A/HRC/41/37 taken to achieve SDG4-Education 2030 and the broader 2030 Agenda are human rights compliant.”4 7. An essential condition for meeting Sustainable Development Goal 4 targets is for States to allocate the maximum of their available resources to ensuring free, quality, public education for all, as required by international human rights law. The Special Rapporteur is concerned that for the moment, the review of national laws in the context of the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4 shows that most countries do not meet the requirement of legislation concerning free and compulsory education. 5 She also recalls that literacy should be universally accessible and freely available. III. Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4 and realization of the right to education in the context of the growth in private actors in education 8. The last two decades have seen a significant increase in the scale and scope of private actors in education at the primary and secondary levels. Those changes are rapidly transforming education systems, including fragile systems in developing countries. It is important to emphasize the scale of the changes at stake and the impact this has on the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4 and of the right to education. 9. In the Global Education Monitoring Report for 2017/18, it is estimated that by 2021 one in every four primary school pupils in sub-Saharan Africa will be attending private schools. 6 By way of illustration of the sheer scale of this trend, in Kenya, according to official statistics, the number of private schools rose from 385 in 1998 to 8,917 in 2013, an increase of 2,216 per cent. Over the same period, the number of public primary schools in Kenya rose from 16,971 in 1998, to 21,205 in 2013, an increase of 24.9 per cent. The share of private schools has thus increased from 2 per cent in 1998 to 30 per cent in 2013, an increase of 15 times in just 15 years. 7 This dramatic increase has raised concern from human rights treaty bodies. For example, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expressed concern that “inadequacies in the public schooling system have led to the proliferation of so-called ‘low-cost private schools’ which has led to segregation or discriminatory access to education particularly for disadvantaged and marginalized children” (E/C.12/KEN/CO/2-5, para. 57).8 10. Similarly, according to official government statistics, in Morocco, the percentage of private enrolment at the primary level has more than tripled in less than 15 years from 4 per cent in 1999 to 14 per cent in 2013. 9 A coalition of organizations has calculated that, without taking into account the acceleration in the growth in private education since 2005, if private schools continue growing after 2013 at the same pace as during the years 2000 to 2013, the proportion of primary school students in the private sector could reach 30 per cent by 2023, 52 per cent by 2030, and 97 per cent by 2038. In response, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights emphasized its concern “about the spread of private education, which could lead to a form of segregation, with good quality education restricted to those who can pay for private, elite schooling”. It urged Morocco to “ensure that the significant increase in private education does not lead to growing inequality in access to good quality education” (E/C.12/MAR/CO/4, paras. 47–48). 4 5 6 7 8 9 See UNESCO and Right to Education Initiative, Right to Education Handbook (2019), p. 163. UNESCO, “Operationalizing Sustainable Development Goal 4: a review of national legislations on the right to education” (2017), p. 8. UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring Report 2017/18, p. 47. Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, economic surveys 2002–2014, available from https://www.knbs.or.ke/publications/. See also CRC/C/KEN/CO/3-5, paras. 57–58. See Coalition Marocaine pour l’Education Pour Tous and others, report to the pre-sessional working group for the fifty-fifth session of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, para. 11. 3