Educating all.

• Position: Eradicating illiteracy - Includes related information on basic education conference to be held in Thailand

Everyone has the right to education.

-Article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

A 10-year-old girl, one of five children, lives in a remote village in India. Her parents are agricultural workers. She would like to attend school but there are numerous hurdles: the school is miles away from her home, and there is a male teacher, so her parents do not allow her to attend.

This little girl is just 1 of an estimated 100 million children of primary-school age who are not enrolled in school and who are, in the words of UNESCO DirectorGeneral Federico Mayor, "in danger of becoming the adult illiterates of the 21st century",

UNESCO targets for International Literacy Year include populations usually the first to suffer when government education budgets are cut: urban slum dwellers and street children, rural populations and those in need of special education such as migrant populations, refugees, youngsters with language, physical or mental handicaps, and immigrants. Children from chronically war-torn countries also suffer as schools are destroyed, depriving hundreds of thousands of primary education,

Education for all is one of social development's broadest goals, and is seemingly an achievable one. Yet, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports that "after decades of educational expansion in the developing world, the goal of universal education has receded in the decade of the 1980s".

Mr. Mayor says that in many of the poorest countries, per-pupil expenditure on primary education has declined to a point which "severely threatens" its quality. "Debt, poverty and demographic growth hamper literacy efforts", he says.

UNICEF predicts that over 90 per cent of...