Education for sustainable development is a means to achieving many, if not most, of the Millennium Development Goals. Realizing and reaching those goals may take time, but providing all with educational opportunities will have an immediate, verifiable, and measurable impact on the well-being of the people of the world and on their sustainable development. Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations, emphasized the importance of education in achieving sustainable development.
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) has been working to improve education in developing countries since 1943. CRS provides emergency relief in the wake of natural and man-made disasters, and through development projects in the fields of education, peace and justice, agriculture, microfinance, health, and HIV/AIDS, CRS works to uphold human dignity and promote better standards of living. Today, CRS assists people in need in 94 countries and territories across five continents, and supports education programs in over 30 countries.
In many countries, lives have been transformed through recent technological advances, but for 1.2 billion members of the human family who live on less than $1 a day, change has been anything but quick. The world bore witness to a decline in the number of absolute poor between 1993 and 1996, but the trend was short-lived. With the advent of the global financial crisis in 1997, the number was once again on the rise. Education is a key ingredient of the “magic potion” that will turn this rhetoric into reality. Hunger, disease, and poverty cannot be eradicated without conquering illiteracy.
There are five main reasons why children are out of school at primary and secondary levels. Firstly, it is too burdensome for families with members who live on less than one dollar per day to meet both the out-of-pocket and opportunity costs of school attendance. Children need to contribute to the family’s economic survival. Secondly, parents often view existing educational opportunities to be of very low quality, and they perceive that the investment they must make to send their children to school is unwarranted in light of anticipated returns. Thirdly, poor countries often cannot educate all the children who wish to attend school, leading to the practice of rationing school places through policies that systematically exclude or discourage populations deemed to be marginal. Fourthly, millions of children are too sick or hungry to attend school, and they are trapped in a downward spiral that begins with poor attendance, progresses to academic failure, and concludes with abandonment of the education enterprise. Lastly, education systems are insensitive to what it takes to bring more girls to the classroom, such as schools that are close to home, separate toilet facilities for girls, encouraging teachers, and instructional materials with female role models.
The present volume contains eight case studies that offer important insights into how these five challenges can be met. Vignettes from Ghana and India illustrate how parents and other community members can become actively engaged in demanding and contributing to the availability of quality education for their children. Parental involvement has been shown in numerous studies around the world to be of critical importance in improving educational access and quality.