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Women and girls globally constitute the largest single category of persons denied "full and equal opportunities for education
for all". Their education is the main theme of the 1995 World Education Report recently published by UNESCO.
The report is the first to offer comprehensive international statistics on
gender disparities in educational oppor-tunity which continue to exist in virtually all countries. It also outlines strategies for
educators and policy-makers to combat this phenonenon.
Women today represent two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults, while girls account for a similar proportion of the world's out-of-school population. "Such an asymmetry in the exercise of the right to education is not only a denial of equal opportunity, but also limits the contribution of education to development and undermines its capacity to nurture respect for human rights generally", writes Federico Mayor, Director General of UNESCO, in the foreword. "Addressing this flagrant injustice to women is indissociable from the task of creating a more equitable, sustainable and peaceful world." The report examines female access to formal education in both industrialized and developing countries, focussing on gender gaps in literacy, enrolment, years of schooling, educational retention and drop-out, access to science and other fields of study. It points out that the strategic importance of the teaching profession for the advancement of women has probably been underestimated by national policy-makers. |
Apart from the fact that an increased presence of female teachers in schools could
encourage reluctant parents to send their daughters to school, the teaching profession itself in most developing countries today
is one of the few modern wage-paying occupations which is relative free of discrimination and at the same time gives a certain
measure of social protection. In this respect, the report proposes that current conditions for access to teacher education programmes
could be a priority area for action in many countries. The role of the Forum for African Women Educa-tionalists (FAWE), a
partnership of senior women policy-makers from Africa, created in 1992, to promote female participation in education at all
levels, is also highlighted.
The report also gives a brief review of measures taken in various countries to teach peace, human rights and democracy, and it lists comprehensive World Education Indicators on key aspects of education in more than 180 countries and by region. Below we have chosen to reproduce two charts from the Report. The first illustrates that just to provide a child with education is a bigger challenge in some regions of the world than in others because of the rapid population growth and higher proportions of young people in the total population. This is very evident in regions where the challenge to provide equal educational opportunities for men and women is most pronounced. The second figure shows that a large majority of the world's illiterate adults are women living in the developing regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. |