More than 250 million young people are out of school due to discrimination in places where they are, the United Nations says in a new report.
The Unesco’s annual Global Education Monitoring Report says 258 million children, adolescents and youth are out in the cold, representing 17 percent of the global total. The number of those cut from schooling in sub-Saharan Africa is growing.
Titled Inclusion and Education: All Means All, the report released on June 23 says “layers of discrimination” have cut these millions from education and deny them “the right to be educated with their peers or to receive education of the same quality.”
Identity, background and ability dictate education opportunities, says the GEM Report that monitors and reports on the fourth social development goal that targets inclusive and equitable quality education.
Audrey Azoulay, the Unesco director general, says global health pandemic Covid-19 that has brought the global economy to its knees has worsened the inequalities that hurt access to education.
“With more than 90 percent of the global student population affected by Covid-19 related school closures, the world is in the throes of the most unprecedented disruption in the history of education,” she says in the report. This means more than 1.3 billion learners have been affected by the disease that emerged last December.
Across the globe, the report says, discrimination is based on gender, remoteness, wealth, disability, ethnicity, language, migration, displacement, and incarceration. Sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, religion and other beliefs and attitudes also make the list.
“In all but high-income countries in Europe and Northern America, only 18 of the poorest youth complete secondary school for every 100 of the richest youth,” it says, showing how unequal the world is and how dreams get shattered.
In at least 20 countries, the bulk of them found in sub-Saharan Africa, hardly any poor rural young woman completes secondary school, the report says.
In sub-Saharan Africa, it says, teachers may fear teaching children with albinism while Stateless people in Gulf States cannot enrol in public education institutions.
Roma children in Europe “are segregated and more likely to be placed in special schools” while learning materials omit or misrepresent the history of Afro-descendants in Latin America.
A move towards more inclusive education “is non-negotiable” and “failure to act is not an option,” according to the Unesco chief whose Unicef counterpart Henrietta H. Fore says this kind of exclusion was “an unmistakable learning crisis” denying millions the chance to acquire and develop skills.
Don’t leave these children behind, the Unicef boss appeals.
Giving children “uprooted” from their homes and communities access to national education systems in countries of asylum ”allows them the chance to learn, grow, and contribute to the societies in which they live,” said the UNHCR boss Filippo Grandi.
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