Breaking Barriers: ensuring access to free, quality public education

• In Event: Sustainable financing for education: why should tax justice be part of the solution

Proposal

Breaking Barriers: ensuring access to free, quality public education in Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania

The Breaking Barriers project is a four year, Norad-funded multi country project which seeks to address some of the key barriers that prevent children, especially girls and vulnerable children from enjoying their right to free, quality, inclusive public education in Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania. Included in the barriers are: discrimination, inadequate financing and the proliferation of private, low-cost schools. The project’s objectives are structured around ActionAid’s 4S framework for education financing, emphasising the need to ensure that:
1. Governments take actions to increase the SIZE of national budgets by raising fair tax
2. Governments take actions to increase the SHARE of funds allocated to and spent on free, quality, inclusive public education
3. Public education policies, systems and expenditure are SENSITIVE to the rights of girls and marginalised children
4. A strong active movement of community and civil society structures effectively SCRUTINISE education budgets and expenditure and hold governments to account for the provision of free, quality, inclusive public education especially for girls and marginalised children

Guided by ActionAid’s research signature which argues that ‘People-centred evidence with women and girls at the core, combined with knowledge from in and outside the organisation, enables power shifts [and brings about] changes at local, national and international levels’, the project employs a combination of action research (directly engaging education stakeholders such as children, teachers, parents and education authorities) as well as secondary research and policy analysis, to gather evidence throughout the life-time of the project. This evidence in turn informs our advocacy and campaigning at local, national and global levels.

This paper will be presented by International Project Coordinator, Asmara Figue, highlighting some of the key findings from various studies conducted across the 4 countries. The research is expected to provide insights into factors including:
• The extent to which children’s right to education is being fulfilled at school level (as compared with government commitments laid out in legal and policy frameworks);
• The impact of the spread of low-cost private education provision on children’s access to free, quality public education (especially for girls and marginalised children);
• Amounts lost by governments each year to harmful tax incentives and how much of this money could be used to finance free, quality, inclusive public education for out of school children across the 4 countries.

Author

• Asmara Figue, ActionAid