Guidelines and Tools

Higher education is too often dissociated from the right to education. In many countries tuition fees are on the rise, and only the privileged have access to, or succeed in completing, higher education, making it difficult to argue that there is an actual right to higher education to be enforced. However, international human rights law is clear: the right to education includes the obligation of states to ensure that higher education is made accessible to all based on capacity.

Family literacy and family learning are approaches to learning that focus on intergenerational interactions within families and communities. This, in turn, promotes the development of literacy, numeracy, language and life skills. Family learning recognizes the vital role that parents, grandparents and other caregivers play in their children’s education. Furthermore, it values and supports all forms of learning in homes and communities.

The purpose of these Guidelines and Toolkit is to describe the different operational tools developed to help education stakeholders systematically collect and analyse the efforts put in place to ensure the RTE. These efforts should be central to every educational planning or programming document. The resulting analysis should also bring to light different and challenging policy gaps in education. The final goal is to mobilize all information and analyses gathered to nurture a constructive dialogue among key national stakeholders and to strengthen the RTE at national and local levels.

This first edition, ‘Education in Africa – Placing equity at the heart of policy’, found that while many countries are taking important and significant positive steps towards reaching this goal, too many children are still left behind. It also found that the quality of schooling they receive varies widely. The report looks at six key topics: early childhood education, primary and secondary school, skills for work, teachers, education facilities, and means of implementation, and suggests that providing quality education for all children will require a complex set of interventions.