Title:
Greater Efforts Are Urged to Get and Keep Girls in
School
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
In May, an international conference took place in
Dakar, Senegal, to find new ways to get and keep
girls in school. The United Nations Children's Fund
says nearly seventy-two million children were not in
school in two thousand seven. More than half are
girls, and more than two-thirds are in sub-Saharan
Africa, South Asia and West Asia. School attendance
has improved in many areas. But the head of UNICEF,
Anthony Lake, says: "Unless we all work harder,
there may still be fifty-six million children out of
school in two thousand fifteen." He says progress
and economic development depend on educating girls
as well as boys. Educated girls are also at lower
risk of violence, abuse and diseases like HIV/AIDS.The
UN Girls' Education Initiative organized the meeting
of two hundred scholars, aid workers and government
officials from twenty-two countries. The initiative
was launched in Dakar ten years ago. The aim is to
bring primary school education to all girls and boys
worldwide by two thousand fifteen. In Senegal, the
number of public schools has doubled in the last ten
years. But UNICEF's Anthony Lake said schools still
lack gender equality. He said girls in one Dakar
school told him about a lack of bathrooms and
textbooks for them, and bullying from boys.The
conference centered on three main problems to
getting and keeping girls in school: violence,
poverty and poor quality education.Ann-Therese
Ndong-Jatta is education director for UNESCO in
Africa. She says donors are giving a lot of
resources and civil society groups are working on
access to education. The UNESCO official says
schools need to modernize and improve what they
teach and how they teach it. For example, she says
schools should teach African children in their
native languages, not just in English or French.To
stay in school, experts say children must consider
their education useful -- and so must their parents.
May Rihani from the Global Advisory Committee of the
U.N. girls' initiative gave an example from a "life
skills" program in Mali.One lesson is about
diarrhea. The idea is for children to go tell their
mother what they learned. May Rihani says: "The
mother would recognize that this education is
important to her and to her family and would want
the child to continue to go to school."And that's
the VOA Special English Education Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
