Cuba Leads Region in UNESCO Report on Education
The Education for All Global Monitoring Report, by UNESCO, points out that in the Latin American and Caribbean region, Cuba is a leader in education
The document, prepared by UNESCO, concludes that disparities due to economic means, the home, gender and disabilities have resulted in millions of children being deprived of quality education.
The six goals proposed at the World Forum on Education held in Dakar (Senegal 2000) are: to expand early childhood care and education; to provide free and compulsory primary education for all; to promote learning and life skills for young people and adults; to increase adult literacy by 50 per cent; to achieve gender parity by 2005 and gender equality by 2015; and to improve the quality of education.
In Latin America, Cuba is a leader in this field and works arduously to increase the quality of education, a parameter that can always be improved. In our country, there is zero illiteracy; 99.5 percent of school-age children are provided care; primary and secondary schools are open to all as is education that is offered without regard to gender, economics or geographical location.
The report points out that in Latin America, preschool education reaches some 65 percent of children and primary education reaches 94 percent. However, there are high occurrences of having to repeat grades and differences in access.
According to the EFA Global Monitoring report, some 776 million adults lack basic reading, writing and calculation skills, two thirds of which are women.
Latin America and the Caribbean lead the rest of the regions of the underdeveloped world in the EFA parameters. Nonetheless, academic performance levels are lower than international standards.
