September 22, 2010: While world leaders meet this week in New York to bolster efforts to reach the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, a new report spotlights the challenges to meeting one of those goals -- achieving universal primary education.

Progress in attaining that goal in many poor countries has been greatly hamstrung by the global financial downturn, according to the Global Campaign for Education, which released its report, Back to School?, on September 20.

Among the group’s findings: 69 million school-age children are not in the classroom. Why, despite the universal primary education promised by global leaders ten years ago? The world economic crisis has led impoverished nations to slash education budgets by $4.6 billion annually. In Kenya, for example, the government has delayed funding of free education for 9.7 million children because of budget constraints.

Fewer Girls Than Boys in School

Students lean their heads on desks in Nairobi, Kenya

But failure to provide education for all is also a question of will, says the report. According to the UN report, in countries such as oil-producing Nigeria, which has the greatest number of children out of school, the government lacks the political will to make universal primary education a priority across regions and genders. More than half of children who drop out of school in the first year are in the north; girls receive the least education.

The Global Campaign for Education is a coalition of more than 100 organizations. The eight Millennium Development Goals, set a decade ago, are meant to be reached by 2015.

“Girls are the real victims of the world’s failure to invest in education with millions unable to enter school,” said Kailash Satyarthi, president of the Global Campaign for Education. “If scientists can genetically modify food and NASA can send missions to Mars, politicians must be able to find the resources to get millions of children into school and change the prospects of a generation of children.”

SOS Children’s Villages Lifts Children Out of Poverty Through Education

Girl doing math exercises at an SOS school in Nairobi

Adults who have completed an education earn 50 percent more than those who do not, according to the Global Campaign for Education. UNESCO estimates that 171 million people could leave poverty if they could stay in school long enough to acquire basic reading skills.

SOS Children’s Villages, operating in 132 countries around the world, shares the belief in education as a way out of poverty for girls and boys. As a complement to the warm, family-based homes in which it raises children, SOS also runs schools that are open to local at-risk children.

Whether children attend SOS kindergartens, primary schools, high schools, or vocational training centers (SOS even runs a college in Ghana), SOS equips them with the knowledge and skills they need to secure a job and live a life of stability and promise.

As the Global Campaign for Education reports, apart from lowering poverty, getting children to school bears other dividends such as reducing HIV deaths by seven million and doubling child survival by 50 percent if mothers are educated.

Help SOS save girls and boys around the world through education. 

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