Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter IV. B. Education and Training of Women – Paragraph 70
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/06
70. On a regional level, girls and boys have achieved equal access to primary education, except in some parts of Africa, in particular sub-Saharan Africa, and Central Asia, where access to education facilities is still inadequate. Progress has been made in secondary education, where equal access of girls and boys has been achieved in some countries. Enrolment of girls and women in tertiary education has increased considerably. In many countries, private schools have also played an important complementary role in improving access to education at all levels. Yet, more than five years after the World Conference on Education for All (Jomtien, Thailand, 1990) adopted the World Declaration on Education for All and the Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs,/12 approximately 100 million children, including at least 60 million girls, are without access to primary schooling and more than two thirds of the world’s 960 million illiterate adults are women. The high rate of illiteracy prevailing in most developing countries, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa and some Arab States, remains a severe impediment to the advancement of women and to development.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
The important areas of development for the long-term visions, if one has one or societies have them, comes in the form of education. It was true among the most elite including the scribes in Ancient Egypt or the religious scholars, e.g., Jesuit priests, centuries in the past, but, now, the basis for the advancement of economies into – what has been termed – the modern world is an education for all.
Insofar as the statistical analyses show, the general trend is the increased investment in the education of girls and women within societies, especially developing or underdeveloped nations, yields benefits – with more payback, in the positive sense, with investment in girls and women compared to boys and men.
This does not seem innate but cultural and institutional. People can be raised as entitled as selfish; they may also be raised with the do as you would be done by and love your neighbour as yourself. In several countries, circa 1995, there was already moderate progress in the increased access to secondary school for girls to reach parity, in terms of opportunities, with boys.
Then we come to the modern period with the inclusion of more girls and women in the educational system with, at least at the level seen now, unprecedented proportions of women entering into education compared to the men, which is an exciting and profound fact about the modern world.
We continue to invent new things, but we also make, in some ways, leaps in the inclusion of more girls and women into the aforementioned long-term plans of the society: through education. Looking out, the number of those who have illiteracy is quite high. Given the numbers, these are worth pausing on, so many girls without basic education, it is, in one word, staggering.
The next considerations are geographic within the paragraph. In fact, the areas are what most of the pointers direct assumptions to – far more, not for any other reason than the prior data seen in other documents. The regions dealing with wars, ethnic feuds, warfare, post-colonial contexts, and so on, are the ones most probable to be facing the problems of, at least in terms of education, illiteracy.
These are the sub-Saharan African and Arab countries or “States.” The lack of education access and opportunities for women and girls continues to be a major impediment to their progress within society. In turn, this alters their life course. Consider, the idea of sexual education based on evidence.
Without the ability to be informed and make educated choices – to make, in real terms, non-evidence-based, illusory-education-based, and uninformed choices about sex, the young, such as the adolescents, will be left to make worse choices, on average, than otherwise; this has an impact, a concrete impact in terms of the dynamics of young people’s lives, e.g., teenage pregnancy rates going up and then changing the educational life course of a woman, increased rates of STIs and STDs, and so on.
These can damage the psyches, or the mental lives, of these pupils – our young fellow citizens, and to ignore this is to damage their life prospects; this problem is ours by virtue of our responsibility to not only the planet and ourselves – to treat it and ourselves properly – but to also the next generations. Education is part of this process of the creation of an informed citizenry. It can be in the form sexual education. It can also be in the simple access to reading, writing, and arithmetic education as well.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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