Education is both a human right and a route out of poverty. People who have been to school are more likely to find work, look after their families and their own health and demand that governments act in their interests.
To help disadvantaged children in some of the poorest countries gain access to education by 2015, UK aid will:
- build at least 15,000 classrooms a year, benefiting more than half a million children
- train at least 190,000 teachers a year
- aim to support more than 200 higher education institutions in Africa and Asia
- provide more than 500 scholarships a year
Access to schooling
More than 61 million children are out of primary school across the world. Many more are forced to drop out of school or are unable to attend regularly as conflict, health problems or the need to earn money to support their family prevent them from studying.
It is mainly children who are disabled, come from poor rural areas or have mothers who didn't get to go to school that are excluded from education. Failure to address the root causes of exclusion – poverty, gender, disability, ethnicity, language and location – is holding back further progress.
In Nepal, DFID provides financial and technical support to the country’s national education programme in order to improve enrolment and attendance in school by children with disabilities. This includes a number of initiatives such as; targeted scholarships to disabled girls; tracking of enrolment and progress by disabled students to understand why they drop out and schools which are constructed for children with special needs.
Keeping young people in school
While universal primary education remains our priority, there is also a growing need to invest in lower secondary and higher education and vocational skills training to continue teenagers' learning.
Young people graduating from secondary schools and colleges today will become the teachers, health workers and business people of tomorrow. And because education is positively associated with improved lifetime earnings, the longer we keep young people in school, the more they will eventually get back from it. Each extra year of education raises lifetime earnings by about 10%.
In order to reduce drop out rates and to help children stay in school we will remove some of the biggest barriers to education.
These include:
- the inability to meet the cost of education
- a lack of schools and teachers
- in some cases, poor water and sanitation facilities
In total, UK aid will help to secure schooling for 11 million of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged children over the next four years.
This includes supporting nine million children in primary school and two million children in lower secondary school – at least half of which will be girls.