By Saverio Krätli

Global progress towards Education For All (EFA) is leaving pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia far behind despite of their growing desire for formal education. The dominant strategy of formal education provision, the ‘classroom’ model, routinely (if unwillingly) selects out a predictable and identifiable proportion of pastoral children: those actvely involved in production. In this scenario, the classroom model is an unnecessary barrier to learning: effective educational inclusion requires an alternative strategy centred on the precondition of compatibility with pastoral production. By problematising the system of provision, rather than the learner who fails to fit with it, we can start thinking about ways education can come to pastoralists without the unfavourable trade-offs that currently threaten both present productivity and a future livelihood as producers in the pastoral system. An encouraging climate of growing institutional awareness, coupled with increasing pastoralist demand for education, suggest that a formal education curriculum delivered through a tailored combination of open and distance learning could offer the way forward. When embedded within mainstream provision, this strategy has the potential to offer pastoralists Education For All, and is less risky and more inclusive than continuing with current approaches that, even if considerably scaled up, have the capacity only to offer pastoralists ‘Schooling for Some’.