Pacific Education for All: 2015 Review
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At the World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2000, countries across the world made a commitment to Education for All (EFA) and identified six goals to be achieved by 2015. In July 2013, with the 2015 deadline for achieving the EFA goals in view, UNESCO invited Member States to undertake a systematic review of their progress towards achieving the goals. In the Pacific, all of the 15 UNESCO Member States and Associate Members (Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tokelau, Tuvalu and Vanuatu) took part in this global EFA 2015 review process. These reviews not only charted national progress towards the six EFA goals but also served as a basis for the preparation of national EFA review reports.
The national EFA reports produced under this review process provided an assessment of progress towards the six EFA goals. They also described the national strategies that were used to achieve the six EFA goals and examined the enabling and constraining factors, to explain the particular challenges that these countries face as they seek to deliver quality education for all. In addition, the reports described the implications these challenges have for the post-2015 education agenda at the country level and made recommendations for the future development of education in their countries.
Over the past 15 years, Pacific countries have worked closely with regional organizations and other development partners under regional initiatives to address shared education challenges in the region. In this context, in addition to launching the EFA 2015 review process at the national level, it was important to also measure progress made against the EFA goals at the Pacific regional level. A Pacific EFA 2015 review was launched to provide a means to describe the challenges and opportunities that countries in the Pacific face in the pursuit of education progress, and to identify common themes and any successful approaches that could be applied more broadly.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, the UNESCO Office for the Pacific States, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and UNICEF Pacific agreed to collaborate to conduct a Pacific EFA 2015 review.
This report is the outcome of that review. It describes the progress made in the Pacific towards each of the six EFA goals and provides an analysis of the region’s socio-economic, demographic, political and technological contexts, including emerging development issues and aspirations. These contextual factors, combined with the region’s diversity, present both challenges and opportunities for the post-2015 education agenda for the Pacific region. This report also catalogues the published education statistics of all 15 Pacific Island Countries and Territories, with a focus on the 11 countries that prepared national EFA review reports.
This report is intended to be a useful resource document for Pacific Islanders, development partners and other stakeholders, serving to (i) provide a snapshot of the state of education in the Pacific and give an example of the type of descriptive analysis that can help to inform evidence-based policy-making in the education sector, (ii) inform deliberations on the direction of the post-2015 education agenda at the national and regional levels, (iii) identify data gaps at the national and regional levels and inform priorities for the provision of support to improve education data collection and use in the Pacific, and (iv) identify national and regional needs, priorities and gaps, so as to aid in the alignment of regional programmes and to ensure development partners’ activities in the education sector continue to be relevant and complementary.
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Pacific Education for All: 2015 Review
Apia: UNESCO Apia Office, 2015, 133p.
ISBN: 978-982-2250-17-6