Dakar meeting to reinforce commitment to education, says UNICEF

The world's failure to achieve education for all can no longer be tolerated, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said in New York on Tuesday, ahead of the World Education Forum to be held in Dakar, Senegal, on 26-28 April. "As we enter the third millenium, more than 110 million children -almost two-thirds of them girls- are excluded from schooling," Bellamy said. Bellamy said she hoped the Dakar meeting - the biggest global conference on education in a decade - would re-ignite commitment and action for education that was severely challenged during the 1990s by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the expansion of armed conflict and unprecedented natural disasters. The elimination of gender discrimination in education was a priority, Bellamy said. "If I had only one wish for Dakar," she said, "girls' education would become the global action priority of the coming decade ... educated girls tend to marry later and have fewer children. They are more likely to be able to understand important health messages. And children of educated mothers are better nourished and suffer less illness." According to the World Bank, each year of schooling girls receive reduces the under-five mortality rate by up to 10 per cent. In Chad, the number of girls enrolled in first grade in areas targeted by UNICEF projects quadrupled between 1997 and 1998 and the dropout rate fell from 22 percent to nine percent in the same period. In Mauritania UNICEF helped to develop a "girl-friendly" model school in Guidimagha, a rural region with the lowest girls' enrolment rates in the country. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan will deliver the keynote speech in Dakar to launch the United Nations' system-wide initiative on girls, in accordance with the recommendations of his 3 April millenium report. The Dakar meeting is a follow-up to the World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990. It is convened by five UN agencies- the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), UNICEF and the World Bank.