EFA

The EMA Global Monitoring Report discusses the major discrepancy between OECD countries and sub-Saharan Africa.  They say that “by the age of 7, almost all children in OECD countries are in primary school, compared with 40% for sub-Saharan Africa.”  There is also a major discrepancy between post secondary educations.  But these are not the only disparities.  Within countries there are major disparities between the wealthy and poor. Across the board, we see a smaller percentage of poor children attending school than wealthier ones.  They say that poor children in Africa and Asia “are less than half as likely to reach grade 9 as those from the richest 20%.  These are truly staggering numbers that need to be corrected.

We have seen this type of disparity in many countries.  In China, for example, children in rural areas are far less likely to go to school than children from urban areas.  It is not a coincidence that they are usually poorer than children in urban areas.  In decentralized countries, poor areas have bigger issues than wealthy areas with education students.  These trends show that finance is an extremely important part of education. We need to put more of our government expenditures into education to try and reverse these trends.