The Global Movement for Universal Education: Background of EFA

In March 1990, representatives from governments, international agencies, and civil society organizations gathered in a small coastal town in Thailand to confront a crisis that had quietly grown for decades: hundreds of millions of people around the world were being denied access to even the most basic education. What emerged from that meeting was not just a set of goals – it was a global movement. The Education for All (EFA) initiative, born at the World Conference in Jomtien, redrew the map of international educational priorities and forced the world to acknowledge that learning is not a privilege – it is a right.

The birth of Education for All: the Jomtien conference, 1990 🔗

The World Conference on Education for All was held from 5 to 9 March 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand. It was a landmark event unprecedented in its scale and ambition. Some 1,500 participants attended, including delegates from 155 governments – policy-makers and specialists in education and other major sectors – alongside officials from international organizations. The conference was not a spontaneous gathering; it was the result of extensive groundwork. Earlier drafts of the conference documents were discussed at nine regional and three international consultations that brought together a wide range of experts and representatives from various government ministries, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, multilateral and bilateral development agencies, and research institutes.

The Education for All Programme was launched at the international level in 1990 with contributions from five intergovernmental agencies: UNESCO, UNICEF, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Bank – as well as various foundations, international and non-governmental organizations, and the mass media.

This level of inter-agency cooperation was itself historic. The unprecedented cooperation by these five convenors over the course of the coming years paved the way for what became the most widely known set of international goals in education – the EFA goals. These originators of EFA insisted on making education a top priority on the development agenda, setting not only a good example for UN cooperation, but also mobilizing governments and civil society around a shared mission.

Why 1990 was a turning point 🔗

The 1980s had been a difficult decade for education in many parts of the world. The Jomtien conference was organised in response to widespread concern over the deterioration of education systems during the 1980s and over the millions of children and adults who remained functionally illiterate and poorly prepared for life. Economic downturns, structural adjustment programmes, and conflict had pushed education budgets to breaking point in many developing countries. In some of the least developed countries, these problems had led to major setbacks in basic education during the 1980s. The world needed a coordinated, renewed commitment – and Jomtien was designed to deliver exactly that.

Major challenges highlighted at the conference 🔗

Before any goals could be set, the conference had to put numbers to the problem. The statistics presented at Jomtien were sobering and left little room for complacency.

According to the World Declaration on Education for All, more than 100 million children – including at least 60 million girls – had no access to primary schooling. More than 960 million adults, two-thirds of whom were women, were illiterate. Functional illiteracy was identified as a significant problem in both industrialised and developing countries alike. More than one-third of the world’s adults had no access to the printed knowledge, new skills, and technologies that could improve the quality of their lives.

These figures made clear that the crisis was not confined to the poorest nations. It was a global problem, shaped by poverty, geography, conflict, and – critically – gender discrimination.

Gender disparity: a crisis within a crisis 🔗

One of the starkest dimensions of the education crisis in 1990 was how unequally it fell along gender lines. Girls, particularly in rural and low-income settings, were systematically excluded from schooling due to social expectations, economic pressures, and cultural norms. The data presented at Jomtien made this visible at a global scale: of the 100 million children out of school, the majority were girls; of the nearly one billion illiterate adults, two-thirds were women. The conference recognised that any effort to universalise education that ignored gender inequality would be fundamentally incomplete.

The structural barriers to learning 🔗

The conference documents noted that many people were denied equal access to education on grounds of race, gender, language, disability, ethnic origin, or political convictions. High drop-out rates and poor learning achievement were also commonly recognised problems throughout the world. These were not random failures – they reflected deep structural inequalities embedded in education systems that had been designed, in many cases, to serve only a portion of the population.

In 1990, the 155 countries and 150 organizations assembled in Jomtien pledged to provide education for all by the year 2000, and to evaluate achievements and undertake a comprehensive policy review at regional and global levels by 2000-2001. It was an ambitious commitment – but the scale of the challenge demanded nothing less.

Global commitment to basic learning needs 🔗

The most significant outcome of the Jomtien conference was the adoption of the World Declaration on Education for All. This document did more than set targets – it articulated a vision of education as a fundamental human entitlement and laid out the principles that should guide efforts to achieve it.

Rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 🔗

The World Declaration explicitly drew its moral authority from a document adopted over four decades earlier. As the declaration noted, more than 40 years before, the nations of the world – speaking through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – had asserted that “everyone has a right to education.” Article 26 of the UDHR states that education shall be free at least in the elementary and fundamental stages, that elementary education shall be compulsory, and that education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The Jomtien Declaration reaffirmed this commitment – but went further. It acknowledged that despite this long-standing declaration of the right to education, the world had failed to honour it for hundreds of millions of people. The 1990 conference was, in effect, a reckoning with that failure and a renewed pledge to act.

What the declaration said about learning 🔗

A central and distinctive feature of the Jomtien Declaration was its insistence on meeting basic learning needs – a concept broader than simply getting children into classrooms. The declaration stated that every person – child, youth, and adult – shall be able to benefit from educational opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs. These needs comprise both essential learning tools (such as literacy, oral expression, numeracy, and problem solving) and the basic learning content (such as knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes) required by human beings to be able to survive, to develop their full capacities, and to participate in society.

The participants at Jomtien affirmed that education can help ensure a safer, healthier, more prosperous and environmentally sound world, while simultaneously contributing to social, economic, and cultural progress, tolerance, and international cooperation. They also recognised that education is an indispensable key to – though not a sufficient condition for – personal and social improvement.

Six goals for the decade ahead 🔗

The Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs, adopted alongside the Declaration, set out specific targets for countries to aim for by the year 2000. These included: expansion of early childhood care and developmental activities, especially for poor, disadvantaged, and disabled children; universal access to and completion of primary education by the year 2000; improvement in learning achievement so that a defined percentage of an appropriate age cohort attained a specified level; and reduction of the adult illiteracy rate to one-half its 1990 level by the year 2000, with sufficient emphasis on female literacy to significantly reduce the disparity between male and female illiteracy rates.

The World Declaration also effectively broadened the scope of basic education to include early childhood development, primary education, and non-formal learning – including literacy – for youth and adults. This was a significant expansion. It meant that EFA was not just a campaign to enrol children in primary school; it was a comprehensive vision of lifelong learning for everyone.

A framework for accountability 🔗

To make sure the momentum from Jomtien did not dissipate, a follow-up mechanism was established. The International Consultative Forum on Education for All, with its secretariat located at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, was set up as an inter-agency body to guide and monitor follow-up actions to the World Conference. This body became the primary vehicle through which global progress on EFA was tracked – and, where necessary, challenged – over the years that followed.

The Jomtien Declaration also explicitly called on all actors – not just governments – to share responsibility. Participants committed to act cooperatively through their own spheres of responsibility and called on governments, concerned organisations, and individuals to join in the effort, affirming that the basic learning needs of all can and must be met.

The legacy of Jomtien 🔗

The world did not fully meet the goals set at Jomtien by the year 2000. Progress was uneven, and the ambition of the 1990 declaration outpaced what many countries were able or willing to implement. Yet the conference’s legacy is undeniable. It placed education firmly on the international development agenda, created a shared language for talking about educational equity, and established a global accountability framework that had not previously existed. Even in low-income countries, the net enrolment rate at the primary level increased from an average of less than 60% in 1990 to over 80% by 2008, and the completion rate rose from 44% in 1990 to 63% by 2008. These gains, imperfect as they were, trace directly back to the commitments made in Jomtien.

The OHCHR has noted that the overall number of children out of school worldwide declined from 100 million in 2000 to an estimated 57 million in 2015 – a significant reduction, even if tens of millions remained excluded. The work begun at Jomtien continued through the 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar, and its spirit carried forward into the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 4, which calls for inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030.

What Jomtien established, above all, was the principle that education is not a favour governments extend to citizens – it is an obligation they owe to every person, regardless of age, gender, geography, or circumstance.

What do you think? Given that the EFA movement was launched over three decades ago, why do you think millions of children and adults still lack access to quality basic education today? And considering that the Jomtien Declaration recognised gender disparity as a central challenge in 1990, how much has truly changed for girls and women in education globally?

References

1. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000127583
2. https://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/educonference1990.html
3. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2018/12/universal-declaration-human-rights-70-30-articles-30-articles-article-26