Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and gentlemen,

    Ten years ago, representatives from 155 countries together with their development partners met in this country and made bold and ambitious commitments to work towards the achievement of Education for All (EFA). We are back again this week to take stock of progress which the Asia region has made towards EFA goals since then. Let this not be simply a review of progress on EFA; let us set our sights beyond Jomtien into the 21st century.
   
    At the global forum in Dakar, the rest of the world will be taking the cue from Asia because it has some unique contributions to make to education. The region represents about one' half of the world's population - the success or failure of this region, therefore, reverberates across the world. Secondly, many of the countries gathered here have a long tradition, which places a high premium on education, and have, over the years invested heavily in education. These countries, have provided the rest of the world with a rich "natural experiment" which establishes a clear empirical link between education and overall growth and development of nations .

    More recently, these same countries provided another important lesson on development. The East Asia crisis was a wake up call to the world that development is fragile and that it can be undermined if all its key pillars are not fully integrated. Out of this experience has emerged a fundamental re-thinking of development which includes the importance of protecting education and health for the poor and vulnerable during a time of economic crises.

    As we assess progress since Jomtien, therefore, let us look beyond EFA and set the pace for a bold vision of education for the new millennium. There should be three elements to this vision. First it should be a vision that would ensure that all countries complete the EFA agenda. While many of the countries have achieved universal primary education the overall regional picture reflects a large unfinished education agenda. More children and adults lack formal education in South Asia than in any other region of the world and one out of every three children of school going age in the region is out of school - some 44 million children. The rate of improvement in adult literacy has been slow as a result of which the absolute number of illiterate people has actually increased. In a few countries in South Asia, the gender gap has become wider especially at the secondary level.

    Even for those countries where basic education is virtually universal, there are pockets of children who have not been reached - some are in the rural areas or are the urban poor others are from groups in special circumstances. Reaching this last group is difficult and expensive, and it will require a targeted and coordinated national effort. But these children must be reached because otherwise they create a potential reservoir for increasing intergenerational poverty. The EFA initiative has provided an effective mechanism for sharing knowledge and experiences on what works in accelerating education development and in making education accessible to all. Let us fully utilize this mechanism as learning forum to emulate our more successful neighbours in the region.

    Secondly, this should be a vision that ensures that we obtain maximum benefit from every cent we spend on education. It is not enough that children register in school, they should acquire skills, attitudes and values, which will enable them, achieve a better life for themselves and for their societies. This is the reason why so many parents make such large sacrifices to send their children to school. But education contributes to more than self-actualization, it also can and does engender social cohesion, it does reduce social inequalities and it does help reduce poverty and inequality. Given the widening disparities between the rich and the poor across and within countries, given the fact that the absolute number of the poor is increasing in the region and that there are serious cross border tensions which threaten peace and security, should we then not push harder to make education help us address these challenges?

    In countries where education has fulfilled these broader objectives, its quality has been high, performance standards have been clearly defined and effective mechanisms for measuring and monitoring performance have been in place. Improvement of education quality in this broader sense, therefore, is important and urgent because this is one area where the region is quite weak. Available data indicate that learning outcomes are quite low. In some cases only one third of the children attain minimum competency in mathematics and reading by the end of the cycle. The drop out rate before grade five is as high as 40 percent in one of the larger countries in this region. There are also concerns that most of the education systems are not fully responsive to the skills needs of the economy especially at the post basic level. Data collection and retrieval systems are also quite weak and it is difficult to make robust inter country comparisons. Improving education quality goes hand in hand with reliable data sets - how can we measure progress if we do not know where we are starting form?

    Third, our vision should boldly embrace the 21st century and develop education systems that are flexible and responsive to the requirements of a fast changing world. A complex interplay of information technology, globalization and market economies is very quickly redefining which nations become successful and which ones will become marginalized. Knowledge and skills are increasingly replacing raw materials and labour as the input most crucial for survival and success. Information technology is making such knowledge instantly available to those who can access it. Then there is globalization - global capital, moveable overnight from one part of the globe to another, is constantly seeking more favourable opportunities including skilled and attractively priced labour in market friendly business environments. And then you factor in a world predominated by market economies which reward risk-taking skills, agility and flexibility.

    Remaining competitive in this singular, digitized world, therefore, necessitates a major revitalization of the post-basic education systems built on strong EFA foundations discussed above. Countries need to create bastions of quality at international standard for scientific and technological leadership; increase the education attainment of the labour force and enhance the level and quality of vocational and technical skills of their workers. Countries also need to proactively seize opportunities provided by information technology in order to make their education systems internationally competitive. The relatively low cost of accessing information through the Internet or CD-ROMS makes this more feasible than it was a few years ago.

    The EFA effort has helped to engender many of the key elements that promote and sustain robust and responsive education systems. These include: (i) the manifestation of strong political commitment to education which makes education part of the public agenda; (ii) pragmatic and holistic development of the education system, balanced across all levels including higher education; (iii) systematic strengthening of delivery mechanisms and institutions with a relentless focus on equity and quality; and (iv) judicious allocation and utilization of public resources while tapping into resources from partners in the communities and in the private sector. Our challenge as we plan beyond Dakar is to broaden these elements, to sustain them over time and to make these elements the defining characteristics of the education systems in the whole region rather of a few successful countries.

    The World Bank pledges its continued support to the region. In Jomtien the World Bank made a commitment to double its lending for education. That goal has been achieved. In absolute terms, lending for education has increased from an average of just under one billion dollars a year in the period before Jomtien to an average of about two million dollars a year for the 1991-99 period. Lending for basic education has increased from 27 percent to 44 percent during that period and it has also become increasingly more responsive to country needs and circumstances - during the East Asia crisis, for example, the Bank supported Indonesia to give scholarships to poor children so that they could get back to school. In addition to support through the lending programme, the Bank has contributed grant financing to various EFA related initiatives. They include strengthening the collection of world wide through support to the establishment of the UNESCO Institute of Statistics; improvement in country evaluation and assessment systems through support to World Education Indicators, support to the EFA assessment and support to innovative programmes such as the Worldlinks programme.

    With you at the lead, we have come a long way since Jomtien. We are ready to support you go beyond Dakar and to set the pace for education in the 21st century.

    Thank you