Achieving Education for All in the Asia-Pacific Region

Abstract

The Education for All movement has gained considerable momentum throughout the world over the past ten years, as countries work increasingly closely together to stamp out illiteracy and so empower individuals and their communities and help create a better quality of life for their citizens. This is to be expected, for as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has noted the attainment of basic literacy and numeracy skills has been identified repeatedly as the most significant factor in reducing poverty and increasing participation by individuals in the economic, political and cultural life of their societies (OECD/DAC, 1996). This realization is not new, and is not limited to organisations like the OECD. Many development agencies such as the Swedish International Development Co-operative Agency (SIDA, 2001), the World Bank (1997, 2000), the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom (DFID, 2000), and non-government organizations such as Oxfam (Watkins, 2000) strongly share this same view.