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Sub-Saharan Africa rates alongside South and East Asia as being among the world's worst regions for girls' education, the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, said in its annual report, The State of the World's Children, released on Thursday.
The report said development efforts were drastically short-changing girls, leaving hundreds of millions of girls and women uneducated and unable to contribute to positive change.
Despite donor nations' promises for extra funding for education and a commitment to ensure universal primary education by 2015, UNICEF said, total aid to developing countries actually declined during the 1990s, and bilateral funding for education "plummeted even further".
"The greatest need is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of girls left out of school each year has risen from 20 million in 1990 to 24 million in 2002," it said.
UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said: "We stand no chance of substantially reducing poverty, child mortality, HIV/AIDS and other diseases if we do not ensure that all girls and boys can exercise their right to a basic education."
UNICEF reported some positive developments in the sub-Saharan region, including the introduction of free primary education in Kenya, which had brought more than 1.3 million children into school for the first time since January 2003, and had increased national enrolment. It said similiar experiences had been reported in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. [See related report, "Tanzania: UNICEF calls for more efforts to educate girls"]
It said that an African Girls' Education Initiative - a partnership among countries, donor governments and UN agencies - had produced "remarkable results" towards achieving committments for "education for all".
"From 1997 to 2001, the multi-country Initiative saw increased gross enrolment ratios for girls in such countries as Benin (9 percent), Guinea (15 percent) and Senegal (12 percent)," UNICEF said, adding that the progress made by Chad in school enrolment was particularly striking.
However, UNICEF warned that extraordinary progress in Africa had to be made in the next few years if "education for all" goals were to be met.
"A recent estimate has sub-Saharan Africa at its current pace achieving universal primary education by 2129," it said.
[For the full report go to www.unicef.org]
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