Over 700 million illiterate adults in 2015, warns UNESCO

According to a UNESCO report released in Paris, over 700 million adults will remain illiterate in 2015, one sign of a widespread failure to provide quality education to the world's poorest people.

There is plenty of blame to go around. UNESCO's annual Global Monitoring Report, titled “Overcoming inequality: Why governance matters,” points to inertia on the part of national governments and broken promises of aid by the international community. It notes a “vast gulf” in educational opportunities between rich and poor children on national and international levels.

“This is a problem that both national governments and aid donors need to solve,” Pauline Rose, a senior policy analyst at UNESCO and an author of the report, told MediaGlobal.

Funding shortfalls and access inequalities are depriving millions of children of an education, primarily in developing countries, where basic schooling is widely considered a prerequisite for economic development. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 14% of primary school-aged children were enrolled in 2006. Nigeria alone accounts for over 10% of the world's out-of-school children.

Governments must ensure that educational funding is distributed equitably, while donor countries need to provide an additional $30 billion to meet 2010 aid commitments, Rose said. Of the $50 billion in aid that wealthy countries pledged in 2005, less than half has been delivered. “Donors have made repeated commitments to close the financing gap in education, and they need to be held responsible for meeting this commitment,” she said.

Aid for education has stagnated since 2004, and, as the current financial crisis upends the economies of rich and poor countries alike, significant increases in funding for facilities, teacher training and educational incentive programs seem unlikely to come any time soon. The UNESCO report warns that without added spending and renewed political commitment, the international development community's goal of universal primary education by 2015 will not be achieved.

National governments must do their part as well, turning education into a spending priority. “The African governments must make it their own responsibility to finance education,” said Professor Mzobanzi Mboya, education advisor for the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), in an interview with MediaGlobal.

“These are not choices that governments can afford to make,” Rose noted. “All children deserve to have access to education of appropriate quality, and this will also have a longer-term impact on economic growth and other development outcomes.”

Simply allocating more money for education will not be enough if the funds are not distributed equitably. “In Nigeria, for example, the wealthiest states and regions with the highest education participation received the lion's share of federal resources, in some cases five times more than poorer areas,” Rose said.

These gaps help perpetuate cycles of need. “Unequal opportunities for education fuel poverty, hunger, and child mortality, and reduce prospects for economic growth,” Koïchiro Matsuura, UNESCO's director-general, said in a statement. “When financial systems fail, the consequences are highly visible and governments act. When education systems fail, the consequences are less visible, but no less real.”

Child malnutrition is one major cause of educational disparities. One in three children worldwide suffers from malnutrition, with developing countries bearing the burden of the majority of hungry or nutrient-deficient children. Malnutrition disrupts brain development and decreases learning ability, putting the world's poorest children at an educational disadvantage well before their first day of school.

The report notes that in many parts of the world, increasing school funding and enrollment will have little impact on economic growth if the quality of the education provided does not improve. Too many children leave school without even basic literacy and number skills. An assessment by the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality found that in ten African countries, less that a quarter of sixth graders had achieved desired reading levels.

Recruiting and training motivated teachers is also a key-and often neglected- component to improving any educational system. But many governments provide little incentive to bright would-be teachers. In much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, teacher pay hovers at-or just below-the poverty line.

“We have a huge gap in the training of teachers,” Mboya said. “I don't think there is a country, especially within sub-Saharan Africa, which can boast of having enough teachers.”

Sub-Saharan Africa will require an additional 3.8 million teachers to realise the goal of universal primary education. “Funding should be directed specifically at the training of teachers-either through contact tuition”-traditional instruction-“or through open and distance learning,” Mboya said, observing that distance learning and open source software have considerable potential to enhance teacher education.

“There is no point in providing opportunities for children to attend school if the quality of schools that they have access to are so bad that children don't learn,” Rose said. “The bottom line is that resources need to be made available, and appropriately targeted towards those living in poverty.”

Article published courtesy of MediaGlobal