Education Financing

This is a 28-page booklet setting out a process for using a human rights framework to assess a government’s education budget.  The booklet looks at elements of the right to education and where these might be found in a government’s budget; a government’s human rights obligations and questions these raise about a government’s budget; a process for using a rights framework to analyse a government’s education budget; and a short discussion of costing related to the right to education.

This policy paper provides analysis showing that if governments and donors make concerted efforts to meet the promises they made in 2000, basic education for all could be achieved by 2015.

This toolkit aims to help education activists reinforce their advocacy and campaign work on education financing. It aims to give practical information in an accessible form, together with ideas for how to build an effective national campaign – the evidence you can build and the tactics you can deploy. 

Corruption and poor governance are acknowledged as major impediments to realising the right to education and to reaching global development goals. Corruption not only distorts access to education, but affects the quality of education and the reliability of research findings. From corruption in the procurement of school resources and nepotism in the hiring of teachers, to the buying and selling of academic titles and the skewing of research results, major corruption risks can be identified at every level of the education and research systems.

Abolishing School Fees in Africa is the product of a SFAI workshop, “School Fee Abolition: Building on What We Know and Defining Sustained Support,” held in Kenya in 2006. The book begins with a comparative overview of the processes, challenges, and lessons learned by five countries that had already abolished school fees: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, and Mozambique. The subsequent chapters delineate the actual experiences of each of the countries in planning and implementing their policies.

This report summarizes in 281 pages the shortcomings of global educational promises and then examines how the right to education fares in 170 countries. Developing and transitioning countries are divided into six geographical regions and 31 tables highlight the key findings derived from country-by-country surveys. The Report highlights the abyss between the domestic policies of wealthy creditor and donor governments which keep compulsory education free, and their external policies which have made it for-fee. All sources are indicated in 1,317 footnotes.

This guide presents ideas and methodologies to put a human rights-based approach to education in practice. It focuses on six strategic areas that are central to (and provide a framework for) a HRBA to education including: understanding and securing the right to education working with excluded groups; financing education; promoting citizen participation in education securing rights in education; advancing a full "Education for All" agenda.