CHAPTER 1
Keeping education on the international agenda: the Global Campaign for Education
Patrick Watt
The Global Campaign for Education was created in 1999 by four international civil-society organisations: Oxfam International, ActionAid, Education International, and the Global March Against Child Labour. At the time, each of them was launching its own advocacy campaign to improve access to education in developing countries.
Oxfam International, a confederation of development NGOs with an extensive track record of high-profile policy-influencing work, but limited experience in the education sector, launched its 'Education Now' campaign early in 1999 with a major report which highlighted the lack of progress towards the goals agreed at the World Conference on Education For All (EFA), held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990. At that conference, more than 150 governments had promised that by the year 2000 adult illiteracy rates would be halved, and all children would enjoy the right to a good primary education. Oxfam's report called for a global financing plan to support a renewed international effort to achieve the goals of EFA. The World Bank and UNICEF gave early support to this proposal. Oxfam linked its education campaign closely to its advocacy work aiming to relieve the burden of unsustainable debt in developing countries, and also to its work on aid policy and poverty reduction.
At the same time, ActionAid, a UK-based INGO, began its own education campaign, called 'Elimu' (a Swahili word which means 'Education is Life'). Elimu focused on the establishment of national advocacy networks in developing countries, with the capacity to hold governments to account for their commitments to fund basic education. Meanwhile, Education International (EI) – a global coalition of teachers' unions – decided to focus its advocacy efforts on improving the status of teachers in developing-country education systems. In early 1999, Oxfam, ActionAid, and EI agreed to maximise the impact of their advocacy by collaborating to respond to key international influencing opportunities, especially at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000, and by adopting a number of joint 'headline' policy positions and objectives.
Out of these initial discussions, a decision was taken to establish a new 'global campaign for education', which would mobilise a broad constituency of civil-society organisations (CSOs) to press for the elimination of gender disparities in education by the year 2005 and the achievement of universal primary education by the year 2015. The three organisations planned to produce a brief 'mission statement' and agree a set of common actions, a membership structure, and communications plans. Although the plans for a global campaign were initially focused on campaigning at the Dakar forum, they were also developed with a view to creating a broad civil-society 'movement' for the longer term: a movement over which the founder members would have no direct control – similar to the model of the Jubilee debt campaign.
In order to deliver on these plans, two part-time staff based in Novib (Oxfam Netherlands) and Education International worked on a campaign framework with a steering group, consisting of staff in Oxfam, ActionAid, and EI, together with four southern NGOs – the Delhi-based Global March Against Child Labour, and national networks from Bangladesh, Brazil, and South Africa. The Global Campaign for Education (GCE) was formally launched at a meeting of these CSOs in October 1999, with the aim of expanding membership to other CSOs over the coming months. The GCE members agreed to work together initially on two major campaign activities. The first was a 'Global Week of Action' in April 2000, to raise public awareness and support for the objectives of Education For All. The initiatives included press conferences with heads of government and finance ministers, actions by GCE members – such as mailing politicians, urging them to support a global financing plan prior to the summit meeting in Dakar – and intensive media work in the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. In addition to the 'Week of Action', other activities were planned in the weeks leading up to the forum in Dakar, including writing letters to political leaders, organising seminars and conferences, and lobbying government ministers and officials. The GCE also established a website, compiled an electronic list for civil-society activists, and wrote a joint proposal, 'A Compact for Africa', which called for a concerted multilateral effort to achieve the EFA goals in the region.
The second set of major activities took place around the Dakar summit itself, later in the same month. At Dakar, several hundred NGO participants attended a preparatory conference, organised by the UNESCO Collective Consultation on NGOs in EFA and Literacy (CCNGO). Although NGOs failed in their efforts to win additional space for civil-society participation in the official meeting, some members of international NGOs (INGOs) were invited to join national delegations – that of the UK was one example – and in the course of the summit the GCE became largely accepted as a legitimate umbrella body for civil-society participants. Daily briefings, targeted lobbying of national delegations, participation in drafting the EFA framework for action, and media work ensured that the GCE had a highly visible presence at the summit, and helped to establish a new space for advocacy on education.
A new kind of civil-society partnership in education
The GCE marked a significant departure from previous civil-society advocacy work on education, which until then had mainly employed an 'insider' strategy of engaging in technical and professional discussion behind closed doors. Unlike debates on improvements in health care, water supply, or agriculture, debates on the development of education services were largely invisible to people outside the sector. Most of the civil-society groups involved in these discussions were either specialised practitioners working in complementary niches alongside government (for example, non-formal education organisations), or professional groups (for example, consultancy agencies reliant on donor-funded technical assistance). Now a new dimension was added by the use of more confrontational tactics and tightly focused, media-friendly messages, from development organisations with a track record of public campaigning. By using advocacy briefings, targeted lobbying, and press releases to publicise the lack of progress on education reform, and by challenging existing ways of working, the GCE created tensions at Dakar. Many education specialists in governments and donor agencies were unused to being lobbied so directly, and in some cases they sought to defend their professional boundaries by questioning the expertise and legitimacy of GCE members. For some civil-society groups in the CCNGO – UNESCO's forum for consultation with NGOs on education – the GCE's approach was seen as unduly critical (especially of UNESCO, with which many CCNGO members had a close working relationship) and as a threat to a broad professional consensus about how best to achieve Education For All. (See, for example, UNESCO 2000.)
The GCE was distinctive for more than its advocacy style. Unlike the CCNGO, which before 2001 included few Southern civil-society organisations, the GCE was explicitly intended as an alliance of Northern and Southern civil society, which combined advocacy experience and lobby access to Northern decision-makers with national-level policy knowledge and grassroots programme experience. This helped to root Northern INGO advocacy in the realities of poor people's lives in the South, while giving Southern NGOs access to information and influencing opportunities which had previously been denied to them. So campaigning for free basic education by Oxfam and ActionAid was based on joint research and advocacy with national and local civil-society organisations in the South, while Southern NGOs were given a platform in Washington DC to argue the case for free education to a sceptical audience of World Bank and USAID staff.
The GCE was also distinctive for the breadth of the coalition, which extended beyond NGOs working on education and international development to include other civil-society organisations, such as trade unions and campaigners against child labour – organisations which have both a distinctive perspective on education policy, and the capacity to mobilise large numbers of supporters, thereby making the GCE (indirectly) a mass-membership organisation. This potential of this membership base for mass actions began to be realised with the planning of 'The World's Biggest Lesson' in April 2003.
Finally, the GCE was distinctive for the closeness of the collaboration between its members. Other national and international education alliances and networks had tended to function as forums for policy discussion, confining themselves to communication rather than co-ordination. Joint lobbying on shared policy positions, and the pooling of resources that took place during and after Dakar, represented a major step forwards in terms of civil-society coalition building. In addition to the practical benefits of close joint work, it gave greater resonance and legitimacy to the GCE's appeal to donors and governments to enter into – and act upon – a global compact for education. Civil-society organisations were leading by example, by sacrificing some pride and prejudice for the sake of achieving together what they could not achieve individually.
Despite the tensions created by the GCE's emergence as a major civil-society voice on education, the stark failure of the international community during the 1990s to deliver on the commitments made at Jomtien meant that the GCE's messages resonated with many participants at Dakar, including members of official delegations – as evinced by public endorsements of the GCE from the UN Secretary General and the heads of the World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, and UNESCO, and the extent to which key GCE demands were reflected in the Dakar Framework for Action (Murphy and Mundy 2002).
Securing high-profile support for the campaign and pushing education up the agenda of the international community were two obvious early achievements on the part of the GCE. Yet in the wake of the Dakar summit, the international community delivered on very few of the commitments made in the Framework for Action. Progress was stalled by disagreements among governments and donors over what would be entailed by 'national EFA plans', how they fitted within pre-existing sectoral planning processes and poverty-reduction strategies, and which organisation should have overall responsibility for the process. There was a failure to agree on the content or scope of a 'Global Initiative' for education, designed to deliver on the pledge that 'no country seriously committed to Education For All will be thwarted in their achievement of this goal by a lack of resources'. In particular, donors were reluctant both to commit significant additional resources to education and to cede a leading role to UNESCO, which many of them regarded as lacking in both capacity and credibility.
After the Dakar summit, the GCE's lobbying and campaigning activity initially subsided, and the interest and commitment of political leaders and media waned. However, in early 2001 GCE members resolved to re-ignite the campaign – once it became clear that little or no movement was taking place among donors and governments to meet key commitments. The following actions were taken.
• A GCE proposal for a Global Initiative for Education was agreed among members, and the text was disseminated in English and French.
• Lobby meetings were held with key donor agencies, including the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO, and government ministries of the UK, Netherlands, and Canada, in an effort to secure a commitment to develop a multilateral planning, finance, and monitoring initiative to achieve the EFA goals.
• The Board of the World Bank was pressed to deliver real, measurable progress on education, and to take a more proactive role in mobilising commitments by governments and donors, in concert with the UN agencies.
• Renewed media activity was stimulated by the involvement of high-profile campaign supporters – such as Nelson Mandela and the UK and Canadian Finance Ministers, Gordon Brown and Paul Martin – who made public statements calling for progress on access to education.
Such efforts helped to bring together the 'like-minded' donor group (World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO, Netherlands, Norway, Canada, EC, UK, and occasionally others) in late 2001 to develop plans for a new multi-donor initiative. The World Bank undertook detailed background analytical work to argue the case for such an initiative and suggest how it could be developed. Out of these discussions, a 'Fast Track Initiative' (FTI) for education was launched at the IMF–World Bank meetings in April 2002. While the FTI is at an early stage in its implementation, and inadequate donor funding is a major obstacle to progress, the initiative nonetheless contains important elements of the 'global compact' for education to which donors and developing-country governments committed themselves at Dakar. (See, for example, ActionAid 2003.)
Institutionalising the GCE
At about the same time, the GCE members decided to institutionalise the campaign. Before and during the Dakar summit, GCE positions had been developed in a largely ad hoc way, and there was little central co-ordinating capacity for the campaign. In part this was because, when the GCE was initially launched, the time leading up to Dakar was seen as something of a 'trial period' for a previously untested campaigning approach, and there was no definite plan to extend its lifespan beyond the summit. Yet the early advocacy successes achieved at Dakar, and strong demand from other civil-society organisations to join the campaign, made a strong case for the GCE's work to be put on a more permanent basis.
As a result, campaign members meeting in Delhi in February 2001 agreed a structure for the coalition, with the aim of creating a member-driven organisation, able to develop a strategic programme of work and increase its public profile. The following changes in the 18 months after the Delhi meeting helped to institutionalise the GCE.
• A mission statement, which aspiring members must sign, was agreed; and a fee-based membership structure was established.
• A board structure was established. GCE members elect a 12-person board every two years, drawn from its membership organisations, at a biennial meeting. The board – which meets on a regular basis and is accountable to members – guides the development of campaign strategy, manages the budget, and oversees the work of a small secretariat. It is designed to be broadly representative of GCE's membership, with a majority of board members drawn from Southern civil-society organisations. GCE members can propose actions and positions to the board, usually through the secretariat.
• A secretariat was established, initially based in the EI offices in Brussels. At present there are two staff, one of whom works as a full-time advocacy co-ordinator. The secretariat co-ordinates advocacy and campaign activities among members, provides regular newsletter updates to members, and works to increase the GCE's profile (for example, by enlisting high-profile supporters) and extend its membership base.
• A GCE website and logo were established.
• The GCE was legally constituted, with its own separate bank account.
As the coalition acquired a firmer institutional footing, it branched out into new advocacy work, gaining profile and new members. During 2001 and 2002, GCE members did intensive advocacy and campaign work on education financing, taking advantage of various international processes associated with the UN's Financing for Development summit in Monterrey, IMF–World Bank meetings, and meetings of the G8, the United Nations General Assembly, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the UN Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI), and other opportunities. Increasingly, GCE members were uniting under the GCE banner: letters and regular policy briefings for international lobbying carried the GCE logo, despite having usually been written by staff of member organisations. More significantly, the policy positions in these papers were being negotiated and agreed among GCE members, through the board. In international meetings where civil society was given seats, the GCE began to operate as a coherent group, developing lobby strategies in advance – for example, at the first meeting of the UNESCO High Level Group in Paris in late 2001, where two places in the communiqué drafting group were allocated to the GCE. In a number of countries, including the USA and the UK, and in Brussels, local staff of GCE member organisations worked closely together on lobbying and research – for example, by regularly meeting with their governments as a bloc.
