UNESCO’s Director General: Education is often undervalued & underfunded – Egypt Today

UNESCO’s Director General: Education is often undervalued & underfunded – Egypt Today

CAIRO – 25 September 2022: In a message to world leaders at the Education Transformation Summit, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] Audrey Azoulay said that education is often undervalued and underfunded.

In her message, Azoulay stressed that the only possible solution to bring about a profound change in the world for the better lies in investing in education.

The organization had revealed in a report entitled "Alarm Bells" that 244 million children and youth around the world are still out of school. There is a crisis in foundational learning, literacy and numeracy skills among young learners.

It is estimated that 60 percent of children around the world are unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of ten.

A new survey by UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development finds that a quarter of countries have not yet collected information on children who have returned to school and who have not returned to school since the onset of the epidemic.

That is why the Transforming Education Summit was held in New York to rally world leaders and put education at the top of the political agenda. It aims to mobilize