This was stated in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26) and repeated in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 28). The report of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding, chaired by Amartya Sen, has drawn further attention to this matter (Sen, 2007). Basic education is also widely accepted in the international literature and policy discourse as essential for development and poverty reduction (see e.g. Lee, 2004; Cohen et al.,