Skills and Education for All from Jomtien (1990) to the GMR of 2012: A Policy History

Abstract

This chapter reviews what happened to a particular commitment after it had been included in the final wording of an international set of EFA Goals at Dakar in 2000. In effect, this became almost ‘sacred text’. Once Jomtien’s ‘essential skills required by youth and adults’ had been turned into ‘appropriate learning and life skills programmes’ in Dakar (UNESCO, 2000: 8), it became very difficult for the EFA Global Monitoring Report (GMR) teams to monitor it. The term ‘life skills’ had been successfully lobbied by one of the core agencies in the Dakar World Education Forum, and had been preferred over terms such as work skills, livelihood skills or vocational skills. The lack of attention to these latter dimensions of skills development had not been helped by the Millennium Development Goals, also in 2000, focusing only on UPE and gender parity in the sphere of education.