Education For All (EFA) is a global movement led by UNESCO (United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), aiming to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015.
UNESCO has been mandated to lead the movement and coordinate the international efforts to reach Education for All. Governments, development agencies, civil society, non-government organizations and the media are but some of the partners working toward reaching these goals.
The EFA goals also contribute to the global pursuit of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially MDG 2 on universal primary education and MDG 3 on gender equality in education, by 2015.
The Fast Track Initiative was set up to implement the EFA movement, aiming at "accelerating progress towards quality universal primary education".
UNESCO also produces the annual Education for All Global Monitoring Report. For further information, see UNESCO's website for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report: http://www.unesco.org/en/efareport. This report has been replaced by the Global Education Monitoring Report.
In 2000, ten years later, the international community met again at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, an event which drew 1100 participants. The forum took stock of the fact that many countries were far from having reached the goals established at the World Conference on Education for All in 1990. The participants agreed on the Dakar Framework for Action which re-affirmed their commitment to achieving Education for All by the year 2015, and identified six key measurable education goals which aim to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015. In addition, the forum reaffirmed UNESCO’s role as the lead organization with the overall responsibility of coordinating other agencies and organizations in the attempts to achieve these goals. The six goals established in The Dakar Framework for Action, Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments are:
In order to evaluate each country's progress with regards to the EFA's goals set in the Dakar Framework for Action, UNESCO has developed the Education for All Development Index (EDI). The EDI measures four of the six EFA goals, selected on the basis of data availability. Each of the four goals is evaluated using a specific indicator, and each of those components is then assigned an equal weight in the overall index.