THE STATE OF THE WORLD'S CHILDREN 2004 - Unicef

What is the scale of the problem that remains
to be tackled if the Millennium Development
Goal for gender parity in education by 2005
is to be met?
The ultimate goal is that by 2015, all boys and
girls alike should have access to, and complete, a
good quality primary education. ‘All’ implies that
girls and boys must be equally well provided for;
but there is a separate Millennium Development
Goal that makes this explicit: to eliminate by
2005 all gender disparity in primary and secondary
education, and to achieve by 2015 full
gender equality in education – including enrolment,
completion and learning achievement.
But these goals look dauntingly distant. Access
to primary schooling is most usefully measured
by net enrolment ratios. These increased during
the 1990s in all regions and made for a
world average of 81 per cent enrolment by
2002. But the regional variation is enormous.
While enrolment rates in Latin America and the
Caribbean are close to those in industrialized
countries, at 94 and 97 per cent respectively,
South Asia lags much further behind at 74
per cent, while sub-Saharan Africa languishes
at a mere 59 per cent (see Figure 6: Primary net
enrolment/attendance rates). 32
© UNICEF/HQ97-0821/Roger LeMoyne
Every year an increasing number of children
have been accommodated within primary education,
but available places are not sufficient
to keep pace with the annual growth in the
school-age population. As a result, the global
number of children out of school stubbornly
remains undiminished at 121 million – and the
majority is still girls.
This failure to reduce the overall number of
children who do not attend school is worrying
enough – especially bearing in mind the
hazards, from exploitative child labour to
HIV/AIDS, to which these out-of-school children
THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN 2004
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