Evolving policies have increasingly aimed to include nomadic groups in EFA, but an overemphasis on mobility has distracted policy makers from going beyond access logistics to consider learning needs within nomads' contemporary livelihoods and cultural values.Notable global trends are the growth and institutionalization of forms of Alternative Basic Education (provided by state and nonstate actors for "disadvantaged" learners) and advocacy of Open and Distance Learning.Case studies of mobile pastoralists in Kenya, India, and Afghanistan, and of sea nomads in Indonesia, illustrate policy and practices on the ground. They highlight a need to address equality, equivalence, and learner progression more closely, rather than adopting strategies for education inclusion that reinforce nomadic groups' sociopolitical marginalization. This requires an extended post-2015 engagement with the larger political question of education's role in undermining, or sustaining and validating, mobile livelihoods.
2In keeping with development narratives of education as a public and individual good (Sen 1999; UNHDR 1990), there have been repeated calls for Education for All (EFA) to make an "active commitment" to removing the educational disparities faced by nomadic groups (WDEFA 1990; WEF 2000).During the EFA decades, global and national policy discourses have increasingly recognized the need to make services more flexible and diverse in order to include "nomadic"populations. These comprise millions of people, living on both land and water, who use mobility strategically and skillfully to support their livelihoods. Some of these (known in the literature as "peripatetics", cf. Rao [1987]) offer specialized services to others. Others are hunter-gatherers, sea nomads, fisher folk, and mobile pastoralists-all of whom deploy diverse mobility strategies to secure fleeting and dispersed natural resources, and rely significantly on resources of the commons. Many of these are among the "missing learners" of EFA discourses.While the policy visibility of nomadic groups has grown during EFA, attention has largely focused on broadening delivery modalities-a focus that is consistent with framing "learner mobility" as the key barrier to access. While access is important, concerns about it have eclipsed attention to learning needs and to the pressing issue of how formal education intersects with and supports livelihood security. At the same time, the view that nomadic groups suffer from extreme "education deprivation" (cf. UNESCO 2010) is contentious. It negates the value of livelihood-specific endogenous education and, in so doing, fails to engage with how formal education can and should interface with and complement, rather than replace, such education.As we move into the Sustainable Development Goals era, it is timely to reflect on why it has proved difficult to accommodate nomadic groups within the EFA movement. It is more urgent now than perhaps ever before to give attention to how education should respond
