Planning to fulfil the right to education
Education is a human right for everyone, no matter what. It’s so fundamental, that it is indispensable to exercise other human rights.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights – and the Convention against Discrimination in Education - enable all persons to access this right without discrimination, and therefore governments across the globe are the primary duty-bearers of the right to education, and need to plan for the delivery of education.
How do we fulfil this fundamental right?
Educational planning is a crucial step as it connects the principles of the right to education to the delivery of education. IIEP makes available tools and guidelines to support countries in weighing and costing policy options and cross-checking them against the most appropriate benchmarks.
Just as education sector plans have made visible gender inequalities, this tool can shed light on the efforts made by the state for fulfilling the right to education.
A tool to align the right to education with sector plans
For example, these methodological guidelines are available to support educational planners and decision-makers in ensuring that education sector plans, and other national documents, align with international commitments and obligations on the right to education.
The tool features an analytical grid – a checklist of 50-plus questions to help education actors verify that all the components related to the right to education are included in a current or future education plan.
For example, it asks:
- To what extent does the education budget ensure compulsory education for at least nine years?
- Are there regulations in place to regulate private actors in education and measures to ensure that they do not hinder public education?
- Does the plan address youth pregnancy, and include measures to combat stigma, stereotyping, and prejudice?
For each question, planners reflect on whether the plan is fully, partially, or not meeting their national commitments, thereby providing a more nuanced picture of a country’s progress in fulfilling the right to education.
By ensuring all elements surveyed by the guidelines are visible in the education sector plan, efforts can better be translated into action, and the right to education strengthened.
Tools
Our experts
Amélie A. Gagnon is leading the Data and Evidence Cluster of the Technical Cooperation team at IIEP.
Amélie is coordinating IIEP’s portfolio in micro-planning, covering the areas of decentralization and deconcentration, workforce management, geospatial data analysis, education statistics, the operationalization of the Right to Education, the use of evidence in educational planning, as well as designing tools and methodologies.
As a demographer, Amélie is passionate about putting data to the service of evidence-informed decision-making in educational planning.
Prior to joining IIEP in 2015, Amélie spent six years at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) advising Member States of Latin America and the Caribbean in matters of EMIS, data collection, data management, monitoring and evaluation. Amélie was also responsible for building the UIS global database on free and compulsory education and contributing to the design of key international comparative education surveys.
Before joining UNESCO, Amélie served as Economist-Statistician at Statistics Canada’s Research Data Centre in Saskatchewan (Canada) where they were responsible for opening and managing a research facility, providing statistical capacity building to researchers and students, and analysing disclosure risks from projects using Canadian Social Surveys and censuses.
Education
- MSc in Demography (Population and Development), Université de Montréal, Canada
- BSc in Political Science and Economics, Université de Montréal, Canada
Publications
- Multi-criteria Decision Analysis for Site Classification: Assessing Natural Hazard Risks for Planning the Location of Educational Facilities. 2024.
- Planning to Fulfil the Right to Education: Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit. 2023.
- Isochrone-based Catchment Areas for Educational Planning. 2022.
- Education recovery for stronger collective futures. 2022.
- School-age populations exposed to natural hazards: An approach to triangulate internally displaced population estimates. 2022.
- Gridded Sex-Disaggregated School-Age Population Datasets for Countries and Dependent Territories in Africa in 2020. 2022.
- Estimating School-age Populations by Applying Sprague Multipliers to Raster Data. 2021.
- Geographically Weighted Regressions for Prioritizing Educational Planning, Policies, and Interventions. 2021.
- Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Cross-National Perspectives in Classifications and Identity Politics. 2015.
- Closing the primary teacher gap in sub-Saharan Africa: How many teachers are needed, and how much would it cost?. 2015
Germán Vargas Mesa is part of the Development Unit within the R&D Team. He works in the production of methodologies, tools, and norms to improve educational planning and management, with an emphasis on the use of geospatial data. He supports both Technical Cooperation and Training projects with data analysis, map production, and statistical work.
In recent years, he has developed tools on spatialized population estimates for educational indicators, multi-criteria decision analyses for school construction and resilience to hazards, spatial econometrics for better decision making, and the use of isochrone-based catchment areas around schools.
Having joined IIEP in 2016, he has also served in the Director’s Office, where he supported the construction and calculation of institutional KPIs from 2018 to 2020. He has worked on several training programmes, including on the use of geospatial data and education indicators, as well as technical cooperation projects in countries such as Somalia, Madagascar, and Viet Nam. He has also coordinated the two EdPlanning Hackathons conducted in 2021 and 2022.
Prior to joining IIEP, he worked as a Teaching and Research Assistant at the Universidad de los Andes’ School of Government and Department of Economics, and as an independent consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank.
Education
- Master’s in International Development (cum laude) – Sciences Po (Paris, France)
- Master’s in Economics – Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia)
- Bachelor’s in Economics – Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia).