C.2	The Future ofIED and Education inAKU
	2.1	AKU is a member of a large array of Aga Khan institutions concerned with education from the pre-school through primary and secondary levels to the University. And as a University dedicated to addressing the "generic problems" of' developing countries, AKU has been drawn to a concern with the quality and availability of education. The result has been the early establishment of the Institute for Educational Development as the first component of AKU outside the health sciences. The Commission has sought to determine if and how AKU should sustain this commitment to education in its future development.
	2.2	The State and Prospects of Education in the Third World
		Our review in Section III of this Report of changes in education in the developing and Muslim worlds since the Harvard Report has focused on higher education, where we found irresistible demand producing great expansion and poor quality. Something similar could have been said about education at all levels. There has not only been enormous private demand for education but a driving sense that education is a basic human right that should be available to all. Ambitions to cradicate illiteracy and make education universal have produced great efforts in the decades since World War 11. In the 1990s, the U.N.'s Jonitien slogan "Education for All" is the rallying cry for continuing these efforts, which are still far from reaching their declared goals. The UNESCO 1993 World Education Report questions the alleged widening of the "knowledge gap" between developed and developing countries, but concedes that the "literacy gap" and the "schooling gap" are only narrowing, not disappearing. It cautiously recognises quality problems under the gross statistics, with the poorer countries marked by short "school life expectancy", short school years, lack of textbooks and other teaching materials. In other sources, less constrained by official responsibilities, the prevalence of poor quality is more forthrightly asserted and deplored. There are, of course, marked differences between the countries that have been growing economically and those that are stagnant or declining, with the African countries showing deterioration throughout their whole educational systems like that we noted earlier in higher education.
		Education has always been regarded as a major requisite of development. After some initial hesitations, it was given a solid status in economic development theory in the human capital doctrines. But in recent decades, the examples of Japan, China, and the "East Asian tigers", as countries with limited natural wealth but impressive human resources, have brought a heightened sense of the critical importance of human qualities in economic progress. Since better education is the most evident way to raise the competencies of national populations, official policies now put new emphasis on educational reform and are encouraged to do so by the World Bank and other powers in the international sphere.
		Parts of the world that are of particular interest to AKU are among those where the present state of education gives particular concern. Pakistan has regularly made a very poor showing on the UNDP's Human Development Index. which combines GNP per capita, expectation 4 life at birth, and level of literacy. The country is presently under a barrage of international criticism for its low expenditures on education and health and its high expenditures on defence. Whatever the justification for these allocations., the 1993 World Education Report shows that on1y 5.0% of Pakistan's total governmental expenditure (in 1980, no figure given for 1990) went for education, a strikingly low figure in comparison with Kenya's 16.7% and Uganda's 22.5% (1990 figures). The stagnation or economic deterioration in East Africa has produced declines in Kenyan and Tanzanian allocations for education in the face of the sharply rising numbers of childrcn the educational systems must serve. In Keny'a increasing fee burdens have been imposed on parents with the result that many children are denied schooling by their family's poverty (or in some cases, by their sheer lack of family). The effects of these straitened economic conditions on the quality of education are less conspicuous but hardly less serious.
		A concern that the Muslim world may still be resistant to schools and formal education has appeared in the discussions of the Commission. And the suggestion has been made that East Asian countries were progressing faster than Muslim countries because of their enthusiastic receptivity to imported forms of education. Statistical comparisons across different countries do not show clear differentials between Muslim and non-Muslim developing countries, except in gender, where Muslim countries show characteristically higher female illiteracy rates, and lower levels of attained education for girls and women. Present understanding of the multiple gains in performance and initiative from the education of girls suggests that the Muslim world may have been disadvantaged in ways not immediately obvious by a slow development of education for girls. There may also be other cultural influences of Islam that affect the receptivity of Muslims to forms of modern education that are important to economic and social progress. Better understanding of such influences is certainly desirable and could be a significant mission for AKU. This is a field in which AKU can build on the AKES's experience in such ventures as the pre-school programme in India and the Madrassah project in East Africa.
		We expect a basic continuity in the problems of education in the developing world in the next quarter-century. In successful and unsuccessful countries alike, we anticipate continued faith in education as a basis of national programmes and searches for ways to make it more effective. In the less fortunate countries the pressures of rising populations and the competition for limited employment opportunities in slowly growing economies will bring heavy demands for education that will be hard to meet with satisfactory quality. Serious threats to the social return from educational investment will come from poor quality, and one of the most important challenges will be to achieve better average quality in large and sluggishly responsive publiclysupported school systems. The growth of private schooling that has been a feature of recent decades is likely to continue, with increasing differentiation in the quality - and hence the prestige and value -of education within a country. Another challenge, particularly attractive for a private university like AKU, will be to find ways whereby high quality private education may have radiating effects beyond a few privileged schools. Even the more successful among the developing countries will face a similar array of problems and needs.
	2.3	AKU'S Continuing Mission in Education for the Developing and Muslim Worlds
		Our brief sketch of the state and prospects of education in the developing and Muslim worlds strongly suggests continuing opportunities for AKU to make contributions of many sorts to educational advance over the coming decades. Because of its concern with some poor and remote populations the Aga Khan Education Services have joined in efforts of our time to extend education toward universality. These AKES efforts have opened opportunities for AKU to advance understanding of the problems of expanding educational coverage. Nevertheless, the potential of AKES and AKU in bringing quantitative expansion of education is clearly limited; they will remain small amid the vastness of national educational systems; their prospects of important contributions by showing ways to bring about qualitative improvement in education look much greater.

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