Education for Development
The Education for Development topic has featured on the G8’s agenda since the Okinawa Summit in 2000, and it was launched at the Dakar World Forum on Education held in April 2000, which approved the Education for All (EFA) initiative.
EFA sets out to ensure universal access to quality education in the form of the provision of free education permitting the learning of life and vocational skills. The goals cover all age groups, from pre-school-age children to young people and illiterate adults, adopting a strategy that takes in formal education (primary and secondary), non-formal education and vocational training. International coordination has been entrusted to UNESCO, which performs the task primarily via two tools, the annual EFA report (Global Monitoring Report) and the High Level Group.
Italy has helped keep the EFA programme high on the international agenda, chairing the proceedings of the G8 Task Force on Education for Development, which, in 2001, drew up the paper entitled "A New Focus on Education for All" (approved at the G8 summit at Kananaskis in 2002). To coincide with that summit, the World Bank and the main bilateral donor countries, including all the G8, launched the “Education for All – Fast Track Initiative” (EFA-FTI) as the chief lever for mobilising resources for education. The EFA-FTI is a partnership mechanism setting out to support national education strategies in the developing countries as part of an overall war on poverty scheme.
Since 2002, the Fast Track Initiative has enabled over 40 million boys and girls to attend school by supporting 36 education schemes in the developing countries. Despite the successes scored, there remain a number of aspects requiring improvement, and the Italian duty Presidency will continue to press for the initiative to be stepped up so as to make it more effective, placing greater emphasis on the issues of high-quality education, education for girls and women and access to education in war and post-war areas.
