Why we are all falling behind in Education.

Inês Lagoutte
Nov 6 · 2 min read
Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

The hard truth is that little to no progress has been made towards SDG 4 - Quality Education - in the past 5 years. The world still has about 262 million children and youth worldwide out of school.

Yet, education is essential to guaranteeing we achieve all the other goals by 2030. Education is essential to find decent work, to achieve good health, to develop skills that allow you to be a dependable parent, and ultimately a responsible and engaged citizen.

So, why are we falling behind on this extremely important goal?

One of the main causes of the learning crisis in numerous countries is that, while enrollment levels have gone up by millions, investment has not. The result? Overcrowded classrooms, undertrained teachers, overstrained resources and infrastructures.

In fact, in Malawi, in first grade, the teacher to student ratio is around 1:130. It is legitimate to affirm that managing to successfully teach a class to 130 students at the same time is impossible.

In Guinea-Bissau, only 20% of schools have basic sanitation facilities. This constitutes a real disincentive, especially for girls who end up dropping out of school when they begin menstruating for lack of facilities to manage their periods with dignity.

Randy Fath

Lack of investment is especially the case for developing countries, who cannot rely on their own financing education, they also need foreign aid. The problem is international aid to education has been decreasing in the last years.

Right now, “Aid would need to be multiplied by at least six to achieve our common education goals and must go to countries most in need. Yet, we see that donors to education are shifting their attention away from the poorest countries,”.

Donor countries are not fulfilling the promise of allocating 0.7% of gross national income to foreign aid. However, doing it and allocating 10% of that aid to education would be enough to cover the 39$ billion dollars annual financial gap that we currently have to achieve the targets by 2030.

Both developed and developing countries have to pull their part in achieving SDG 4. It is our shared responsibility. Let’s keep our promise.

Every day, young people from around the world are taking action by going in an international volunteering experience through AIESEC; a big part of them contributing to SDG 4. Will you be the next one?

Written by Inês Lagoutte

Youth for Global Goals

Youth 4 Global Goals (Youth4GG)is the SDG Initiative of AIESEC that aims to mobilize 1.8 Billion youth towards the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. We do this by raising awareness about the SDGs, engaging youth and allowing them to take action.

Inês Lagoutte

Written by

Youth for Global Goals

Youth 4 Global Goals (Youth4GG)is the SDG Initiative of AIESEC that aims to mobilize 1.8 Billion youth towards the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. We do this by raising awareness about the SDGs, engaging youth and allowing them to take action.

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