One in four children in Pakistan will not complete their primary education by the deadline of 2030, says a report by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organ­isation (UNESCO). The country will only be half-way to the target of 12 years of education for all, with 50 percent of youngsters failing in the completion of their upper secondary education at the current rates.

The report aims to explore the performance of the international community in fulfilling their global education promises committed in 2015, to be completed by the end of 2030. The UNESCO projections prepared for the UN High-level Political Forum opening in New York highlights how the global community has failed in accelerating progress in the education sector.

In 2030, when all children were supposed to be enrolled in schools, one in six children, aged 6-17 will still be excluded. Several children were dropping out of schools, and in the current rates, more than 40 percent children will fail to complete their secondary education by the 2030 deadline.

The new global education goal, SDG-4, calls on countries to ensure all children were going to school and had ample opportunities to learn. At the current trends, learning rates were expected to further deteriorate in middle-income countries and Latin America, with drop by almost a third in Francophone African countries by 2030. Moreover, 20 percent youngsters and 30 percent adults will fail in acquiring proper education by the deadline, the report added.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development focuses on accelerating growth in the field of education, yet only four percent of youngsters in the poorest countries completed their upper secondary schooling in comparison to 20 percent from the richest. This gap was even wider in lower-middle-income countries.

The Global Education Monitoring Report highlights that the available finances were not sufficient to meet the ends. It calculated that in 2015 that there was a $39 billion annual finance gap to meet the goal and yet aid to education had deteriorated since 2010.

Besides, less than half of the countries were monitoring their progress. UNESCO Institute for Statistics Director Silvia Montoya said “Countries need to face up to their commitments. What’s the point in setting targets if we can’t track them? Better finance and coordination are needed to fix this data gap before we get any closer to the deadline.”

Global Education Monitoring Report Director Manos Antoninis stated that “Countries have interpreted the meaning of the targets in the global education goal very differently. This seems correct given that countries set off from such different starting points. But they must not deviate too much from the promises they made back in 2015. If countries match their plans with their commitments now, they can get back on track by 2030”.

The UNESCO report also highlights that several countries have prioritised equity and inclusion to meet their goals, with different measures being taken in this direction such as issuing school vouchers to local students, offering conditional cash transfers to refugee children and not taking tuition fee from poor children. Countries have also tried to prioritize learning by introducing learning assessments to access trends, while one in four countries employ these results in curricula designing.

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