Anjali Sharma
GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 19th Sept. UNESCO on Monday released new figures of children missing out on any schooling has increased by six million, to the total to 250 million, in a press release issued in New York
The agency said that the increase is due to the mass exclusion of women and girls from education in Afghanistan but can be attributed to broader stagnation in education provision worldwide.
The findings undermine the Sustainable Development Goal 4, which sets the goal of quality education for all by 2030, UNESCO said.
According to the report, if countries were on track with their national SDG 4 targets, six million more children would be in pre-school, 58 million more children and adolescents would be in school, and at least 1.7 million more primary school teachers would have been trained.
UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said “Education is in a state of emergency,”
“While considerable efforts were made over the past decades to ensure quality education for all, UNESCO data demonstrates that the number of children out of school is now rising, she said.
Ms. Azoulay said “States must urgently remobilize if they do not want to sell out the future of millions of children.”
The report stated that 1 year ago, 141 countries committed at the UN Transforming Education Summit to accelerate progress towards SDG 4.
It noted that 4 out of 5 countries aimed to advance teacher training and professional development, 7 out of 10 committed to increase or improve their investment in education, and 1in 4 committed to increase financial support and school meal provision.
The report said that for countries to achieve their SDG 4 targets, millions more children must be enrolled in early childhood education every year until 2030, and the progress in primary completion rates needs to almost triple.
Ms. Azoulay said “These commitments must now be reflected in acts. There is no more time to lose. To achieve SDG 4, a new child needs to be enrolled in school every 2 seconds between now and 2030.”
The report highlighted that since 2015, the number of children completing primary education has increased by less than three percentage points to 87 per cent.
The number completing secondary education has increased by less than 5% to 58%.
UNESCO said that in the 31 low and lower-middle-income countries that measure learning progress at the end of primary school.
Viet Nam is the only country where the majority of its children are achieving minimum
The Education 2030 Framework for Action calls on countries to set intermediate benchmarks for SDG 4 indicators.
The countries were assisted in setting benchmarks to achieve by 2025 and 2030 for seven SDG 4 benchmarks on pre-primary education, school attendance, completion and learning, gender equity, learning proficiency, trained teachers, and public expenditure, the UNESCO report concluded.
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