The Dakar Framework for Action stipulated that the Director-General of UNESCO would convene a high-level group annually, as part of UNESCO’s ‘mandated role in coordinating EFA partners and maintaining their collaborative momentum’. This first meeting of the High-Level Group followed two meetings of the EFA Working Group (November 2000 and September 2001). The aim of the meeting was to ‘serve as a lever for political commitment and technical and financial resource mobilization’, as well as being ‘an opportunity to hold the global community to account for commitments made in Dakar’.

In accordance with the Dakar Framework for Action, which states that the High-Level Group should be composed of ‘highest level leaders from governments and civil society of developing and developed countries, and from development agencies’, UNESCO invited the Ministers of Education from eighteen countries representative of all regions of the world, the leaders of four international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the heads of five multilateral or bilateral agencies (see the the List of Participants in the Final Report).

The meeting had three major themes: political commitment, resource mobilisation and civil society and partnerships.