Education for All – Fast Track Initiative

Contents

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 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.

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.

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

EFA FTI gets more girls into school for longer

EFA FTI ensures increases in domestic financing and maximizes aid effectiveness

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. EFA FTI supports education in 44 developing countries, including 25 in sub-Saharan Africa.
  4. 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.
  5. More than 300,000 teachers were hired in FTI-endorsed countries between 2002 and 2008 with support from FTI’s main trust fund.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Despite significant progress, 67 million children are out of school worldwide, including 44 million girls, and 38 million children in Africa alone.
  9. 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.
  10. 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

External links