Africa Regional Policy Forum on Education

Africa Network Campaign on Education For All (ANCEFA) in conjunction with Basic Education Network-Ethiopia (BEN-Ethiopia) is organizing the Africa Regional Policy Forum scheduled to take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 8 to 12 December 2014. The policy forum will bring together stakeholders from the education sector including national and international civil society organization nations, United Nations agencies, funding agencies, and government representatives.


The forum will take place as the Dakar 2000 EFA promise is set to be broken in 2015 considering that with only few months to go, 58 million children remain out of school, half of them from Africa including 16.6 million females and 13.0 million. This crisis is largely due to failure by governments and the international community to raise adequate funds for education with reports indicating that aid to basic education fell for the first time since 2002 by 6% from US$6.2 billion in 2010 to US$5.8 billion in 2011. Consequently, important resources needed for promoting access and quality education such as well-trained and motivated teachers, teaching and learning materials, classrooms and others are in short supply in most countries.


The forum will also take place when consultations around the post 2015 education framework are at an advanced stage following the submission of the report of the Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals to the United Nations General Assembly that was held in September 2014, as well as the adoption of the EFA Steering Committee post 2015 education proposal in Muscat in May 2014 during the Global Education For all Meeting (GEM). It is expected that discussions on the post 2015 agenda will continue into 2015 until adoption of the final framework in September 2015 at the UN General Assembly.

Moreover, the African Union is developing ‘Agenda 2063’ as a policy and development framework for the continent in the next 50 years. Plans are also underway regarding the final evaluation of the plan of
action for Second Decade on education for the Africa Union (2006-2015) and development of another continental education policy framework.