UNICEF calls for more efforts to educate girls

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Thursday commended Tanzania for having taken giant strides in advancing universal access to education, but stressed the need for further efforts to enrol girls to achieve gender parity and reduce poverty. Thanks to recent government initiatives, Tanzania was on track to satisfy the 2005 Millennium Development Goal for gender parity in primary education, UNICEF said, but added that further efforts were needed to keep students, especially girls, in school until they completed standard seven. The comments were made as UNICEF launched its annual State of the World's Children Report, which this year concentrated on the need to educate more girls. The report presented girls' education as "one of the most crucial issues facing the international development community". "We recognise the enormous achievements of the Primary Education Development Plan (PEDP), especially in enrolment, including that of girls," Hamish Young, acting UNICEF representative in Tanzania, said. "But we are anxious about those who are not yet in school: the 150,000 girls who need to enrol for gender parity to be achieved; those [girls] among the 70,000 registered for the Complementary Basic Education in Tanzania (COBET) who have not started learning and the many other children over seven who have not yet registered for COBET," he said. Through COBET, a specially designed three-year course in basic education, Tanzania aims to provide some education to the estimated three million overage and adolescent children who are out of school so that they can re-enter the school system. Oliver Mhaiki, the government's Director of Primary Education, acknowledged the existing problems of girls' participation in education. "These are due to cultural preferences for educating male children and also high drop-out rates due to early marriages and pregnancies. Moreover, records show that there is relatively low performance for girls in class and during final examinations when compared to boys," he said. But Mhaiki said the government was determined to bridge these gaps through ensuring girls completed the primary education course, and were therefore not susceptible to early marriages and pregnancies. The successful COBET pilot scheme would also be scaled-up to cover the entire country, and there would be a review of the curricula, text books and classroom practices to eliminate gender stereotypes, he added. The introduction of PEDP in 2002 - which brought the abolition of school fees, increased teacher recruitment and community mobilisation - has had an immediate effect. Enrolment figures at primary level in 2003 showed that 86.7 percent of girls and 90.4 percent of boys were attending schools. However, the high student drop-out rate, especially of girls, leaves Tanzania with one of the lowest percentages of primary school pupils moving to secondary school. In 2002, just 20.7 percent of girls and 27.2 percent of boys taking primary school exams performed sufficiently well to go on to secondary school, UNICEF said. UNICEF announced its committment to helping the government scale up the COBET scheme, which was noted by the UNICEF report as a proposed "best practice" for improving girls' access to education.