1. The importance for Africa of reaching the EFA goals for 2015;

2. The possible impact of recent renewed education growth on the prospects for achieving the 2015 EFA targets;

3. What it will take to maintain these positive developments; and

4. Role of the development partners in achieving the EFA targets.

1. EFA. To reach the EFA goal is:
An in-escapable pre-requisite for SSA to attain all other development goals such as sustained economic growth; more inclusive and democratic societies; better health and nutrition standards; and greater individual opportunities. It is also a pre-requisite for SSA's successful integration in the modem knowledge and ICT-based economy.
The best vaccine against poverty and inequity that we know about.
Particular attention needs to be given to the education of girls and the poorest since they comprise most of those out of school.

2. Recent positive trends This "Forum" is organized during a period of a remarkable resumption of enrollment growth in SSA. This is a quite different context from the 2000 Dakar "World Education Forum" and the 1990 Jomtien conference which both- were convened in a context of education decline in Africa. When we look back at the development of education in SSA since 1960, we may distinguish between three periods:

" 1960 - 1980: Tremendous growth: The Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) grew from 45% in 1960 to 80% in 1980. While the target of 100% GER for 1980 set in 1961 in Addis Abeba was not reached, enrollment grew by 260%, exceeding the enrollment target by 24%. However, 100% GER was not reached since the population of primary school age grew five times faster than projected (93% versus 18% projected).

" 1980 - late 1990s: Stagnation and decline. The GER declined from about 80% in 1980s to 72% in 1992, and slowly regained its 1980 level by 2000. The 70% enrollment growth between 1980 and 2000 just enough to keep pace with population growth.

" Late 1990s - 2005: Resumption of strong growth. The GER increased from 78% in 1998/99 to 84% in 2000/01 and 91 % in 2002/03, reflecting broad-based growth in access at a level not seen since the 1970s. Partial data available for the school-years 2003/04 and 2004/05 confirm that the progress is continuing.

This means that main challenge bas change from how to address stagnation and decline, to how best to maintain and reinforce the progress achieved in most countries since the late 1990s.

3. What will it take? Clearly, to reach EFA means (i) enrolling those who have not yet entered the system (largely in rural areas and from the poorest groups) and, especially, and (ii) drastically improve the quality of education. While the actions required to achieve this will vary considerable between countries, in most countries there are six areas where particular attention is needed:

Teachers: Much more attention needs to be given to providing regular in-service training and pedagogical support for teachers as well as to effective policies for teacher deployment and management;

Training material: To ensure that all children have access to a package of essential learning materials free of charge is likely to be the most cost-effective way for most countries to improve quality. In general, financing is not the main constraint on reaching this objective. It is largely a question of giving political to the establishment of sustainable national systems for the development, procurement, financing, distribution and utilization of printed learning material.

Management: More and better inputs are not enough. Much more must be done to improve how education is managed at the system and, particularly, at the school level. As we will see during this Forum, at present there is considerable scope for using existing resources more effectively.

Home factors: Even a well endowed and managed school cannot prevent dropout or ensure effective learning if the children are hungry, walk far to get to school, work long hours at home, or have illiterate parents. To make education provision more poverty-focused must be a priority, and east-effective interventions do exist to address this type of obstacles.

Impact of HIV/AIDS: In 2010, one out of every ten children of primary school age in Africa will be an orphan, largely from HIV/AIDS. In Some countries, the annual attrition rate for teachers bas doubled in recent years, from around 3-4% to 6-8%. These developments pose a major challenge to education.

Sector-wide approach: To give priority to EF A does Dot mean that secondary and higher education are not important as well. They are. It is in fact very urgent that countries and their development partners start to seriously explore the impact of reaching the EFA goals on the rest of the education system.
Many countries are making good progress in addressing the above type of issues. One main purpose of this "Forum" is to promote knowledge sharing between countries to enhance countries' capacity to develop home-grown solutions enriched by the experiences from other countries.

4. Role of development partners. African Governments obviously bear the main responsibility for financing EFA.

• However, the development partners have committed themselves to help. But many African policy makers feel that the success in translating the commitments made five years ago into increased funding bas been too slow. However, over the last couple of years there bas been considerable progress. We will discuss some of this progress when discussing the "Fast Track Initiative" (FTI) in a session tomorrow.

• At this stage I will limit myself to say that there are many encouraging trends in the international debate about increased aid to Africa, including debt relief, and that those of us working within international technical and financial agencies support these developments as best we can. But ultimately, the level of development assistance is not determined by us but by the parliaments and political leadership in the rich countries. And one of the most effective ways of ensure increased aid is to implement effectively and timely the national programs.

• Finally, bath recipient and dollar countries need to pay increased attention to the balance between increased don or financing and the rapidly increasing dollar dependency in the education sector.

5. Concluding remarks. The most important lesson from successful countries is that reaching EFA requires strong Government commitment.

• Having followed quite closely education development in SSA over the last 30 years, I feel that African Governments' commitment to education now is strong. At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, I will say that today's situation resembles the very strong priority for education given by African leaders following independence, as witnessed in the Addis Ababa conference in 1961, and that resulted in unprecedented education growth during the 1960s and 1970s at a level never seen anywhere else.

• Unfortunately, the economic crisis of the 1980s stopped this progress. To succeed, we need to repeat this past success. Building on lessons learned since then, including what we will learn over the next few days, there is really no reason why this should not be possible.

I wish you a successful conference. Thank you.

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