Brazil is ranked among the 53 countries that have not achieved – and are not about to achieve – the Education for All Goals by 2015. Although the country has reported significant advances in the field of universal education in the last two decades.

As the U.N. Agency entrusted with the coordination of the global drive towards Education for All (EFA), UNESCO’ s role is to follow up the activities by assessing progress, analysing effective educational policies, disseminating knowledge about good practices, and alerting on emerging challenges.

Brazil has achieved the following advances in the last two decades:

• Access to primary and lower secondary education has become almost universal. 94.4% of the population in the ages 7 to 14 is now included primary and lower secondary education.
• The proportion of young people attending secondary education at the right age has doubled compared to that of 1995, showing a significant advance in the access to secondary education.
• The rate of youth and adult illiteracy has been reduced.
• Access to higher education has increased.

Along these lines, UNESCO can play a unique role in contributing to harmonizing educational statistics and disseminating such data around the world. UNESCO's contribution seems to be particularly critical for Brazil, as an E-9 country. Therefore, it still faces problems to achieve basic quality education for all, which is essencial:

• to eradicate poverty,
• to reduce infant mortality rates,
• to control of population growth,
• to achieve gender equalilty and
• to assure sustainable development, peace and democracy