NATIONAL 9 (Spotlight Weelky)]

Education For All

Global representatives will discuss the issue of education in the Dakar meet this month

By A CORRESPONDENT

Children at classroom : Education for better future

The UNICEF is organizing a World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal from April 26-28 -- the biggest global meeting on education in a decade. "As we enter the third millennium, more than 110 million children -- almost two-thirds of them girls -- are excluded from schooling," said Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF.

"Given that we now have a global economy of 30 trillion USD annually, this is indefensible." On the eve of the Dakar meet, Bellamy said decent quality education is a fundamental human right.

She urges that five key areas be embraced by the 1000 representatives of governments, funding agencies, and education and civil society organizations who will agree a framework for action at the Dakar Forum.

The areas include enriching early development and learning, reaching excluded children, enhancing girls' education, improving quality of education and restoring education in conditions of crisis and emergency.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan will deliver the keynote speech at Dakar to launch the UN system-wide initiative on Education for Girls.

Bellamy said she hoped the Dakar meeting would reignite commitment and action for education that was severely challenged during the 1990s by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the expansion of armed conflict and unprecedented natural disasters.

"If I had only one wish for Dakar," Bellamy said, "girl's education would become the global action priority of the coming decade. Investment in the education of girls is the foundation of equality between men and women, boys and girls."

According to UNICEF chief, educated girls are less likely to be exploited by their family or social situation. "Educated girls tend to marry later and have fewer children. They are more likely to be able to understand important health messages. And children of educated mothers are better nourished and suffer less illness," she said.

According to the World Bank, each year of schooling girls receive reduces the under-five mortality rate by up to ten percent.

Nepal has one of the lowest rate in female literacy and highest in child mortality in the world. The country would do well with the global attention the issue will draw in the aftermath of the Dakar meet.

A clear context for UNICEF's goals, according to Sheldon Shaeffer, the agency's chief of education, is the 250 million children presently caught up in child labor.

"Education for all will be a pipe dream until we address the deep poverty which makes child labor necessary," Shaeffer said. UNICEF is currently involved in a multi-nation effort to provide educational opportunities for children who work.