DOKUMENT: Learning to survive:
How education for all would save millions of young people from HIV/AIDS
New research presented in this report shows that if every child completed primary school, at least 7 million new cases of HIV would be prevented over a decade. A good general education enables people to understand, evaluate, and apply facts, including facts about AIDS. It is probably the single most effective weapon for halting the spread of HIV.
Yet it is being ignored in strategies for fighting AIDS – and among young adults, infection rates continue to rise. At the Group of Eight (G8) summit this June, rich countries must agree an expanded response to the epidemic, which includes the funds needed to get every child into school, as well as to provide treatment and care for all of those infected.
Executive Summary
New analysis by the Global Campaign for Education suggests that if all children received a complete primary education, the economic impact of HIV/AIDS could be greatly reduced and around 700.000 cases of HIV in young adults could be prevented each year – 7 million in a decade. This report outlines what rich countries and developing nations need to do now so that millions of children can learn … to survive.
Universal primary education is not a substitute for expanded HIV/AIDS treatment, nor does it replace the need for other prevention programmes. All of these measures are urgently necessary if we are to win the battle against this disease.
However, while there is increasing awareness that the epidemic requires a multi-sectoral response, the importance of general schooling in winning the fight against AIDS has been largely overlooked. Instead, policy-makers have tended to rely on targeted health information campaigns and counselling programmes for the prevention component of their strategies.
While these are important, research shows that a primary education is the minimum threshold needed to benefit from such programmes. Not only is a basic education essential to be able to process and evaluate information, it also gives the most marginalised groups in society – notably young women – the status and confidence needed to act on information and refuse unsafe sex.
Education is so strongly predictive of better knowledge, safer behaviour and reduced infection rates that it has been described as the “social vaccine”, and UN and World Bank experts say it may be “the single most effective preventive weapon against HIV/AIDS”.
Literate women are three times more likely than illiterate women to know that a healthy-looking person can have HIV, and four times more likely to know the main ways to avoid AIDS, according to a 32-country UN study. Evidence from 17 countries in Africa and four in Latin America shows that better-educated girls hold off longer on sexual activity, and are more likely to require their partners to use condoms.
Women with some schooling are nearly five times as likely as uneducated women to have used a condom the last time they had sex. And education also accelerates behaviour change among young men, making them more receptive to prevention messages and more likely to adopt condom use.
Investing in education now is not only a crucial step towards slowing infection rates in the short term; universal education also contains a built-in rescue package to help hard-hit countries recover from the economic and social damage done by the epidemic. Experts postulate that economic growth in countries hard-hit by HIV/AIDS will drop by 1-4 per cent a year.
But raising the average education of the labour force by one year raises overall GDP by 9 per cent, according to UN research, and increases individual farmers productivity by 3-14 per cent. Deliberate steps to safeguard and expand access to education will help to stop AIDS from destroying the fragile stock of human capital on which poor peoples livelihoods –and developing countries economic futures – depend.
Unfortunately, however, the developing world faces an education crisis so severe that hundreds of millions of young people are being left without the basic knowledge they need to protect themselves from HIV, and hard-hit countries are being left without any way to replace the skilled and trained workers lost to AIDS deaths. On current trends one in three children in the developing world – one in two in Africa – will not even finish primary school.
Without urgent action, including substantial increases in aid to education, Africa will not be able to get all of her children into school for another 150 years. Yet, a good primary education for every child is an eminently affordable and achievable target, costing only about 100 US dollar per child per year.
To stop AIDS in its tracks, overall aid budgets must rise to at least 0,7 per cent of GNI in line, with the commitments made in Monterrey. Of this, about 7 billion US dollar per year must be invested in achieving universal primary education (UPE). In addition, about 10 billion dollar annually will be required to mount adequate HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programmes in all developing countries, including an estimated 7 billion dollar to underwrite the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The combined annual cost of UPE and expanded treatment and prevention – 17 billion dollar – is less than the amount Europeans and Americans spend on pet food every year, and would save entire countries from devastation.
In the words of Hilde Johnson, Norways development minister:
– We have a choice. We can, if we set our priorities right, offer every child on earth access to basic education, irrespective of where she lives and how poor she is.
Knowing, as we now do, that this education may save her life, there can be no further excuses for inaction. The Group of Seven (G7) and other rich countries must make the right choice by properly funding and coordinating the Education for All effort:
1.) Now is the time for rich countries to finally deliver the dramatic increases in aid to education that they promised in 2000. The G7 wealthiest nations should lead the way by scaling up their funding for basic education in developing countries, from the current 520 million to at least 4 billion US dollar by 2006.
A fair breakdown, taking into account Gross National Income and historic aid levels, would be in US dollar:
USA 1 billion
Japan 700 million
Germany 600 million
UK 500 million
France 500 million
Italy 400 million
Canada 300 million
2.) It is equally crucial that these resources reach the countries that have greatest need of additional financing, and have shown the strongest commitment to achieving Education for All. All donor nations should use the Fast Track Initiative as a mechanism for determining how they allocate education funds among countries, and should pledge to channel 75 per cent of new aid to education to Fast Track-endorsed countries.
As a first step, rich countries must immediately make up the remaining funding shortfalls for the 12 low-income countries whose education plans they have already endorsed through the Education for All Fast Track Initiative.
3.) The Fast Track Initiative secretariat, in cooperation with donor agencies, civil society and partner governments, should undertake a review of the 34 additional countries that have already qualified for Fast Track status, but have not yet had plans endorsed.
The review should establish whether the country is in possession of a credible plan for achieving Education for All, whether existing donor commitments are adequate to support this plan, and whether outstanding finance needs can be met through existing in-country channels. Findings should be presented to the World Bank Development Committee and the G8 in the Spring of 2005.
4.) Beyond this, rich countries must begin to work with developing countries in genuine partnership. Key markers of this would be the inclusion of Southern ministers on the steering committee of the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, an end to donor-only meetings, and full implementation of a transparent system to monitor the quality as well as the quantity of donor aid to education.
5.) Finance ministers of developing countries should ensure that they are increasing budgets for basic education alongside budgets for primary health care and AIDS prevention and care. Priorities for increased education spending should include abolishing primary school fees and charges; achieving gender parity in both primary and secondary education; improving teacher training; and incorporating sexual and reproductive health education and life skills training into the curriculum.
As Nelson Mandela has noted: – Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.
It is also a weapon that the world cannot do without in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Education saves lives. And ignorance is lethal.
Gengivet fra www.ibis.dk
