Turning Point: Between 2000 and 2018 the number of African children enrolled in primary school more than doubled, rising from 60 million to 150 million.
In 1848, republican revolts against European monarchies ended in failure and repression. The year was said to be a turning point at which history failed to turn.
Almost certainly 2018 will mark a similar turning point. The year saw Donald Trump’s protectionism, Chinese expansionism, a reborn nationalism in India and Japan, Iranian empire-building, and Russian opportunism all combine to undermine the international cooperation that has sustained the 70-year-old postwar global order.
Among the casualties have been agreements on climate change, nuclear weapons and trade, as the world suddenly appears divided and leaderless.
For the time being at least, lip service is being paid to the United Nations’ internationally sanctioned Sustainable Development Goals, which set ambitious deadlines to end illiteracy, avoidable disease, malnutrition and extreme poverty by 2030. But there is now growing evidence that, despite the valiant efforts of António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, and his deputy, Amina J. Mohammed, these goals are being subverted by our collective failure to agree on a means to finance them.
The fourth Sustainable Development Goal — equitable and inclusive quality education for all — commits us to make our generation, by 2030, the first in history to send every child to school.
Today, the shameful reality is that 260 million children aren’t going to class. Among those in school, a total of 400 million will leave before they turn 12, and more than 800 million, half the developing world’s boys and girls, will end their secondary schooling with no recognizable qualifications for the modern work force.
A recent World Bank study shows that child marriage could become a thing of the past if all girls attended school. Unfortunately, about 230 million of the 430 million school-age girls in low- or lower-middle-income countries will never complete their secondary education, according to the Unesco Institute for Statistics. And female illiteracy has a devastating effect on a community’s health, with infant mortality in Africa far higher among uneducated mothers.
Despite the scholastic mountain we have to climb, international aid for education has fallen over the past decade from 13 percent of all aid to just 10 percent. At just $10 per child per year, that’s not even enough money to cover the cost of a secondhand textbook.
The much-vaunted public-private partnerships that were expected, in the words of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United Nations, to turn “billions into trillions,” have yet to materialize, and while global health and educational institutions in developed countries are blessed with outstanding private philanthropists, global education has yet to discover its latter-day Andrew Carnegie. Business investments in global education have been a fraction of the investments in global health or the environment.
With only 12 years until the 2030 deadline to achieve universal education, we are at a moment of truth. Barring a dramatic shift in policy, 200 million school-age children will not be in class in 2030. Instead, they will most likely be on the streets, where they will be easy prey for extremists who will exploit our broken promises on education as proof that peaceful coexistence can never work.
If they aren’t on the streets, these millions of young people, denied educational and employment opportunities in their home countries, will be on the move. Unless some of the world’s wealth moves to Africa, Africans will increasingly move to the world’s wealth, as millions of would-be migrants convince themselves that being poor in a rich country is better than being rich in a poor country.
The $10 billion International Finance Facility for Education can break through the aid stalemate. Proposed by the Education Commission, an international initiative I chair, the fund is focused on the more than 700 million children living in the world’s lower-middle-income countries, which themselves contain the vast majority of refugees and displaced children.
These 50 or so countries are too poor to finance the cost of universal education themselves, but too wealthy to qualify for substantive grants from multilateral development banks. The loans that are available carry a 4 percent interest rate. As a result, only $350 million, or 50 cents per child per year, is devoted to education in these nations.
By offering developing countries affordable financing, the new fund will plug a yawning chasm in the architecture of international aid. It will be created from guarantees provided by donor countries: $2 billion leveraged up by borrowing in the marketplace into $8 billion worth of funding. And this will be supplemented by $2 billion of grant aid, allowing us to cut the interest charged on the loans. Converting a $2 billion grant into $8 billion of aid will make the funding we offer go four times as far as conventional aid.
Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of Britain, is the United Nations special envoy for global education and the author of “Gordon Brown: My Life, Our Times.”