallowed by rising sea levels;
• Himalayan glaciers melting by the 2030s;
• powerful heat waves recurring across the United States;
• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef being destroyed; and
• agricultural production plummeting world-wide (after a brief boost in Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Scandinavia).

Despite the dire warnings contained in this second report of the IPCC, scientists remain optimistic that humanity will act on climate change.

Oceanographer James McCarthy of Harvard University, one of the key authors of the current report, is one such optimist. “The worst stuff is not going to happen because we can’t be that stupid,” he told Reuters. “Not that I think the projections aren’t that good, but because we can’t be that stupid.”

[via Gaia Foundation WA]

An interesting little clip on the simple question of whether or not to take ameliorating action independent of whether global warming is real - i think it’s quite a strong logical argument presented here.