The total number of children in primary school rose from 599 million in 1990 to 681 million in 1998. And others that have faltered are now even farther behind. At the same time, education has moved from being the floor on which a country builds its competitive success to being its competitive success. Older measures of competitiveness such as labour costs, resource endowments and infrastructure are being superceded by human capital. Because knowledge does not respect geography or old economies.
Ideas have wings and in the IT age they fly at the speed of light.
So we cannot underestimate the scale of the challenge. And even as the proportion of Official Development Assistance devoted to education has remained steady over the past decade, the total has dropped due to the overall fall in aid flows. At UNDP, that has forced us to re-think how best to help meet our shared, overarching goal of helping halve world poverty by 2015. And we are the UN s focal point in the fight against poverty. So in education, UNDP s comparative advantage does not lie in areas like teachers, classrooms, textbooks or recurrent costs.