Norway boosts education funding

Norway on Tuesday challenged the G-7 countries to follow its example and significantly increase their commitments to education initiatives in the developing world. Hilde Johnson, Norway's Minister for International Development, said this would be the only way of meeting the Dakar Declaration commitments, through which the international community undertook to ensure that no country that attempted to provide education for all its citizens would lack the resources to do so. "We need more than donors like Norway chipping in with resources and fighting for existing resources to be directed to education," the minister told IRIN in Dar es Salaam. "We need the G-7 countries to come in heavily because it is a significant [amount of] resources that are needed for the goals to be achieved." Johnson, who was in Tanzania launching 'Education - Job Number 1: Norwegian Strategy for Delivering Education to all by 2015', stopped short of saying G-7 countries - comprising Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States - had shown reluctance in committing themselves, but she said there was a "great deal of variation between them". "The UK is pushing very hard, but there are other elements of the G-7 that have not come in heavily on education and we are challenging them to do that," she said. Norway's new strategy reveals an 83 percent increase in development assistance that will be earmarked for education - from 9 percent of the development budget today to 15 percent - by 2005. This increase, alongside a boosted development assistance budget - from 0.93 percent of the Gross National Income (GNI) to 1 percent in 2005 - will translate into a further US $140 million available to education programmes. Johnson stressed that not only was education a human right and a precondition for development, but studies had revealed it was also the best investment that could be made in developing countries. Joseph Mungai, Tanzania's Minister for Education and Culture, expressed satisfaction with his government's relationship with donors, but agreed with some of Johnson's concerns. "It is not just aid as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but within the aid package, the amount going to education needs to be increased and I find Norway here has taken the lead," he said.