Friday, January 22, 2010

“Reaching the Marginalised” some statistics on education

A new report from UNESCO has some startling statistics about education around the world. The study titled “Reaching the Marginalised” found a problem with teacher's attendance in schools, with absentee rates as high as 25 percent in some countries.

The study on education also found a drop in total children enrolled from 1999 to 2007. The drop is especially troubling in light of the goals the world has for education with the Millennium Development Goals and the UN's "Education for All"

From The Economist, we find a greater detail of the statistics. The article also proposes some possible solutions that we encourage you to check out.

In India, for example, research by the World Bank reveals that 25% of teachers in government-run schools are away on any given day; of those present, only half were actually teaching when the bank’s researchers made spot checks. That is dreadful but not unusual: teacher absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador.

Despite the inspiring rhetoric that accompanied the adoption of the UN’s “Education For All” goals in 1999, progress has been patchy. The numbers of unenrolled school-age children dropped by 33m in 2007 compared with 1999. About 15m of that fall came in India alone (though UNESCO says statistics may understate the problem by up to 30%). In countries like Liberia and Nigeria the numbers have hardly budged since 1999. Of the 72m still outside school, 45% are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dig, and it grows still gloomier. Two-thirds of the fall in out-of-school numbers was in 2002-04. Since then, improvement has been scanty, though getting the final chunk of children into school is necessarily the trickiest task as the easy cases are already solved. The hardest job is enrolling children from remote areas, who speak minority languages; or come from cultures that place little value on schooling or (in India) from castes that have been long excluded from it. In more than a third of the 63 countries for which such data were available, more than 30% of young adults have fewer than four years of schooling. Nineteen of these countries are in Africa; the remaining three are Guatemala, Pakistan and Nicaragua.

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