Nearly one in three adolescent girls from the poorest households in the world has never attended school, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. Poverty, disability, poor infrastructure, discrimination due to gender, physical distance from schools and ethnic origin are among the obstacles that pre4vent the children from the poorest from getting quality education.
In a paper “Addressing the learning Crisis: an Urgent Need to better education for the poorest children”, recently published, the UNICEF also shows major disparities in the distribution of public education spending. It has been said that unequally distributed funding or limited funding has led to lack of education materials, poor school infrastructure and poorly trained teachers.
Meanwhile, UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore said that the countries had failed the world’s poorest children and as such they are failing themselves. Fore also noted that the poorest children will not have any hope of escaping from poverty and learning the skills they need as long as public education spending is not accurate.
In the paper, it has been said that 20 per cent of richest household in 42 countries that had data collected spent almost the double. The paper also said that ten countries across Africa had the highest disparity in education spending. It pointed out that Denmark, Ireland, Barbados, Sweden, Norway distributed equal education funding between the richest and the poorest.
The UNICEF has set certain guidelines for the governments. IT said that funds should be distributed equally between the poor and the rich. Another thing that the UN Agency has given emphasis is for proper funding of lower levels of education, where children from the poorest household are most represented. It also recommended giving at least one year of universal pre-primary education, which is the basis of all educational systems.
