On April 20-21, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Education for All Fast Track Initiative (EFA-FTI) welcomed two hundred education and development specialists from low-income countries, donor countries, UN agencies and civil society organizations to Copenhagen for the EFA-FTI’s biennial partnership meeting. The EFA-FTI is an international partnership established in 2002 to help achieve Universal Primary Education before 2015.

The two-day meeting allowed education and development specialists to discuss solutions for getting millions of out-of-school children around the world into classrooms as effectively as possible, while improving the quality of learning. The overall theme of the meeting was the ‘Road to 2015’, and discussions centered around three policy sub-themes that feed into the overall objective; i) Hard-to-reach children, ii) the quality of learning and iii) resource mobilization and aid effectiveness.

Almost all countries endorsed by the EFA-FTI are on track to achieve a primary school completion rate of at least 80 percent by 2015 as stated in the latest EFA-FTI publication entitled “Sounds from the classroom” which was launched in Copenhagen on April 20.  “Sounds from the classroom” features five EFA-FTI countries (Ghana, Guyana, Madagascar, Mongolia and Yemen) focusing on how basic education programs supported by the EFA-FTI partnership have impacted the lives of children, parents and communities positively.
 
The past decade has seen unprecedented gains in access to education in developing countries.  In sub-Saharan Africa alone, the countries supported by the EFA-FTI, an international partnership established in 2002  to help achieve universal primary education,  saw a net gain of 15 million primary school students over a six-year period. Despite these high enrollment rates, much more remains to be done, but this is real progress, catalyzed in part by the EFA-FTI which has seen the allocation of over US$ 1.4 billion through its main Catalytic Trust Fund.
 
The coming months will be of great importance to the EFA-FTI as it launches a resource mobilization effort and establishes a special fund to support education in fragile states. The immediate financing needs of the EFA-FTI trust funds are estimated at US$ 1.2 billion for 2009 - 2010. “These are the financing needs of countries with ambitious but credible national education plans that have received the international ‘seal of approval’ through FTI” says Joy Phumaphi, Vice-President for Human Development at the World Bank, one of the founding partners of EFA-FTI. “The financing needs sound like a modest figure when measured against the scale of the economic rescue packages we hear about every day. With everyone pulling together, Education for All can become a reality.”

On Saturday April 25, a high-level panel will discuss the EFA-FTI partnership’s accomplishments thus far, as well as the challenges ahead, during a ministerial breakfast meeting at the World Bank’s headquarters.

Featured speakers will include Ms. Ulla Tørnæs, Minister for Development Cooperation of Denmark, Mr. Graeme Wheeler, Managing Director of the World Bank, UK’s Minister for International Development, Douglas Alexander and H.E. Ato Sufian Ahmed, Finance Minister of Ethiopia.

Denmark is the current non-G8 co-chair of the EFA-FTI Partnership.