TWELVE YEARS’ OF QUALITY EDUCATION FOR EVERY COMMONWEALTH CHILD
GALVANISING THE EFFORT TO FUND AND DELIVER TWELVE YEARS’ OF QUALITY EDUCATION FOR EVERY COMMONWEALTH CHILD Across the Commonwealth progress on global education is at a crossroads. The health emergency caused by the COVID19 pandemic has created the largest education crisis in history, affecting 1.6 billion learners in over 190 countries. No member of the Commonwealth has been left unscathed by this crisis. Whilst almost all countries rolled out remote learning strategies, their delivery has been hampered by widespread inadequacies. At least a third of the world’s schoolchildren were unable to access any remote learning when their schools shut. Even when remote learning was available, many learners lacked access to the necessary resources or technology leaving them with next to no learning. It is no surprise that learning losses have accumulated rapidly over the past year, disproportionately affecting girls, children with disabilities, refugees and IDPs, and other marginalized groups. To make matters worse this all comes on top of an existing learning crisis. 90% of 10-year-olds in lowincome countries can not read and understand a simple story. Whilst over a quarter of a billion children are completely excluded from education. As the world emerges from the pandemic, the challenges it has placed on education systems will not evaporate. Pressures on public finances creates immediate risk The combined impacts of school closures and economic crisis brought on by the pandemic threatens to send progress on Sustainable Development Goal 4 of ‘quality education for all’ into freefall. Millions of children have dropped out of school and 20 million girls may never return due to child marriage or early pregnancy. As schools reopen, it is education budgets that will feel the greatest impact. The education financing gap, which is a primary driver of children’s inability to access education, could, because of the additional costs associated with COVID-19, rise by up to one-
third. Yet despite these additional funding needs, two-thirds of lowand lower-middle-income countries have, in fact, cut their public education budgets since the onset of the pandemic. In Pakistan, where I am a Member of the National Assembly, the economic consequences of the pandemic have already led to many provinces redirecting funding away from their education budgets. At the same time falling household budgets and remittances mean that many parents are struggling to maintain the resources they devote to their children’s education. We are bearing witness to the impact of these cuts with many more children on our streets, begging or as labourers. Meanwhile in Nigeria, which has the second highest out-of-school child population after Pakistan, the budget share for education is the lowest in a decade, amounting to just 5.6% of total government spending. Rather than cutting budgets, we should be investing now in education re-enrolment to get all children back into education when schools fully open, remediation programmes to address learning loss and in second chance education programmes. From crisis to catastrophe The cost of inaction is going to be very high. The World Bank estimates that Pakistan will lose a larger share of students from the school system than any other country, with close to a million children expected to drop out as a result of economic hardship experienced by their families. This is in addition to the 22 million children who were already out of school pre-COVID. The World Bank also estimates that the pandemic will push millions into learning poverty, resulting in 80% of our children unable to read a simple story by the age 10. This is nothing short of a learning catastrophe.
Hon. Mehnaz Akber Aziz, MNA is a Member of the National Assembly of
Pakistan where she was first elected in 2018. She is Chair of the SDGs Committee on Child Rights and she is also the International Parliamentary Network for Education’s Regional Representative for Asia. She completed a Masters in Anthropology at the Quaid-i-Azam University and a Masters in Gender and Development Studies at the University of Sussex.
142 | The Parliamentarian | 2021: Issue Two | 100 years of publishing
