Why is the right to education important?

CAIRO – 25 January 2022: According to the UNESCO World Education Future Report, transforming the future requires re-balancing our relationships with each other, with nature as well as with the technology that permeates our lives. It also requires dealing with opportunities for numerous scientific breakthroughs that bring with them serious concerns about equality, inclusion, and democratic participation.

This year's International Day of Education will serve as a platform to highlight the most important transformations that must be nurtured in upholding the fundamental right of everyone to education and building a more sustainable, inclusive and peaceful future.

It will open discussion on how to advance education in the public interest, how to guide digital transformation, support educators, and protect the planet, unleashing the potential of each person to make a shared contribution to collective well-being.

The right to education is explicitly enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that advocates free and compulsory primary education. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, goes further by stipulating that higher education is available to all.

In adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September 2015 the international community recognized that education is essential to the success of all 17 goals of the plan. The fourth goal, in particular, aims to “ensure inclusive quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” by 2030.

Education gives children a ladder out of poverty and a path to a promising future. Nearly 265 million children and adolescents in the world do not have the opportunity to study or even complete it, and 617 million children and teens cannot read or do basic arithmetic. Less than 40 percent of girls in sub-Saharan Africa have completed secondary education. In addition, nearly four million children, boys and girls in refugee camps are out of school. It means violating the right to education for all of those, which is unacceptable.

Without inclusive and equal educational opportunities in quality education for all, countries will falter in their pursuit of gender equality and exit from the cycle of poverty that negatively affects the livelihoods of millions of children, youth and adults.

The International Day of Education is celebrated annually on January 24.