Somalia, stricken by more than two decades of civil war, was declared the world’s worst place to go to school in a report released on Monday.
The battle for Mogadishu becomes more bitter by the day and aid agencies operating in the east African country accuse Somali war lords of forcibly enlisting children into their militias.
“Ongoing conflict, civil unrest and fragility have had a catastrophic effect on education, with the most recent data estimating that only 10 percent 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 percent of the population is illiterate, GCE said.
It came bottom of a table of the world’s 60 poorest countries, 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,” the report said.
“A country like Chad, languishing close to the bottom of our table, has shocking indicators across the board: Just 14 percent of its population go to school for five years, child labor 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,” it said.
GCE, which was backed by aid groups such as Oxfam, Save The Children and Action Aid, in making the report, said that “decades of failure to invest in education have left the basic school system hardly functioning” in Nigeria.
Adult illiteracy remains “a major stain” on efforts to end poverty with 759 million adults, the majority of them women, unable to read and write, the campaign said.
Half of the illiterate adults in the world live in South Asia, particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Fewer than 20 percent of Afghan women are literate
“Illiterate adults and their families struggle without even the most basic of skills to navigate life, access healthcare for their families and enter the labor market,” it said.
Haiti was bottom of the rankings in 2008, with just half of children attending primary schools. The earthquake in January destroyed 80 percent of schools.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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