Global learning crisis is costing $129 billion a year

The 11th Education for All Global Monitoring Report reveals that a global learning crisis is costing governments $129 billion a year. Ten per cent of global spending on primary education is being lost on poor quality education that is failing to ensure that children learn. This situation leaves one in four young people in poor countries unable to read a single sentence.  The Report concludes that good teachers are the key to improvement and calls on governments to provide the best in the profession to those who need them most.

This year’s Report, Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all, warns that without attracting and adequately training enough teachers the learning crisis will last for several generations and hit the disadvantaged hardest. In many sub-Saharan African countries, for example, the Report reveals that only one in five of the poorest children reach the end of primary school having learnt the basics in reading and mathematics.

Poor quality education is leaving a legacy of illiteracy more widespread than previously believed. Around 175 million young people in poor countries – equivalent to around one quarter of the youth population – cannot read all or part of a sentence, affecting one third of young women in South and West Asia. On current trends, the Report projects that it will take until 2072 for all the poorest young women in developing countries to be literate; and possibly until the next century for all girls from the poorest families in sub-Saharan Africa to finish lower secondary school.

Read more (UNESCO)