ABSTRACT
In March 1990, 155 governments and most of the world’s major bilateral and multilateral donor agencies met in Jomtien, Thailand. They met to discuss and endorse a plan to achieve basic education for all, and to eradicate illiteracy globally by the year 2000. There were three main aspects to the issue:
• how to get all children enrolled in schools for at least four years and deliver a quality education to help them become literate
• how to recover literacy among the large numbers of ‘over-age’ children who have dropped out of school before achieving sustainable literacy
• how to bring basic education to more than 960 million adults who at that time were living in a state of illiteracy
The goal was to have basic education for all and universal literacy by 2000; an ambitious target indeed.
