Achieving the Goals - 2009
The Performance of Commonwealth Countries in Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Education and the Dakar Education for All Goals

This report, commissioned by the Commonwealth Secretariat for the 17th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2009, explores progress towards achieving good quality basic education for all.
Section A describes briefly the composition and the diversity of the Commonwealth before providing two short overviews on trends and significant advances in basic education across all of the countries of the Commonwealth and regional trends and patterns for Commonwealth Asia, Commonwealth Sub-Saharan Africa, the Commonwealth Caribbean and the Commonwealth Pacific.
Section B presents data for each Commonwealth country in graphical and diagrammatic form, contrasting wherever possible, the state of basic education in 1999 with the latest available statistics. Particular attention is paid to pre-primary education, Universal Primary Education (UPE), progress towards higher levels of adult literacy, gender parity and equality and some proxy indicators of better quality in basic education.
Section A describes briefly the composition and the diversity of the Commonwealth before providing two short overviews on trends and significant advances in basic education across all of the countries of the Commonwealth and regional trends and patterns for Commonwealth Asia, Commonwealth Sub-Saharan Africa, the Commonwealth Caribbean and the Commonwealth Pacific.
Section B presents data for each Commonwealth country in graphical and diagrammatic form, contrasting wherever possible, the state of basic education in 1999 with the latest available statistics. Particular attention is paid to pre-primary education, Universal Primary Education (UPE), progress towards higher levels of adult literacy, gender parity and equality and some proxy indicators of better quality in basic education.
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 2.22MBPDF
-
Click to Read online and shareREAD
.
Recognising Diversity
Member countries of the Commonwealth are diverse across many dimensions of national life. Table 1 captures three aspects of this diversity: size as measured by total population; wealth as measured by levels of income (GNI per capita); and one proxy measure of development, the Human Development Index (HDI). The table shows a broad spectrum of national situations. Twenty-six countries have a population of less than one million people. There is a spread across main income groups. And 17 Commonwealth countries have a high HDI, 24 are classified as falling into the medium HDI category, and eight countries have a low HDI (all in Sub-Saharan Africa).
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 71.28KBPDF
-
Click to Read online and shareREAD