Region faces major education challenges - UNESCO report

In a new report on education on Monday, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) says that Central Asia faces a number of key challenges, despite some signs of improvement. "The region has experienced some setbacks in enrollment in almost all levels of education, but we had an indication of recovery at the end of the last decade," Nicole Bella, a team member and author of the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report told IRIN, from Paris, noting the issue of quality. Her comments follow the report's release in Brasilia, assessing where the world stands on its commitment to provide a basic education to all children, youth and adults by 2015. Developed by an independent team and published by UNESCO, the report is an authoritative reference that aims to inform, influence and sustain genuine commitment towards education for all. The report's EFA development index measures the overall progress of 127 countries towards EFA goals agreed upon during the World Education Forum in Senegal in 2000: universal primary education, adult literacy, education quality, and gender parity. Based on these goals, Tajikistan fared the best in Central Asia, Bella said, followed by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Turkmenistan was not included due to lack of data, she added. Norway topped the survey while the West African nation of Burkina Faso ranked last of the countries surveyed. The report provides a detailed analysis of factors influencing the quality of education, including financial and material resources for schools, the number of teachers and their training, core subjects, pedagogy, language, the amount of actual learning time, facilities and leadership. Since gaining their independence in the early 1990s, Central Asian states had undergone profound economic, social, political and demographic upheavals that in many ways have damaged their education systems, notably by the withdrawal of state funding for preliminary and secondary schooling, the report said. Bella noted in Kyrgyzstan for example, only 35 percent of pre-primary teachers were trained, while in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, all teachers had received some training - indicating efforts towards achieving good quality of care, health, education and development of young children. "This is an important quality issue," she maintained. Most education indicators had fallen, while setbacks in enrollment rates were recorded over the decade at almost all levels of education, the report said. And while some indications of recovery were observed between 1998 and 2001, poor school retention levels remain a concern in some countries, suggesting that many students leave school without mastering a minimum set of cognitive skills, it added. This year's report focused on the quality of education, which it found was insufficient in several regions of the world and could prevent many countries from achieving the EFA goals. It also presented case studies from 11 countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Egypt, Finland, Republic of Korea, Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka) showing how both rich and developing nations were tackling the quality issue.