A Global Campaign with Local Roots?

Queen Rania of Jordan launched the 1 GOAL campaign at Wembley Stadium together with a host of international footballers (Photo by Jeff Moore, 1 GOAL).

The Make Poverty History campaign, which was criticised for losing touch with people in developing countries, is being followed by a new mega-campaign, complete with the ballyhoo of international football celebrities. The 1 GOAL campaign was launched at Wembley Stadium this month in a ceremony presided by Queen Rania of Jordan and Premiere League footballers including Portsmouth's David James and Gael Clichy of Arsenal.

In the lead up to next year’s World Cup in South Africa, dozens of organisations affiliated with 1 GOAL will campaign in more than 200 countries for universal primary education. Yet unlike Make Poverty History, which emerged opportunistically to pressure the UK government while it held the presidency of the G8 and the EU, 1 GOAL builds on the strength of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), which began nearly a decade ago, making it one of the world’s longest-running global campaigns. 

In addition to its longevity, the GCE is distinguished by its democratic approach to involving southern partners, as described in a recent IDS Working Paper by John Gaventa and Marjorie Mayo. The paper, entitled “Spanning Citizenship Spaces Through Transnational Coalitions: The Case of the Global Campaign for Education,” looks at how the GCE built a coalition that spanned the local, national and global, while maintaining trust and legitimacy at all levels. 

According to one GCE campaigner and INGO staff member in New Delhi, having trust means that GCE can respond quickly, when this is needed, knowing that it is representative of members' views, and having the confidence that decisions are coming from a governing board that is rooted in the South.

The exceptionally successful case of the GCE underscores two important lessons for campaigners. The first is that the globalised nature of policy-making means that change on social issues like education can only come with pressure on multiple levels. The second is that a coalition attempting to bridge various levels must make an extraordinary effort to involve constituents at every level: within its own governance, with its resources and even with the framing of the issues. By harnessing energy and talent spanning from the local to the global, GCE deserves credit for helping to end primary school fees in dozens of countries. Since GCE formed ten years ago, the number of children registered in primary schools around the world has risen by 40 million.

Notwithstanding GCE's efforts, the second MDG, universal primary education, is unlikely to be achieved by 2015. About 75 million children remain out of school (approximately 10 per cent of the world’s primary-school aged kids). Still, one wonders how much worse the picture would have looked without the constant work of GCE, among others, in campaigning for education for all. Indeed, of all the MDGs, some of the most remarkable progress has been made in this one.

The progress, however, may be difficult to maintain against the countervailing pressures on aid and national and local budgets created by the global financial and food crises. GCE's most high-profile project yet will seek to revitalise the movement in this challenging environment, though the new celebrity-laden strategy may also present new challenges internally to the movement's decentralised ethos. How these forces play out in the next year will certainly provide additional insights for other global activists.

Four large NGOs came together in 1999 to establish GCE and to promote the realization of the right to quality, free and compulsory education for all. Two of these founding organisations – ActionAid and Oxfam International – are international NGOs. The third, Education International, is an international association of teachers’ unions formed in 1993, which brought resources from international trade union organisations to the campaign. The fourth founder member, the Global March Against Child Labour, is an international movement concerned with children’s rights, based in the global South. By 2007, the GCE had involved over 18 million people and thousands of organisations in over 100 countries. To read more about GCE, download the working paper here.

Related Resources

Spanning Citizenship Spaces Through Transnational Coalitions: The Case of the Global Campaign for Education by John Gaventa and Marj Mayo (2009), IDS Working Paper 327.

Also, browse the entire IDS Working Paper Series on Global Citizen Engagements