people and planet

7
Projecting global educational attainment to 2030 and beyond....................... 151
Predicting effects of education on development outcomes...............................153
Previous chapters of the Global Education Monitoring
(GEM) Report have introduced ways in which
education can unlock the global potential for sustainable
development. They have also examined how the
2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development requires
reconsidering how education of good quality can address
pressing social, economic and environmental challenges.
This chapter looks at ways in which likely scenarios of
education progress might shift development outcomes
in the next 15 years.
The GEM Report commissioned the Wittgenstein Centre
for Demography and Global Human Capital, a specialized,
multidisciplinary research centre, to analyse the impact
of education dynamics on selected social, economic and
environmental outcomes (Barakat et al., 2016). On the basis
of this analysis, the chapter discusses two questions.
First, what do past rates of education expansion indicate
about the prospects of achieving the ambitious new
education goal? The news is not good. Unless there is
rapid acceleration unlike any observed to date, there is
no chance of achieving the target of universal secondary
completion by 2030. Instead, it is projected that
69% of those aged 15 to 19 in 2030 will complete upper
secondary education and 84% will complete lower
secondary education. Not even the Education for All (EFA)
goal of universal primary
completion will be achieved;
in low income countries, less
It is projected than 70% of children will
that less than 70%
complete primary school
in 2030.
of children will
complete primary
school in 2030
in low income
countries
Second, what would different
rates of progress in education
mean for development
in other sectors such as
health, the economy and the
environment? This chapter’s
analysis considers the impact
of education improving at the speed of past trends, as
well as three more optimistic pathways, on three sets
of outcomes: social (health, including child mortality
and life expectancy), economic (poverty and economic
growth) and environmental (disaster-related deaths).
As the effects of any social change, and especially
education, take a long time to reach fruition – sometimes
generations – the impact on these outcomes is explored
at both 2030 and 2050.
PROJECTING GLOBAL
EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
TO 2030 AND BEYOND
For the World Education Forum in May 2015, the GEM
Report team published projections of whether the goal
of universal secondary completion, set in the Education
2030 Framework for Action, would be achieved by 2030
(UNESCO, 2015). The conclusion was stark: progressing at
past expansion rates, not even the EFA goal of universal
primary completion will be achieved by 2030 in low and
middle income countries.
The new projections for this report have been updated
in two ways. First, a larger set of data is used, covering
163 countries that account for the vast majority of the
global population. A potential disadvantage of this wider
coverage is that data sometimes draw on censuses, which
are conducted every 10 years, so the impact of recent
changes in enrolment and attainment may be missed.
Second, a more sophisticated methodology is applied
to project the share of the population that will attain a
given level of education, by country and gender. Yet, the
approach shares some of the limitations of other global
projections (Box 7.1).
By calling for universal secondary education, the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda entered
uncharted territory. It is unknown whether the future
2016 • GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT 151