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New UN goals must help hundreds of millions of children who can't read, write: UNICEF chief

Xinhua, September 22, 2015 Adjust font size:

With more than 200 million school-aged children unable to read and write, the UN's new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will focus on access to quality education, the executive director of UNICEF, said Monday.

"There are 250 million children around the world of fourth and fifth grade age who can not read and write or do their numbers," Anthony Lake told reporters here.

The new SDGs -- a set of 17 economic, social and environmental goals expected to be adopted by world leaders here on Friday -- go beyond the previous UN goals -- the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -- because they are about the quality of education and not just whether or not kids are in school, said Lake.

MDGs are a set of eight anti-poverty targets to be reached by the end of 2015.

"Just measuring the kids in school or out of school ... doesn't measure attendance, it doesn't measure learning, and one of the advances in the SDGs now is that it is quality education not simply education," he said.

"The shocking figure is that there (are) 130 million kids who have reached the fourth grade around the world who aren't learning their numbers or how to read or write, and that's not school," Lake said.

Another 120 million children don't even complete four years of schooling, according to UNICEF figures, meaning that in total 250 million of the world's 650 million primary school age children are not learning even basic literacy and numeracy.

Lake said that health and education, as well as hope, were important for children if the world is to achieve its sustainable development aims.

"If we don't give today's children the health and the education -- and then I would emphasize -- the hope, the belief that they can make the world better, then the SDGs will fail," he said.

He spoke about the particular challenges facing children living in or fleeing conflict zones, with 2 million Syrian children now out of schools.

UNICEF has plans to scale up its activities to help refugees in European countries, while continuing to provide much needed support to refugees in countries surrounding Syria, he added.