About 200 million children around the world don’t complete primary education and lack the most basic skills for work. The majority of these children, about 116 million are girls.
This is one of the main messages of UNESCO’s 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work. The report examines how skill development programs can be improved to boost young people’s opportunities for decent jobs and better lives.
Pauline Rose, Director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report discussed the report’s findings and the dynamics around gender and skills development in a UNICEF podcast. According to Pauline Rose, programs such as BRAC in Bangladesh and Camfed in parts of Africa are addressing the needs of young women in the direst circumstances by providing basic skills training and assistance in setting up profitable businesses. But these efforts are not enough given the scale of the problem. “These programs are very important, but they are reaching too few young women and men who need the support of these programs. They need to be radically scaled up by governments with the support of aid donors,” she said.
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Related Blog Posts: Check Out the New World Inequality Database (WIDE)