Everyone deserves an equal chance at an education: It's a basic human right. But giving everyone an equal chance means more than making an equal effort. To make sure some children have an equal chance - especially the poor, girls, ethnic minorities, the disabled, and those who live on the margins - governments have to make a special effort. Equity is not just development jargon, it is about fairness; it's what you have to do to get to equality.
Recently, we released the 11th Education for All Global Monitoring Report , Teach and Learn: Achieving quality for all, in which we have provided the stark evidence of our failures to help some of the poorest, and most remote children - and especially girls - go to school. We have calculated how long it would take for the marginalised to achieve global education goals if we carry on with business with usual.
The results are shocking. In Nigeria, for example, where all rich boys are already completing primary school, on current trends it will be almost three more generations before poor girls do. Across sub-Saharan Africa, it will take until 2086 for all of the poorest girls to be completing primary school - over 60 years later than the richest boys.
And that's just primary school. Unless we step up our efforts to reach the daughters of the poorest families in Africa, it will take until 2111 for them to be completing lower secondary school - the level they need to reach to have a hope of getting decent jobs.
When international education experts drew up the six "Education for All" goals in 2000, they wrote the language of equity into the goals. The ambition was there. So why is equity in education far from being realised, with only two years to go until the deadline for the goals in 2015? And what can we do to make sure that this time, good intentions translate into real results for the world's marginalised children?
It's crucial that we resolve these questions, because the international education community is now proposing new goals, for the post-2015 period. Unless we resolve this period before then, it is likely we may end up in this very same position as we near our next set of deadlines in 15 years time.
Part of the problem comes from the sheer scale of inequalities that remain hidden. Looking at national averages does not reveal the realities of the most marginalised communities. To avoid this problem, we need to make sure we have the picture for every child, and not just the average in the country. This is a key part of the solution to inequity: To give every child an equal chance at an education, you have to measure how they are doing, using data that are broken down group by group, region by region, so that you know where you need to dedicate special efforts and resources.
Visualising the extent of such disadvantages is key to recognising the scale of the problem of children who are trying to get to school and learn while there, as new data on our World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) show.
In Malawi, for example, almost half of the richest boys in urban areas complete primary school and learn the basics in reading. But in rural areas, none of the poorest girls can say the same. Breaking the figures down in this way makes it clear where funds should be directed.
Another piece of the puzzle, along with implementing policies to reach the marginalised and measuring whether they are working, is to write targets into our new goals. Not just for raising average education levels, but for respecting the right of every person to an education - including, for example, those girls from poor families in rural Malawi, kept out of school by a triple barrier of poverty, gender and where they live.
An equal chance has to be at the heart of every goal, target and indicator on educational access and learning. If we fail to do this, we will also fail another generation, just as today's illiterate young people are the victims of our past failures. When we set down our education pledges for the era after 2015, let's make sure we don't fail them again.
Pauline Rose is the Director of the Global Monitoring Report on Education published by UNESCO.
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