UN Summit: Barriers to Schooling Undermine Goals (8 September 2005)

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Summary: Children around the world face systematic barriers to schooling that are undermining global progress towards universal primary education, Human Rights Watch said today in a report released ahead of the UN World Summit.

 

UN Summit: Barriers to Schooling Undermine Goals
World Leaders Must Fulfill Millennium Target for Primary Education

[NEW YORK, 12 September 2005] – Children around the world face
systematic barriers to schooling that are undermining global progress
towards universal primary education, Human Rights Watch said today in a
report released ahead of the U.N. World Summit.

Human Rights Watch investigations in more than 20 countries found that
school fees and related education costs, the global HIV/AIDS epidemic,
discrimination, violence and other obstacles keep an estimated 100 million
children out of school, the majority of whom are girls. The 60-page
report, “Failing Our Children: Barriers to the Right to Education,” is based
on interviews with hundreds of children in all regions of the world.

On 14 September an estimated 170 world leaders will gather at the United
Nations in New York, in part to assess progress on the Millennium
Development Goals adopted in 2000. One of the eight goals is to ensure
that by 2015, every child attends and completes primary school.

“Schooling is a fundamental human right for every child, and it’s also
essential for global development,” said Jo Becker, advocacy director for the
Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “Education breaks
generational cycles of poverty, protects children from exploitation and
improves their very chances of survival.”

In more than a dozen countries, Human Rights Watch found that school
fees and related costs such as books, uniforms and transportation cause
many children to drop out of school, start late or never attend at all. In El
Salvador, the annual cost of schooling for one child is nearly four times the
minimum monthly wage for an agricultural worker. Human Rights Watch
found that prohibitive school fees are often linked to children’s entry into
the worst forms of child labor, including sex work in Papua New Guinea,
domestic labor in Indonesia, hazardous work on banana plantations in
Ecuador, and child soldiering in Burma.

“Under international human rights law, countries have a clear obligation to
provide free primary education to all children,” said Becker.

Human Rights Watch also documented the devastating effect of the global
HIV/AIDS pandemic on children’s right to education, particularly for the
estimated 14 million children worldwide who have lost one or both parents
to HIV/AIDS. Both in sub-Saharan Africa, where the crisis is most acute, as
well as countries like India and Russia, Human Rights Watch found that
children affected by HIV/AIDS may be denied access to school or
mistreated by teachers because of the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS.
Many children, particularly girls, are pulled out of school to care for sick
family members, or are forced to work to supplement their family’s income
when a parent falls ill or dies.

Another of the eight Millennium Development Goals set in 2000 include
halting and beginning to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.

“As AIDS impoverishes more families and produces new generations of
orphans, its negative impact on children’s right to education will only
intensify,” said Becker. “Governments need to adopt focused strategies to
keep children affected by HIV/AIDS in school, particularly since education is
one of the most effective means of reducing the risk of HIV infection.”

The first target set for the Millennium Development Goals, which called for
getting an equal number of girls into school as boys by 2005, has already
been missed. Girls make up an estimated 60 percent of children who are
out of school. Traditional biases against educating girls often influence
parents to give priority to their sons over their daughters for schooling,
particularly when school fees or poverty make it difficult for parents to send
all of their children to school.

Girls are preferred for certain kinds of child labor, particularly domestic
work, which typically involves isolation and long hours that are
incompatible with schooling. Girls are also particularly vulnerable to sexual
violence by classmates and teachers and are less likely to travel long or
dangerous routes to get to school.

“In some parts of the world, gender disparities in education are in fact
growing wider,” said Becker. “Governments need to make stronger efforts
to get girls into school, and to address the barriers to education that
disproportionately affect girls.”

Measures to increase girls’ education include educating families and
communities about the benefits of girls’ education, improving security in
and around schools, addressing sexual violence in the schools, and
providing incentives for girls to attend and remain in school, such as free
meals or stipends conditional on school attendance.

Human Rights Watch also urged governments to:

- ensure that children are not denied their right to education because of
school fees or associated costs of education;
- enact and enforce bans prohibiting discrimination in education against
children because of their race, ethnicity, gender, social, HIV or other status,
and identify and include populations of children underserved by the
education system;
- address the interrelationship between education and child labor by
providing incentives to keep children in school, expanding educational
opportunities for working children and making stronger efforts to remove
children from the worst forms of child labor.

Countries investigated as part of Human Rights Watch’s report included
Brazil, Burma, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel,
Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Spain, South
Africa, Togo, Uganda, United States and Zambia.

Read the report

Testimonies from Failing Our Children: Barriers to the Right to Education:

“When I went to school, I sat separately from the other children, in the last
mat. I sat alone. The other children wanted to be with me, but the teacher
would tell them not to play with me. She said, ‘This disease will spread to
you also, so do not play with her.’”
— a 10-year-old Indian girl who is HIV-positive

“After the school break, my mom asked me if I wanted to go back to
school. I said no. I didn’t want to go. . . they [the rapists] were still there.”
—a South African girl gang-raped by classmates when she was 13

“I finished elementary school. I said to my father that I want to continue,
but my father said, ‘I’m sorry, I cannot afford the cost’. . . So I left the
school. I wanted to go and when I had to leave I was so sad. I would like
to go back to school.”
—an Indonesian girl, who began working as a domestic worker when she
was 13

“All of my children work. Working, they’re not able to advance. I wish that
my children could study, but they can’t because they have to work.”
—mother of a 14-year-old Ecuadorian boy who left school to work on a
banana plantation

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