UNESCO on Gender Imbalance in Global Education
UN officials, diplomats and educators gather to talk about gender imbalance in global education. Credit: Lusha Chen/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2014 (IPS) - In order to go to school, Sarah, a girl living in rural Ethiopia, escaped the village and an arranged marriage at 14, returning to her home at age 23, when she could finally enter a classroom again. In a conversation with a youth advocate for education, named Chernor Bah, Sarah asked, "Why does it have to be so hard for me, just because I'm a girl?"
Sarah used to be one of the 100 million women, mostly from least developed countries (LDCs), who could not read.
According to a report by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), titled Education for All Global Monitoring Report, over 15 million young girls out of school are never expected to enroll for classes.
These figures have stirred a number of concerns over gender imbalance in global education, as the 58th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) got underway.
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Inequality Matters: Disparities in Education, health and Other Dimensions of Human Development still Remain Large
While the international community is shaping its vision for a post-2015 global development agenda, worsening inequalities across and within many countries have been an important part of the discussions. There is a growing recognition among stakeholders that economic growth is not sufficient to sustainably reduce poverty if it is not inclusive. This is what this Report of the World Social Situation, 2013 focus on and discuss.
It is possible to estimate the global distribution of income along these lines, that is, going beyond the mean incomes of each country, by combining data on domestic income distribution from household surveys and adjusting incomes using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates to translate domestic currencies into international dollars. Based on this method, global inequality measured by the Gini coefficient increased from 68.4 per cent in 1988 to 69.4 per cent in 1998 and reached 70.7 per cent in 2005 – a level of inequality larger than that found in any one country. The income share of the top 10 per cent of the world population increased from around 51.5 per cent to 55.5 per cent during the period. Since this measure of global inequality among individuals reflects, in principle, inequalities within and across countries, and since inequalities across countries did not increase in this period, the rise in global inequality must be due to increased inequalities within countries. Chen and Ravallion suggested that within-country inequalities explained less than one third of total income inequality in the developing world as a whole in 1981, but that they constituted more than half of total inequality in 2008.
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A Matter of Justice, Securing Human Rights in the Post-2015 Development Agenda
This article is a review of a report published by the Center for Economic and Social Rights and is a very good reading and reflection for those who want to have some insight to some of the chronic problems and challenges we are facing now at all levels . It is needless to repeat that development if it is not human and do not insure and promote human rights is not development at all.
The Millennium Declaration adopted at the turn of the century expressed a global consensus that poverty is a scourge on our common humanity, which all states have a shared responsibility to eradicate. It placed human beings at the center of development, and took human rights as its normative bedrock. As affirmed in international human rights instruments, poverty is not inevitable, but a product of specific legal and policy choices. Ending poverty and its associated patterns of human rights deprivation is a long-standing legal obligation of states—acting individually and through international cooperation.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) developed to implement the commitments of the Declaration focused attention on some of the most disquieting dimensions of poverty, such as preventable child and maternal death, hunger, disease, homelessness and lack of educational opportunities. In setting out aspirational goals, time-bound targets and indicators to systematically monitor results, the MDG framework helped to stimulate progress, mobilize political will and financing, and incentivize timely action in these areas.
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