• Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling

Educating Children is a Tool to Achieve all the MDGs
Education – specifically free primary school for all children – is a fundamental right to which governments committed themselves under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Essential to achieving each of the MDGs, education provides important skills that give children hope for a better future, and it helps reduce poverty, lower child mortality rates and promote concern for the environment. It also helps promote gender equality. In 2001, there were estimated to be around 115 million children of primary school age, the majority of them girls, who were deprived of their right to education because their families could not afford school fees or other related costs, or because their communities were too poor or remote to have proper schools.

Educating Girls Benefits All
Of the 799 million illiterate adults aged 15 and above, two-thirds are women. Primary school enrollment and attendance rates in some 67 countries are still far lower for girls than boys. Uneducated girls are more vulnerable to exploitation and disease; HIV/AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls with just some schooling. Getting girls into school and allowing them to learn benefits both them and their families. Girls who are educated usually are more productive at home, and if they work outside the home are better paid in the workplace, and contribute to their community’s social and political life.

SOS Children’s Villages responds by:

• placing a strong emphasis on education in all SOS programs;
• investing early in quality child care and development programs through kindergartens. Today more than 22,000 children attend over 270 SOS kindergartens worldwide;
• building SOS Hermann-Gmeiner Schools in many parts of the world where school facilities are non-existent or inadequate, and opening them to both the children and young people from SOS Children's Villages, as well as to other children in the area;
• getting involved in raising the quality of education in secondary schools and vocational training centers;
• providing educational opportunities for vulnerable children with special needs, such as disabled children and children orphaned by HIV/AIDS;
• ensuring equal access to primary and secondary education for girls;
• getting girls into school and ensuring that they learn and thrive in quality, child-friendly learning environments;
• safeguarding the right to education in emergencies.