The battle for Mogadishu becomes more bitter by the day and aid agencies in operating in the east African country accuse Somali war lords of forcibly enlisting children into their militia.
“Ongoing conflict, civil unrest and fragility have had a catastrophic effect on education, with the most recent data estimating that only 10% of children are enrolled in primary school,” said the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) report, released on the sidelines of the UN Millennium Development Goals summit.
Somalia was one of four countries where more than 70% of the population is illiterate, GCE said.
It came bottom of a table of the world’s 60 poorest countries, just behind Eritrea, Haiti, Comoros, Ethiopia, Chad and Burkina Faso.
“The ‘School Report’ table findings paint a stark picture of the lives of children from around 60 of the poorest countries, demonstrating that a dramatic upscaling of effort is needed in order to give the next generation better prospects than their parents,” said the report.
“A country like Chad, languishing close to the bottom of our table, has shocking indicators across the board: just 14% of its population go to school for five years, child labour and early marriage are rife, and two-thirds of adults cannot read or write.”
The report said Nigeria has more children out of education than any other country in the world – 8.2 million.
“This is made all the more appalling by the fact that Nigeria is far from poor, by African standards. On paper at least it is among the continent’s richest countries, the world’s sixth largest producer of crude oil.”
Source: news24.com