We can solve global education crisis

By Sarah Natumanya

As a newly appointed Global Youth Ambassador for A World at School, I want to call attention to the57 million children around the world are currently being denied their human right to an education.

I am joined in this call to action by 500 other young advocates for global education. Together, we make up the Global Youth Ambassadors group – launched on April 1, by the United Nations Secretary-General Bank Ki Moon and the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown.

The big number of children out of school means a lot of human resource is being wasted. These children without education can never realise their potential in life and this means they will not have a developmental goal to achieve in life.

In some situations, children get little education and drop out of school because they are not facilitated, guided and encouraged why they have to study. This is so common in remote areas where my case study was based. They enter schools to try it out without a motive and at the end they are left with less or no skills that can open their minds to the competitive world a head of them.

Progress in education is contingent on wider social influencing inequalities based on income, gender, ethnicity, and location. There is need to promote coping frameworks championing for education for all policies within a sustainable and well-integrated sector framework that is clearly linked to poverty elimination and development strategies. While education planning has been strengthened, a failure to join education and poverty reduction strategies, along with high levels of fragmentation and weak coordination continues to hamper progress. There are deep and persistent inequalities in education linked to poverty, gender, nutrition, healthy, disability and other forms of marginalisation. Addressing the inequalities require policies that extend far beyond the education sector. It is important to incorporate national commitments to wide-ranging governance reforms. However, the implications of the reforms for equity in education are seldom considered in any detail, even where the reforms have potentially significant consequences. Decentralisation is one prominent example that can spur education for all children with practical strategies for ensuring that governance reforms strengthen the link between education planning and wider poverty reduction efforts.

I want to reach every child - the poorest, the most excluded, the most vulnerable and those whose rights need greater protection. There are many problems that we face across the globe - concerning poverty, nutrition, water and sanitation, health, environment and conservation, economic development, gender equality, social inclusion. We believe that education lies at the heart of the solution to each of these.

As firm believers that education is the answer to the greatest challenges we face as a society, we ask for your help in urging leaders to raise budgets, build schools, train teachers and improve learning for all children.

It has been shown that we could lift over 170 million people out of poverty simply by teaching every child in low-income countries basic reading skills.

So why are we not making this a reality?

Unless we revert current trends, we will not even achieve universal primary education before 2086.

So Join A World at School in our campaign to get every child into school learning. Support our calls to action and get all the latest news on global education online (www.aworldatschool.org) on twitter (@aworldatschool) and on Face book (www.facebook.com/AWorldAtSchool).

The writer ia a World at School Global Youth Ambassador.