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More attention should be paid on children in rural areas: UNICEF
Nov 05, 201401:07 PM
For most children, Sri Lanka’s universal primary education policies of the past 70 years have been a success. About 98 per cent of children complete primary school, and the country boasts a 92 per cent literacy rate, according to the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children’s South Asia Regional Study.
But what about the children who are not in school? Many of them come from the poorest of poor families. In some areas, generational cycles of school exclusion have been perpetuated by the Sri Lankan civil war, which ended in 2009.
The reasons children are excluded can be complex. As anywhere else, children in Sri Lanka may be deterred from school by poverty or conflict. Many children also miss out on opportunities because they live in remote regions and have no transportation to the nearest school. Some are impeded by violence or natural disaster. Others are hindered by disability or discrimination because of language, ethnic origin or gender.
Identifying those children and understanding why they do not attend school is the goal of the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children, a collaboration launched in 2010 by UNICEF and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. It employs statistical methods to determine which children are not in school and why. The data is used to recommend policies that enable all children to attend school and learn.
