Have Education Goals Accelerated Progress

The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, we test whether there has been an increase in indicators of educational attainment and/or an acceleration in progress towards goals set by the Education for All (EFA)-movement in 2000. Second, we project progress towards universal achievement of these targets. The indicators considered in both tasks are the fraction of a cohort that has ever been to school, the primary school completion rate, and the lower secondary completion rate. Our results indicate that progress towards education goals has seen a large boost that benefited cohorts that were affected from policies implemented c. 2000. We estimate that an additional 34m children born before 2010 will eventually gain access to education that would not do so had previous trends continued. While in most countries, cohorts that will attain universal access have already been born, our projections also suggest that, on average over all countries, universal completion of lower secondary will only be attained by cohorts born after 2050 in most regions.