This online library provides resources from the Right to Education Project as well as from other partner organisations. You can filter relevant resources by topic, region, country, content type and language. Note that resources in other languages will be available soon.
See also our list of useful databases for information on the implementation of the right to education at national level.
Abolishing School Fees in Africa is the product of a SFAI workshop, “School Fee Abolition: Building on What We Know and Defining Sustained Support,” held in Kenya in 2006. The book begins with a comparative overview of the processes, challenges, and lessons learned by five countries that had already abolished school fees: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, and Mozambique. The subsequent chapters delineate the actual experiences of each of the countries in planning and implementing their policies.
Corruption and poor governance are acknowledged as major impediments to realising the right to education and to reaching global development goals. Corruption not only distorts access to education, but affects the quality of education and the reliability of research findings. From corruption in the procurement of school resources and nepotism in the hiring of teachers, to the buying and selling of academic titles and the skewing of research results, major corruption risks can be identified at every level of the education and research systems. At the same time, education serves as a means to strengthen personal integrity and is a critical tool to address corruption effectively. The Global Corruption Report is Transparency International’s flagship publication, bringing the expertise of the anti-corruption movement to bear on a specific corruption issue or sector. The Global Corruption Report: Education consists of more than 70 articles commissioned from experts in the field of corruption and education, from universities, think tanks, business, civil society and international organisations.
This toolkit aims to help education activists reinforce their advocacy and campaign work on education financing. It aims to give practical information in an accessible form, together with ideas for how to build an effective national campaign – the evidence you can build and the tactics you can deploy.
It focuses on holding national governments, particularly Ministries of Finance, to account, challenging them when they are internalising ideological positions pushed by external actors. The toolkit is addressed to national coalitions, teacher unions, NGOs and others, to deal with strategic issues around education financing so that more money flows more effectively into education systems and more children can learn in good quality public schools.
This policy paper provides analysis showing that if governments and donors make concerted efforts to meet the promises they made in 2000, basic education for all could be achieved by 2015.
This is a 28-page booklet setting out a process for using a human rights framework to assess a government’s education budget. The booklet looks at elements of the right to education and where these might be found in a government’s budget; a government’s human rights obligations and questions these raise about a government’s budget; a process for using a rights framework to analyse a government’s education budget; and a short discussion of costing related to the right to education.
This report explores a range of innovative education budget work initiatives from Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda, where civil society has monitored and challenged their governments over education expenditure in order to hold themaccountable for commitments to EFA and the MDGs. It examines the significance and impact of civil society budget initiatives by drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with a range of education stakeholders, including education coalitions, government officials, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), teaching staff and school pupils; and by reviewing research reports and budget manuals developed by civil society organisations (CSOs).
This guide provides civil society organisations (CSOs) in the education sector with the basic information they need to get started on budget work. It introduces core concepts relating to budgets, and discusses ways of analysing them. It also demonstrates how budget work can inform strategic advocacy messages, and bring about change in the education sector.
This booklet articulates what it means to take an explicitly rights-based approach to government budgets and draws on the lessons of Gender Budget Initiative experiences around the world. It links governments’ commitments under CEDAW with the four main dimensions of budgets: revenue, expenditure, macroeconomics of the budget, and budget decision-making processes. It shows links between the share of educational expenditure and the realisation of girls’ right to education.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) restrictions on recurrent government spending are working against the MDGs, and Education for All, this report argues. Through research with the governments of Malawi, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, this study shows that IMF-imposed macroeconomic policies and explicit caps on teachers’ wage bills have forced many poor countries to freeze or curtail teacher recruitment, and are a major factor behind the chronic and severe shortage of teachers.
Recent years have seen an explosion in methodologies for monitoring children’s economic and social rights (ESR). Key examples include the development of indicators, benchmarks, child rights-based budget analysis and child rights impact assessments. The Committee on the Right of the Child has praised such tools in its work and has actively promoted their usage. Troublingly, however, there are serious shortcomings in the Committee’s approach to the ESR standards enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which threaten to impact upon the efficacy of such methodologies. This article argues that the Committee has failed to engage with the substantive obligations imposed by Article 4 and many of the specific ESR guaranteed in the CRC in sufficient depth. As a result, that body has not succeeded in outlining a coherent, comprehensive child rights-specific ESR framework. Using the example of child rights-based budget analysis, the author claims that this omission constitutes a significant obstacle to those seeking to evaluate the extent to which states have met their ESR-related obligations under the CRC. The article thus brings together and addresses key issues that have so far received only very limited critical academic attention, namely, children’s ESR under the CRC, the relationship between budgetary decision-making and the CRC, and child rights-based budget analysis. This article includes references to the right to education.