Denpasar, Bali (ANTARA News) - Some 302,523 Bali residents aged 15 and over are still illiterate, a provincial government spokesman, I Ketut Teneng, said here on Friday.

To remedy the problem, Teneng said, the provincial administration had been organizing more basic literacy classes since 2008 with the target of making 36,697 people literate by 2010 and 265,826 more gradually starting in 2011.

Ketut Teneng said the provincial administration had in 2010 allocated Rp964.4 million from the regional budget to support various programs such as technical supervision of tutor training and activities to increase the quality of education for students.

Last 2008, Indonesia`s Bali Island hosted the seventh E-9 Ministerial Review Meeting on Education for All (EFA) which was focused on the improvement of education and training for teachers in countries where illiteracy is a national problem.

The program is run by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and aimed at decreasing the world`s illiterate population.

The nine countries attending the meeting were Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia.

According to a 1993 report by UNESCO said these nine countries were home to 70 percent of the world`s illiterate population and 40 percent of global school dropouts.
UNESCO said it aimed to cut 50 percent of the world`s illiterate population by 2015 through the EFA program, with particular focus on the nine countries.

The EFA program is focused on six themes including early childhood education, compulsory education, gender equality, life skill education, quality of education and illiteracy.

Former director general for higher education at Indonesia`s Education Ministry who is now the vice minister, Fasli Jalal, said "Failures in tackling education problems in these nine countries will result in failure to reach the EFA target".

Fasli said the condition of education in the nine countries had improved since the first EFA summit in New Delhi in 1993.

China was the country that had shown the most improvement because it had managed to cut its illiterate population by 80 percent and had provided nine-year`s worth of compulsory education for its citizens.

Fasli said Indonesia was in second place in terms of improvement. He said the country`s illiteracy rate had declined to less than 10 percent of its 240 million population.

Illiteracy rates in most other countries stood at around 40 percent, he said.
"Besides that, we have no problem with gender equality in education. We have left the six-year compulsory education (phase) and we are now entering the nine-year compulsory education (phase), which is equal to China," he said.

But Indonesia still had problems with the quality of its education, Fasli said, adding lessons around life skills were not properly provided.

(A051/F001/S026)

Editor: Suryanto
COPYRIGHT © 2012

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