EFA Global Monitoring Report 2009: Overcoming inequality - why governance matters

This edition of the EFA Global Monitoring Report comes at a critical moment. With the 2015 deadline for some key goals just over the horizon, there are worrying signs of a large-scale shortfall. Remarkable gains have been registered in many of the world’s poorest countries,but the distance remaining is great. Governments and aid donors have to act with a renewed sense of urgency and shared commitment to deliver on the pledges they made in 2000. These promises cannot wait and time is running out.

The Report, titled Overcoming Inequality: Why Governance Matters, identifies deep and persistent disparities based on income, gender, location, ethnicity and other markers for disadvantage as a major barrier to progress in education. Inequity in education is linked to wider disparities in the distribution of power, wealth and opportunity. And it is perpetuated by policies that either tolerate or actively exacerbate an unfair distribution of life chances – policies that fuel the transmission of poverty across generation