Global Campaign for Education

The Global Campaign for Education is an international, nongovernmental coalition of organizations that advocates for the education of children and adults in developing countries, motivated by its core principle that education is a basic human right.

The Global Campaign grew out of the World Conference on Education in Jontien in 1990, an event organized by the United Nations Children's Fund; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the World Bank; and the United Nations Development Programme to get countries from the global North (or the developed, Western countries) to collaborate with the countries from the global South in creating a program of action to solve the crisis of education within the developing world.

The international nongovernmental organization (NGO) response to this World Conference of Education was to found the Global Campaign for Education. Formed in 1999 by of the joining of the international education advocacy campaigns of three NGOs-Oxfam, ActionAid, and Education International-the Global Campaign for Education has since launched many initiatives to advocate its cause for universal education in the developing world. It has also since enlisted other NGOs, teachers unions, and children's rights activists in its cause. These include World Vision International, the Girl Scouts, and coalition NGOs for educations in many different countries.

The core principles of the Global Campaign for Education are that education is a basic human right, the key to poverty alleviation and sustainable human development, a central responsibility of the state, and achievable if governments mobilize the political will and available resources. In line with these values, the central goal of the Global Campaign for Education is to put public pressure on national and local governments to provide good educations for their citizens; in other words, to make governments responsible and accountable for their peoples’ educations.

The two major ways in which the Global Campaign for Education contributes to its calls for the provision of global education is first through research, and second through advocacy. The research conducted by the campaign is primarily policy research on comparative education. This policy research includes school reports in different countries that rank the efforts of various governments toward providing a free and universal education to its people.

Within the arena of advocacy, the Global Campaign for Education organizes a wide variety of campaigns and other activities. These include its involvements in many national campaigns to lobby the annual Group of Eight, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund meetings, and its organizing a yearly Action Week that takes place on the last week of April-an event that coordinates around a central theme concerning education. This has ranged from girls’ education in 2003 to a global “back-to-school” campaign in 2008, in which 9 million people took part.

[Page 627]The landmark event that characterizes the history of the Global Campaign for Education is the World Education Forum in Dakar, which took place in 2000. The Global Campaign for Education was set up specifically to contribute to the forum. Since the forum took place, 40 million more children have managed to go to school, and a financial mechanism-the Education Fast Track Initiative-has been established to help meet the goals of this campaign.

...