Sovereign Debt and the Right to Education

The nexus between education and sovereign debt has not always been obvious, although it is not difficult to conceive. This is because the stakeholders involved in debt politics and economics, but particularly its protagonists, namely creditor states and multilateral international financial institutions (IFIs), do not view educational imperatives through a human rights or developmental lens. The chapter demonstrates the inextricable link between the right to education and development and then trace international efforts to entrench the former in developmental agendas, particularly the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), as more recently transformed into Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The object of the chapter is to show that behind the pledges and rhetoric of development finance the reality is that the promotion of the right to education is not high on the agenda of industrialised nations (but equally perhaps on the agendas of least developed nations). We supply numbers-based scenaria in order to demonstrate that most instances of debt servicing, even if combined with debt relief and other forms of co-financing may ultimately fail to comply with the internationally accepted indicators of the right to education.