Corporate Philanthropy and the ‘Education For All’ Agenda

There is no shortage of candidates for inclusion in a list of challenges facing humanity at the start of the twenty-first century. Over the past two decades, globalisation has contributed to impressive gains in poverty reduction. Yet we live in a world of unprecedented disparities in wealth. Progress towards the international development goals in areas such as poverty reduction, nutrition, child survival and maternal health has fallen far short of the targets set for 2015, even in many of the countries that have secured high economic growth. Youth unemployment has reached record levels. While global economic integration and the spread of technology, capital and ideas have increased prosperity, growth has been uneven and unbalanced. Building a new globalisation will require not just new mechanisms for curtailing the power of financial markets, but also a more equitable pattern of economic growth and a new approach to ecology. Climate change and the growing body of evidence on environmental stress point unequivocally towards an economic system that has overstepped the ecological boundaries, with potentially devastating consequences for future generations.