A UNESCO official Tuesday praised China's literacy efforts and what it has been doing to make the UN millennium goals more achievable.

China has made great achievements which any other society or country in human history has hardly achieved in a short period of three decades,

said Dr. Abhimanyu Singh, director of UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) China, in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

UNESCO is extremely happy about China's achievement because it makes the global achievements look better than it might be, Singh told Xinhua during an International Symposium on Education for Rural Transformation being held in Stockholm.

"We are very happy that you are trying to achieve the targets in the millennium goals. China has taken policy measures to achieve almost full enrollment in schools and a very high adult literacy rate, and to implement a program under which children in both urban and rural areas have access to free compulsory education of nine years," said the official.

Emphasis on mass literacy has made over 90 percent of Chinese adults above 15 years literate by universal international standards as well as enabling the country to achieve parity between boys and girls and men and women in both primary schooling and adult literacy, according to Singh, who has been working in China for two years.

"But there are challenges in the difference between urban and rural areas, between the rich and the poor provinces," Singh said.

According to one of the UNESCO global monitoring reports, investment in the rich area in primary education in China, for example in Shanghai, is 18 times more than in a poorer one.

China's experience has to be presented to other developing countries, which are facing similar challenges, said Singh.

"China should be willing to help developing countries by being open, by being accessible, and by providing them with necessary policy of advice and technical expertise if they like that so that they have the capacity to make progress in the next few years," Singh said.

It is not a question of just speaking up of any structure or any policy from China, but to learn how political vision, commitment at different levels of government and the right kind of mixed funding and organizational structures make you capable of delivering services to the public.

"It does not depend on what political system you have, now we have international targets which have to be achieved across countries, and political, social and agricultural factors have to be taken into account. They cannot be an excuse for not achieving their education for all," Singh said.

And the outside world in that context should be more open minded and not have any mental blocks of ideological reservations in accepting the validity of Chinese deeds, Singh said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 9, 2010)