Fast Track Initiative - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

What is EFA FTI?

The Education for All Fast-track Initiative (EFA FTI) was created as the first ever global compact on education, to help low-income countries achieve a free, universal basic education. It was launched in 2002 as a global partnership between donor and developing country partners to ensure accelerated progress towards the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education

Universal Primary Education

The second United Nations Millennium Development Goal is to achieve Universal Primary Education, more specifically, to “ensure that by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling." Currently, there are more than 75 million children...

by 2015. All low-income countries which demonstrate serious commitment to achieve universal primary completion can join EFA FTI.

The FTI “compact”, based on mutual accountability, aims to provide the incentives and resources to empower poor nations to build and implement sound education plans. Developing countries are responsible for taking ownership of crafting national education plans, with budget accountability and a greater commitment of political and financial resources, while donor countries commit to providing the additional technical know-how and funding required ensuring that no country that has met its obligations would fail for lack of resources or technical capacity.

Through the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, all involved partner countries and agencies coordinate at both national and international levels to ensure greater donor harmonization, knowledge sharing and resource mobilization. Globally, EFA FTI encompasses all major donors for education: more than 30 bilateral, regional and international agencies and development banks. At its inception, EFA FTI was created as an instrument to help low-income countries close four gaps: finance, policy, capacity and data. In addition to increasing resources, EFA FTI is helping to address the other gaps through support for the development of comprehensive sector wide education plans and by strengthening efforts to better track progress towards the EFA goals, including for example primary completion rates.

Historical Context

The EFA-FTI partnership is grounded in the collective wisdom of the global conferences of the past few years.

Education for All goals adopted at the World Education Forum, April 2000, in Dakar, Senegal. 180 countries committed themselves to providing quality education for all the world’s children by 2015.
Millennium Development Goals
Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals are eight international development goals that all 193 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015...

adopted at the UN summit, September 2000, in New York. World leaders agreed to 2015 as the year that all boys and girls should complete a full cycle of primary education.
Monterrey Consensus
Monterrey Consensus
The Monterrey Consensus was the outcome of the 2002 Monterrey Conference, the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development. in Monterrey, Mexico. It was adopted by Heads of State and Government on 22 March 2002. Over fifty Heads of State and two hundred Ministers of Finance,...

forged at the International Finance and Development Conference, March 2002, Monterrey, Mexico. The consensus commits rich nations to boost trade and aid opportunities for countries with sound policies.
Rome and Paris Declarations on Harmonization and Aid Effectiveness (2003 and 2005). The development community committed to work towards aligning its assistance around country development priorities and to harmonize donor policies and priorities around country systems

Partnership Structure

EFA FTI Secretariat
The EFA FTI Secretariat provides technical and administrative support to the Chair and the members of the FTI Board of Directors, FTI Funding committee(s), working groups and task teams to help them fulfill their roles and responsibilities and maintain progress toward the strategic objectives of the FTI Partnership.
The EFA FTI Secretariat is currently hosted by the World Bank in Washington, DC. The Secretariat is organized around four teams.

Global Good Practices
External Relations and Communications
Country Support
Finance, Administration & Board Services

Head of the EFA FTI

Robert (Bob) Prouty is the Head of the Education for All - Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI) Secretariat, a global partnership of donor and developing countries, multilateral institutions, and civil society groups. Since its creation in 2002, EFA FTI has grown steadily endorsing the education sector plans of 43 developing countries around the world. The EFA FTI Secretariat is based in Washington, DC.
Bob specializes in classroom issues and learning outcomes. He holds a Ph. D. in Educational Administration with an emphasis on African studies from Michigan State University and has taught at the primary, secondary, and university levels. Bob lived for 10 years in rural areas of D.R. Congo (formerly Zaire) and Rwanda and speaks three African languages. Much of his career has been focused on education issues in francophone West Africa.

EFA FTI Board of Directors

The FTI Board of Directors is the governing body of the FTI, which sets policies and strategies for the FTI Partnership. It is composed of FTI Partners which represent the main constituencies of the FTI Partnership and a Chair independent of all Partner organizations.

Chair of EFA FTI Board of Directors

The Chair of the FTI Board of Directors is independent of any constituency and represents the FTI Board of Directors and the FTI Partnership as a whole. Ms. Carol Bellamy, elected in November 2009, is the current Chair of the FTI Board of Directors

Results on the Ground

EFA FTI has delivered some impressive results
FTI gets more children into school, for a longer time and for a better education

In 2009 over 82 million children were enrolled in school in EFA FTI developing partner countries compared to 63 million in 2002. In other words, EFA FTI has helped put 19 million children into school.
The number of children enrolled in school in African EFA FTI countries went up 50% between 2002 and 2008. In non-EFA FTI countries the increase was 27%.
The primary school completion rate in EFA FTI countries has increased from 60% in 2002 to over 72% in 2009.

EFA FTI gets more girls into school for longer

In sub-Saharan Africa, girls account for 62% of all new children entering school in EFA FTI partner countries.
In 2008 more than two-thirds of girls completed the last grade of primary school in EFA FTI partner countries around the world compared to 56% in 2002. The children of these girls in the future will be 40% more likely to survive to age 5.

EFA FTI ensures increases in domestic financing and maximizes aid effectiveness

Three new FTI policy directions will be unveiled in detail in late summer on: fragile states, gender, and quality in education.
The new policies will reinforce FTI's core focus of getting children into school for a quality education.
To meet the challenges of educating children in fragile and post-conflict states, FTI will actively engage fragile states and partners such as UNICEF to devise the most effective strategies for working in such countries.
To improve learning outcomes, FTI will promote a "surge in learning" by focusing strongly on reading skills; developing coherent, evidence-based packages to improve reading skills in partner countries; and supporting FTI countries in assessing reading and monitoring progress.
To increase gender parity and enrolment overall, FTI will support girls in the crucial transition to and through secondary school; provide dedicated funding and technical expertise to partner countries to help identify out-of-school girls and develop new ways to get them into school; and renew efforts to ensure that the process to develop, appraise and endorse an education plan concentrates country-level attention and resources on girls' education.

The Education for All blog: a voice for all out-of-school children around the world

Kalyani will probably never read this Wikipedia entry.

Kalyani lived in a village near Tiptur, a small town in Karnataka, India. As a young girl she cleaned and did laundry.
Her parents were very poor and could not send her to school. She never learned to read or write and got married very young.
36 million Kalyanis are still out of school today and, if nothing is done, most of them will never read a blog entry ten years from now.
The vast majority of us will agree that an important foundation for development is education and there is overwhelming evidence to support this claim. And yet there are still 67 million out of school children worldwide. Voiceless children
Beyond the numbers and data, the Education for All blog, hosted by the Education for All - Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI) provides straight-to-the point perspectives on the progress and the challenges still ahead for these millions of unschooled children.

Through the stories of children and their personal experiences (like Kalyani in Deepa Srikantaiah’s blog entry titled 36 million girls, Interrupted EFA FTI’s team of bloggers has explored in non-jargon some of the most important issues that dot the bumpy road leading to education for all:

Read these stories and analyses at Education for All Blog

10 Things About EFA FTI

The Education for All - Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI) is a partnership of donors and developing countries, multilateral institutions, the private sector and civil society organizations which wants all children around the world to receive a quality education.
EFA FTI was launched in 2002 to ensure fast progress toward education for all children. Donor and developing countries agree that education is the best investment in a nation’s future; education can halt the spread of AIDS and other diseases, increase economic growth and break the cycle of poverty.
EFA FTI supports education in 44 developing countries, including 25 in sub-Saharan Africa.
From 2002 to 2008, the number of children enrolled in schools in FTI countries in Africa rose by 50% and 19 million more children were enrolled in school in FTI countries worldwide.
More than 300,000 teachers were hired in FTI-endorsed countries between 2002 and 2008 with support from FTI’s main trust fund.
Between 2004 and 2010, FTI helped to build around 30,000 classrooms, provided more than 200 million textbooks and granted over two billion dollars in financial aid to developing countries.
Girls make up 54% of newly enrolled children in FTI countries and 27 FTI countries have achieved or are close to achieving the goal of boys and girls equally completing primary school.
Despite significant progress, 67 million children are out of school worldwide, including 44 million girls, and 38 million children in Africa alone.
EFA FTI is not only about financing: it helps donors and developing country partners work together to ensure that education aid is better coordinated and more effective, based on countries’ own education strategies.
The endorsement by the EFA FTI partnership of a country’s education plan signals to current and new donors that it is sound, sustainable and a good investment.

Success Stories

Education and the Community in Rwanda: March 18 is remembered in Rwanda as the day when heroes and martyrs of the genocide are honored. That day, four years after the tragedy, a band of armed genocidaires, still roaming the country, stormed into a classroom in the remote Nyange Secondary School... Faced with a society in shock, with whole communities broken-down, atomized sometimes at family level, the country’s leaders targeted education as one of the main instruments to repair the damage to the fabric of society.

Cucuruzeni Village, Moldova Has a New Kindergarten: Alexandru Turcan is a boy of four with curious eyes and an intelligent look. For half his life, he has made sacrifices comparable to an adult’s. Every day he would wake up early, at 6 am, to go to the closest kindergarten, located in the neighboring village, 5 km away. Sleepy, he would wait for the bus, together with other children and parents. “It was most difficult in winter, in the cold. There were days when we froze hard waiting for the bus..."

Overcoming Education Challenges for Marginalized and Poor Children in Cambodia : Violent civil conflict in the 1970s and1980s destroyed much of the country’s social infrastructure. Cambodia’s education sector faces numerous obstacles. The government and local FTI partners are focusing on challenges such as keeping children in the classrooms beyond the first years of school, enhancing the quality of teaching, and reducing the large class sizes. Keeping children in school is difficult for many Cambodian families as children are expected to work to contribute to family incomes and the direct costs for schooling such as pocket money, transportation costs, and supplementary tutoring, are a heavy burden for the average Cambodian family.

Bringing Education to Mongolia's Remote Regions: Mongolia spans 1.5 million square km and has 2.5 million people and globally, has the lowest density of population. Just over 40% of its citizens live in rural areas and 37% in the capital city – Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia’s transition to a free market economy and parliamentary democracy in the early 1990s entailed drastic changes in the education system which impacted the country’s literacy rate negatively.

External links

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