Image courtesy UNESCO/Justin Mott.

 

One of the stories in our April News Roundup episode of GirlSpeak featured the latest report from UNESCO.

Entitled “Education for All 2000-2015: Achievements and Challenges,” the report reviews the progress made on the Dakar Framework for Action that was put in place in 2000 with six wide-ranging education goals. This year, those goals should have been met.

As you can read in their Summary Report, there has been great progress towards the goals. The Framework has helped achieve stunning growth in the number of children enrolled in school. In the past fifteen years, the number of children and adolescents out of school fell by half – resulting in an estimated 34 million more children having attended school.

Unfortunately, there are still 58 million children out of school globally and around 100 million who do not complete primary education. Inequality in education has increased, resulting in the world’s poorest children being four times more likely not to go to school than the world’s richest children and five times more likely to not complete primary school.

One of the biggest barriers to education is conflict, with a high percentage of out-of-school children living in conflict zones. Additional barriers are the under-financing of education, with many governments not devoting the recommend 20% of national budgets to bridge funding gaps in education.

The report calls for new education goals to include prioritizing marginalized and disadvantaged groups, stronger action on financing from governments and donors, and stronger monitoring efforts to hold all stakeholders accountable.

Cheers!

-Tiffany Rhoades
Program Developer
Girl Museum Inc.

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