Finishing School. A Right for Children’s Development

A report recently released by UNICEF and UNESCO revealed that 22.1 million boys, girls, and adolescents in the Latin America and the Caribbean region are not in school or are at serious risk of dropping out.  “Finishing School. A Right for Children’s Development: A Joint Effort,” asserts that late entry to schooling and grade repetition are the main determinants of exclusion.  The report’s approach first identifies the profiles of excluded groups, then moves on to pinpoint the barriers to education supply.  As highlighted in the title, policy recommendations outlined in the report to ensure complete, timely, sustained, and full schooling are a “joint effort.”

“Finishing School. A Right for Children’s Development: A Joint Effort,” is a result of the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children launched in 2010 by UNICEF and the UNESCO Institute of Statistics.  The initiative aims to statistically characterize and identify those children who are out-of-school and least likely to enter school in order to inform policymakers about creating context-appropriate policies that increase enrollment, attendance, and retention.  This regional report was constructed as a result of country-level studies on exclusion from education in Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia, and aggregated data for the other countries.

For More Information:

Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children (download of full report in both English and Spanish also available here)

Finishing School. A Right for Children’s Development: A Joint Effort; Executive Summary (English pdf, 2012)

[Press Release] UNICEF and UNESCO present a new report on education in Latin America and the Caribbean