Between 1980 and 1987, in Latin America and the Caribbean real spending per inhabitant plummeted by around 40 per cent and in sub-Saharan Africa by a catastrophic 65 per cent. The dawn of the 1990s was supposed to represent the turning of the page. The World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990 held out a new vision of education in the developing world that would boost the quality of schooling as well as the quantity. Yet despite all the action plans drawn up by more than 100 governments since Jomtien, despite the fact that education has been seen as central by every UN conference of the 1990s, we are still a dismally long way away from achieving 'Education for All'. Toys and rockets The problem, we are continually told, is one of resources.
Education simply costs too much.
The best estimate of a price tag for achieving 'Education for All' in the next decade is eight billion dollars a year. This may seem an enormous sum. Yet it is only around half what Americans spend each year on toys. Even more telling, it is equivalent to just four days of global military spending, or just nine minutes of international currency speculation. Microsoft's Bill Gates could fund it out of his own pocket.