Promoting quality education for all.

New UNICEF/UNESCO Reports Reveal Stalled Progress in Africa

by Mark Engman, 

by Mark Engman, US Fund for UNICEF

Every year, June 16 is the Day of the African Child.  It commemorates the thousands of courageous children in Soweto, South Africa, who in 1976 marched to protest apartheid and to demand equal education. The march ended in violence: – hundreds of youth were wounded or killed.  Their legacy continues to build a better future for African children.

This year’s Day of the African Child theme was “a child friendly, quality, free and compulsory education for all children in Africa.”  In honor of the Day of the African Child, the Global Initiative on Out of School Children, a joint initiative of UNICEF and UNESCO, issued a set of reports that show more than 30 million young children in sub-Saharan Africa remain out of school.

For more than a decade, the world saw significant gains towards achieving universal access to education for children.  The number of children out of school dropped from 102 million in 2000, to 57 million in 2011.  Recently, though, progress has stalled. Some of the world’s most vulnerable children – especially girls, children living in conflict and children with disabilities – remain excluded from education systems.

The majority of children out of school are in West and Central Africa.  In that region, 28 percent of primary school-age children are out of school; and one out of five school-aged children will never enter a classroom.

Even when children make it to school, conditions are so difficult that a quality education is challenging at best  In some countries, more than half of primary school teachers lack appropriate teacher training.  Overcrowded classrooms, insufficient learning materials, lack of sanitation facilities, untrained or absent teachers, and other problems mean too many children fail to learn, repeat grades, and eventually just drop out, without mastering even basic literacy and numeracy.

UNICEF and its partners are working hard to help governments, communities, and parents gain the capacities and skills they need to ensure the right of all children to free, compulsory quality education, even during a humanitarian crisis, or in fragile or unstable situations, with a focus on equity and gender equality.  African governments are responding with efforts to increase access to schools and improve quality of education.  But they need help from donors, whether governments or individuals, to help build education systems that get and keep kids in quality schools.

That’s why the GCE needs your support and your voices, to make sure that education remains a global development priority.  Making sure every child goes to a good primary school is a worthy goal, and we won’t stop working until we reach that goal!

Mark Engman is the Director of Public Policy and Advocacy and the US Fund for UNICEF

Photo Credit: 

© UNICEF/NYHQ2009-2334/Kamber

Children attend class in the city of Kindia.  In Guinea, fewer girls than boys have access to school. An education decreases girls’ risk of experiencing abuse, early marriage and other rights violations

comments powered by Disqus