Casablanca – Child education remains an important issue for both developed and developing countries. Morocco has made significant progress in this realm, according to a report recently released by UNESCO.
Published on Thursday, June 26, the Global Report on Out-of-School Children highlights alarming facts about the number of unschooled children in the world. There are about 58 school-age children who are not receiving an education, most of whom are from sub-Saharan Africa, according to the report.
Morocco, on the other hand, is one of the countries that have demonstrated remarkable progress in terms of child education over the past 13 years. The out-of-school population in the kingdom fell by 96% (more than 930,000) between 2000 and 2013. Morocco is thus one of the countries that “have shown the way forward,” according to the report.
“How did [Morocco] achieve this remarkable feat?” asks the report, “What policies were used to translate political will into effective action?”
To answer these questions, the report lists the following decisive actions and policies implemented by the countries that have managed to considerably reduce their out-of-school population:
- Fee abolition
- Increasing education expenditure
- Social cash transfer
- Increasing attention to ethnic and linguistic minorities
- Overcoming conflict
- Increasing quality
Among these important actions, Morocco’s most noteworthy progress was its increasing attention to ethnic and linguistic minorities since 2003, the year the kingdom introduced the teaching of Amazigh in primary schools. This action resulted in a 9% drop in the out-of-school population in the same year.
However, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa still suffer from lack of child education. The overall number of out-of-school children of primary school age in sub-Saharan Africa outnumbers South and West Asia and the rest of the world, according to the report.
The report also shows that the number of out-of-school girls (16.6 million) is higher in sub-Saharan Africa than out-of-school boys (13 million).
Edited by Timothy Filla
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