The Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010 was released on January 19th. Five years before the due date of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which claim among others primary school education for all children worldwide, the process still draggs behind. Today, 72 million children are not attending school, projections for 2015 show that this situation won't change for 56 million primary school aged children until then. The report identifies the global financial crisis as one reason for this failure. While aid commitments have been stable until the breakout of the crisis, they have reduced by more than one fifth in 2007. Ten years ago, the donor countries agreed that the goal 'education for all' shall not be missed due to a lack of resources. But the report calculates that there is a lack of US$ 16 billion to achive full primary education in the 46 least developed countries, which have been donated US$ 2.7 billion so far.

The subtitle of this year's report is 'Reaching the marginalized', pointing to the fact that there is a great disparity in terms of chances for a good education for children of different backgrounds. Children that where born into poor households have a significantly worse access to education than others, language, ethnic background and gender play an important role as well. The report states that the disparity within a country is usually bigger than
disparities between countries. Further, the report critisizes the average quality of the education: after four years of primary school education, there is still a 40% risk of becomming illiterate.

The full report (11MB): http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/186606E.pdf
Summary: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001865/186525E.pdf