Broken promises?: why donors must deliver on the EFA action plan

This paper reports on how development finance ministers have backtracked on support promised for the new Education for All Action Plan programme at the 2002 IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings. The Action Plan produced an agreement on how to mobilise the extra financing needed to ensure that no country could fail to ensure eductation for all due to a lack of resources.

Since the promises were made in April:

• donors have failed to deliver additional financing
• implementation of the EFA Action Plan has slipped
• the financing framework has still not been finalised

The authors argue that unless there is a breakthrough on education at the new donors education consortium in November, political momentum will be lost and the progress that was achieved at the Spring Meetings will have been wasted. The global campaign for education calls on donors to commit additional annual financing of $5bn to implement the EFA action plan. Without such funding the fast track initiative will become just another set of conditionalities placed on low income countries. The authors argue that a multilateral framework within which national plans are systematically developed, funded and monitored is required to:

• commit donors to an a priori guarantee that any country meeting the criteria set out in the indicative framework will have its external resource needs met
• ensure financing needs are met through in-country donor co-ordination
• ensure policy benchmarks enshrined in the Fast Track initiative are revised through genuine dialogue between donors, governments and civil society
• construct a strategy and timetable to expand the Fast Track list beyond the initial 18 countries