The scope of the challenge and a framework

“Lack of education” as a global challenge must be understood, at an individual level, as a failure to master the many distinct competencies necessary to thrive in a modern economy and society. Remedying this is not simply a question of providing more schools, more teaching aids, or reducing drop-out rates. The challenge is to create competencies and learning achievement rather than just educational tools.

Because it is easy to measure, data on enrolment (the percentage of school-age children actually starting school) is often used as a proxy for educational progress. However, enrolment levels have little bearing on actual achievement. For example, a large part of the educational deficit results from drop-outs rather than failure to enrol. Likewise, substantial gaps in attainment between students from richer and poorer households occur in all countries.

Most importantly – and disappointingly – levels of learning achievement in nearly all developing countries are abysmally low. Only former Soviet bloc countries and the Southeast Asian tiger economies achieve results comparable to those of OECD members. In recent tests, virtually all developing countries perform far worse than Greece (the poorest performing major OECD country). Only 3.1% of Indonesian students scored higher in reading competency than the average French student, and the average Brazilian maths student achieves the same as the bottom 2% of Danes.

Poor performance is caused, at least in part, by systems that are geared to measure inputs (money spent, schools constructed, etc.) instead of students' performance.