Millions of children around the world continue to be denied access to basic education, and wealthy donor countries that channel the bulk of their aid money toward higher education are partly to blame, says a new report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

Unesco’s 2009 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, “Overcoming Inequality: Why Governance Matters,” was released today at a conference in Geneva. The report says that France and Germany are among the countries whose “education aid is skewed toward tertiary education.”

Both countries are major donors, ranking first and third respectively in terms of their donations to the education sector, but “only 12 percent of France’s aid to education supported basic education in low-income countries, while for Germany the share was 7 percent.”

The two countries “allocated a large share of their overall education aid to the imputed cost of students from developing countries studying in their tertiary-education institutions,” the report says. That imputed cost “accounted for 62 percent of France’s aid to education and 50 percent of Germany’s.”

The report calls the overall record of donor countries “one of collective failure” and notes that the current economic crisis will only add to the gloom.

The report also notes the rapid expansion of higher education over the past decade, with the 144 million students enrolled in 2006 representing an increase of 51 million since 1999. —Aisha Labi