Everyone deserves a quality education... yet right now 69 million children and 774 million adults are missing out.
It's the world's poorest who are missing out on an education today. And it's the world's poorest who stand the most to gain if they only had the chance to learn.
Education is imperative to tackling poverty. When individuals have the chance to learn basic life and literacy skills, economies grow faster and poverty rates decline. When people go to school, they are able to eventually earn more money and support their families
- A single year of primary school increases the wages people earn later in life by 5-15% for boys and even more for girls.
- For each additional year of secondary school, an individual's wages increase by 15-25%.
- No country has ever achieved continuous and rapid economic growth without first having at least 40% of its adults able to read and write.
Education is essential to improving health, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and enabling families to better cope with illness.
- Seven million cases of HIV/AIDS could be prevented in the next decade if every child received an education.
- A child born to a literate mother is 50% more likely to survive pass the age of 5 years.
Education is a human right. Human rights are inherent, every person is born with them and they cannot be given or taken away. Rights establish the basic standards without which people cannot live in dignity.
Everyone no matter where they are born deserves a chance to receive a quality education.
The majority of people without an education live in the world's poorest countries.
People are being excluded from education because they simply cannot afford the cost of going to school - whether the cost of school fees, uniforms or books.
Many children are excluded from school as they're working to support their family, or staying at home and caring for sick members of the family.
In rural areas children miss out when there are no schools available, and in areas of conflict families may be forced to flee their home in search of refuge - children are even forced to fight in wars in which they played no part.
In most countries women and girls are last to get the opportunities to learn - often because boys are favoured when families are not able to send all their children to school.
- A third of all children out of school have a disability.
- 60% of all children out of school are girls.
- Nearly 250 million children have to work to help their families.
- Half of the world's out of school children live in communities where the language used in schools is different from that used at home.
When children do make it to school, they often struggle to learn in huge class sizes, from untrained and poorly paid teachers. Without the incentives to stay at school and learn, many children drop out. In sub-Saharan Africa one in three children who start school never get the chance to complete even the basic primary school, let alone progress to secondary school.
- 18 million more teachers are needed by 2015, for everyone to be educated by this date.
Yet everyone has been promised an education
