…Early childhood care and education programmes improve children's health, nutrition, well-being and cognitive development. They offset disadvantage and inequality and lead to better achievement in primary school. The comprehensive care and education of children below age 3 remains a neglected area. Meanwhile, access to pre-primary education for children aged 3 and above has improved, but remains very uneven. Many developing countries still have limited or non-existent pre-primary education systems…
…Adult literacy remains a serious global issue: 774 million adults (of whom 64% are women) still lack
basic literacy skills. Three regions (East Asia, South and West Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa) concentrate the vast majority of the one in five adults around the world still denied the right to literacy…
…The goal of eliminating gender disparities in both primary and secondary education by 2005 has been missed in a great majority of countries. While about 63% of countries with data have managed to eliminate gender disparities in primary education, only 37% have done so at secondary level….
…Projections suggest that, without accelerated efforts: 58 of the 86 countries that have not yet reached
universal primary enrolment will not achieve it by 2015; 72 out of 101 countries will not succeed in halving their adult illiteracy rates by 2015; only 18 of the 113 countries that missed the gender parity goal at primary and secondary level in 2005 stand a chance of achieving it by 2015….
EDUCATION FOR ALL GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2008