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EDUCATION: More Girls in School Benefits Everyone, Says UNICEF

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Dec 11 2003 (IPS) - Shamim Cairo Atwine, a 15-year-old Ugandan girl, speaks with great pride of the success of the Girls’ Education Movement (GEM) at her school in Nakulabye, a poor and densely populated neighbourhood of Kampala.

This UNICEF-backed movement, in which Cairo serves as vice-president, helps girls prepare themselves for an active, fulfilling life and has reintegrated many into the educational systems, and its activities have benefited more than 400,000 children in Uganda alone.

Cairo shared her experience Thursday during the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) presentation in Geneva of its flagship report, the Sate of the World’s Children 2004, dedicated to the goal of increasing the number of girls in school worldwide.

The release of the report coincided with the sessions here of the World Summit on the Information Society, a global conference on policies and actions aimed in part at disseminating the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in developing countries.

UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said that taking advantage of these new technologies in order to achieve human development goals in the development world has taken on great importance.

But she placed even greater weight on the need to improve the quality of basic education provided to children in each country.

UNICEF experts see the Internet – the worldwide web – as having the potential to change the lives of communities everywhere.

"But not if they can’t read. Not if they don’t understand basic math. Nothing prepares a child for engaging with the world, including the world on the Web, like basic learning and literacy," said Bellamy.

Technology offers modern wonders and new frontiers for knowledge, but only for a few. While amazing things are accomplished on the one hand, on the other, the fact is that "more than 120 million children every year who never see the inside of a classroom."

"The majority of these children are girls," the UNICEF chief said.

An evaluation of international policies shows that development strategies have not sufficiently taken the situation of girls into account. Millions of women lack schooling so have difficulty contributing towards positive changes for their children and their communities.

"But girls’ education has the power to change all this. That is why UNICEF is calling for the acceleration of efforts to get girls in school over the next two years," Bellamy said.

Walter Fust, general director of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, applauded efforts to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary schooling, and stressed that "no development goals can be reached without education.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of girls without schooling increased from 20 million in 1990 to 24 million in 2002. The latest reports estimate that if immediate progress is not made to reverse this trend, the region will not achieve universal primary education until 2129.

These recent studies have found that 83 percent of girls without schooling live in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Pacific regions.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, school attendance is equally balanced among boys and girls, and enrolment is nearly even, with 96 percent of all boys and 94 percent of all girls, respectively. However, the high enrolment rates obscure a crisis, warns UNICEF.

In this region, a rising number of girls are dropping out of school, particularly in rural areas.

For the Middle East and North Africa, the enrolment rate is around 83 percent for boys and 75 percent for girls. Overall school attendance is one percentage point less for both genders.

In Morocco, some 25,000 girls and female adolescents work as domestic employees in the greater Casablanca area, and 60 percent are under age 15.

In South Asia, enrolment reaches 80 percent of boys and 65 percent of girls, while attendance is 76 percent and 69 percent, respectively.

Meanwhile, for East Asia and the Pacific, enrolment is 93 percent for boys and 92 percent for girls, but the UNICEF report admits that it lacks data on overall school attendance for the region.

Bellamy noted that in most places gender equality in education means breaking down the barriers that keep girls from school. There are nine million more girls than boys who are outside the educational system worldwide.

But the UNICEF experts behind the State of the World’s Children report found that when gender obstacles are eliminated, schools are transformed into places that are more beneficial for all – boys and girls alike.