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| World Education Forum > Press Releases > | |
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UNICEF Calls for Debt Forgiveness for Education
DAKAR, April 27, 2000 - UNICEF Executive Director Carol
Bellamy today called on the world's donor countries to forgive
immediately the debt of poor countries that have a viable plan
for achieving the goal of education for all.
Addressing
the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, Ms. Bellamy urged
delegates and the international community to accelerate efforts
to ensure that education plans and programmes receive adequate
support. "No country seriously committed to basic education
will be thwarted in the achievement of this goal by lack of
resources," said Ms. Bellamy, quoting a draft Framework of Action
being considered for adoption by the Forum.
Ms. Bellamy said that the effort can only succeed with the active
support of all sectors of society -- families and communities,
governments and funding agencies, service providers of all sectors,
the media, the private sector, and civil society. In this regard,
UNICEF urged the Forum to try to ensure that all children are
in school by 2005 and that the 2015 targets be reached by 2010.
Ms.
Bellamy urged that five key areas be embraced by the 1,500
participants of the Forum:
* Enrich early child care and learning -- children must be
nurtured from birth in safe, caring and gender-sensitive environments
to ensure they are healthy, well-nourished and ready to learn.
* Reach excluded children -- get all children into school
and help them stay there -- girls, ethnic minorities, working
children, children affected by violence, conflict, disabilities
and HIV/AIDS.
* Enhance girls' education -- girls must have full and equal
access to, and achievement in, basic education. All forms
of gender discrimination in education must be eliminated.
* Improve education quality -- schools must be child-friendly
so children learn what they need for a healthy, productive
life. This means quality teaching, physically and emotionally
healthy environments, and relevant curricula.
* Restore education in emergencies -- children need safe,
child-friendly spaces to help them regain a sense of stability.
Children affected by HIV/AIDS deserve special effort.
Noting the education is the right of all children -- and the
obligation of all governments, Ms. Bellamy stressed the urgency
of ensuring access to quality education for the most marginalized
children.
"We must recognize that getting the last five to 30 per cent
of children into school is likely to require more innovative
approaches -- and be more expensive -- than the first 70 to
95 per cent," she said.
Girls make up the largest single group of children out of school.
UNICEF has been asked to continue to lead the UN girls' education
initiative, announced by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Dakar
yesterday.
"It
is a global scandal that the vast majority of the more than
110 million school-age children not in school are girls," said
Ms. Bellamy, noting the need for an all-out global effort to
crack this major impediment to education for all. Girls' education
is a proven 'best investment' for human, social, and economic
development, she said. "But most importantly, it is every girl's
right -- and to forget this is to imperil our global future."
Ms.
Bellamy said that the Framework of Action being negotiated in
Dakar must single out girls' education as a priority. With the
experience of the last decade and longer, she said, we know
how to do this. As one example, we must ensure that schools
are located where girls can reach them safely and that every
school has separate and functioning latrines for girls and boys.
Young, female teachers are also an important factor in attracting
and keeping girls in school.
Ms.
Bellamy also appealed to the Forum on behalf of other groups
of children excluded from school, notably the world's 250 million
working children, as well as children of ethnic minorities,
and children affected by disabilities, violence and conflict,
and HIV/AIDS.
"Most
urgently, children affected by HIV/AIDS deserve our immediate
attention. We must ensure, with creative and dynamic life-skills
programmes that both transmit information and change behaviour,
that education has an impact on the pandemic -- on decreasing
the rate of the transmission of the virus.
"We
must come to grips with the calamitous effects that the AIDS
virus is having on communities and institutions, including educational
systems, and find ways to mitigate its impact as much as humanly
possible," said Ms. Bellamy.
In
parts of Africa, she said, it has been estimated that 30 per
cent or more of teachers and teacher educators are HIV-positive
and likely to die within the decade; that as many as 40 per
cent of senior education managers may be ill and dying; and
that vast numbers of children are becoming orphaned.
New
technologies such as Internet connectivity and radio instruction
were also addressed at the Forum whereby the focus was on how
they can be used more creatively to reduce rather than increase,
disparities in access to quality learning.
UNICEF
is one of five UN agencies convening the World Education Forum.
The others are the UN Development Program (UNDP), UN Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), UN Fund for Population
Activities, and the World Bank.
"There
is no single solution to increasing access to education and
improving its quality," said Ms. Bellamy. "Rather, there are
thousands of proven local and national solutions. Over the past
decade we have learned many lessons about what works. We have
put structures in place and achieved successful results in many
countries. Now is the time to use these solid foundations to
build for Education for All for the future."
See
also UNICEF's webpage devoted
to Education for All
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