The World Bank was created in 1945 as part of a grand Allied strategy of conflict prevention after the second world war. The aim was to promote growth and stability globally, including in the defeated countries, and encourage even former enemies to become partners in preserving the new world order.

Today its work is focused largely on fighting poverty, including via education, to which it will dedicate US$2.4 billion this year, with a near doubling of support for Africa. The bank is also the catalyst behind what experts call one of the best kept secrets in development - a global mechanism, called the Fast Track Initiative - for helping achieve the worldwide goal of giving every child a place in primary school, one of the Millennium Development Goals.

'Expanding access to education is one of the success stories in development,' said Manfred Konukiewitz, deputy director-general of the German ministry for economic development and co-operation, which hosted a meeting of fast track donors in Bonn last month.

The fast track was set up in 2002 to encourage and help leaders of poor countries to devise credible national plans to provide universal primary education and to persuade leaders of rich countries to provide the additional funds needed to implement them.

The mechanism helps governments find funds from individual governments or international bodies and the bank has set up a 'Catalytic Fund' to support 'aid orphans', countries committed to reducing poverty and whose education plans have been endorsed by donor countries but who cannot find a donor.

'The fast track is one of the things that caught Mr Wolfowitz's eye and he was enthusiastic about it right up until his resignation,' said bank spokesman Phil Hay.

The progress in some countries helped by the Fast Track Initiative has been startling. In Yemen, a country where girls traditionally lagged far behind boys in school attendance, there has been a sharp increase in intake rates from 78 per cent in 2000 to 100 per cent, while reforms in Niger endorsed and funded by the fast track have resulted in an additional 1 million children going to primary schools, according to bank figures.

Globally, the fast track has contributed to a sharp drop in the numbers of children not attending primary school from 105 million in 2000 to 77 million today, against a tide of rising populations. But is the international target of all children completing four years' primary schooling by 2015 attainable?

'It's within our grasp,' said Lucia Fry, a leading figure in the Global Campaign for Education. Of all the Millennium Development Goals it was the most 'doable', she said, because there was a consensus on how it needed to be done: abolish fees of any kind, have no more than 40 pupils per class, ensure schools are secure places, especially for girls, have participatory curricula and teachers who are trained and motivated to do a good job.

'Aid to primary education has more than doubled in the past five years,' she said. 'But it needs to at least triple in the next two to three years to achieve the goals.'

Massive inroads could be made if expected endorsement of education plans for higher-populated countries - such as Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan - in 2008 is quickly supported with adequate funds from the G8. But that is a big if.

Last week the G8 countries committed themselves only to funding the US$500 million resource gap for the 30 countries whose national plans have already been endorsed. It made no mention of funding the 30 other countries awaiting endorsement over the next two years, which include the big-population countries that will eat up the largest share of funds.

According to the Global Campaign, an extra US$6 billion a year is needed to achieve universal completion of primary education and US$13 billion a year to cover all the Education for All goals including halving adult illiteracy.

'Of the aid promised in 2005 at Gleneagles, it was clear that about US$10 billion a year would go to education,' said David Archer, but so far the annual figures total US$3 billion, and there are still close to a billion people who cannot read the G8's pledges.

The figure pales compared with up to US$101 billion a year the US spent on the Iraq conflict up to the end of 2006, and Mr Archer is dismayed that the World Bank has not been putting its own resources into the initiative, preferring instead to fund its own projects.

Four of the richest nations - the US, Germany, Japan and Italy - have been among the slowest to offer their share of the necessary funds and enrolment on its own does not solve the problem. Partly driven by the Education for All agenda, abolishing school fees has become a popular policy for new governments in developing countries, particularly in Africa, but it creates a massive overnight surge in pupil numbers. In Uganda they shot up by 2.9 million, in Kenya by 2.5 million. Without careful planning and financing that can send standards falling as 120, 140, even 200 pupils cram into classes built for 40, because there are not the classrooms and trained teachers needed.

Mr Archer said this problem had been exacerbated in a number of countries because donors, including the World Bank, had been reluctant to go beyond funding the hardware of education - classrooms, desks and chairs - to paying teachers' salaries, which make up the majority of running costs. He cited an independent evaluation, in which he took part, that found a 'shockingly large amount' of the US$14 billion the bank spent on education from the early 1990s onwards had been wasted on building schools that were closed within a few years due to a lack of teachers.

The bank does far more than simply mobilise funds. It offers its services as a type of global development doctor, helping countries measure and analyse their education problems, diagnose the policies for solving them and build their capacity to carry out reforms. For example, it has been at the forefront of efforts to encourage self-management of schools in dozens of countries, has pressed governments to reduce or abolish fees at primary level, and it helps create state-of-the-art databases for measuring the impact and quality of education reforms and methods.

In East Asia, the bank is trying to persuade several governments to set minimum standards for schools and financially help schools in poorer areas to meet them. 'In Vietnam schools in rural areas are in a far worse condition than those in cities,' said Chris Thomas, sector manager for education in East Asia and the Pacific. 'So we have tried to help the government set minimum conditions for learning, such as having clean buildings, basic instructional materials, and a trained teacher in every class.'

The bank is pressing the Vietnamese government to encourage school leaders to think about the results they want to achieve in terms of improving student learning, enrolment, attendance, and the performance of teachers. It has run similar programmes in Cambodia and the Philippines and will be introducing one in Indonesia next year. 'It's about getting governments to think what the determinants for learning are and then bringing up the bottom of their system to raise standards systematically,' Mr Thomas said. 'We are doing a lot of work on setting professional standards for teachers then aligning that with their incentives for pay and opportunities for training.'

Higher education is another focus of the bank's work, with the aim of helping governments gear their tertiary system towards providing the skills needed to run a knowledge economy, an economy dominated by information and ideas rather than manufacturing.

'We've been active in two areas, trying to improve quality assurance and helping governments to set up competitive funds for higher education institutions,' Mr Thomas said. 'Most countries in Europe and the US provide core funding and let out 20 per cent of their budget competitively to universities who make bids to improve the departments they think will be successful. And that's what we are doing in Vietnam and Indonesia. It provides an incentive for universities to improve their performance and expand.'

The bank money encourages governments to innovate and test interventions and network with others who have done similar things so they can exchange experience and ideas. Past programmes in the mainland have included a US$50 million project to improve the science curriculum and lab conditions in 100 key higher education institutions and for them each to share that assistance with a linked university in a poor area.