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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| Half of women in Arab world are illiterate |
| 2005-04-11 |
| Half of the women in the Arab world are illiterate and more than 10 million children in the region don't go to school, according to a report released on Monday. The report on the status of children and women, produced by the Arab League and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), said many Arab countries have made progress on child rights and protection, but that more still needs to be done. "More than 10 million children in the Arab world are out of school, most of them in Egypt, Iraq, Morocco and Sudan," said the report, although it gave no figures for the total number of school-age children in the region. It said although many countries have established a basis for a child's right to education, they still fall short of the UN's millennium development goals for primary education, especially for girls. "More than half of the women in the Arab world cannot read or write," said the report, arguing that this was preventing them from obtaining vital information on such issues as pre- and post-natal health, leading to high infant and child mortality rates. Mortality rates among under-fives in the region stand at around 60 for every 1,000 births compared to just six in industrialized countries. Many of those deaths occurred in the first year primarily due to "pre-natal complications," exacerbated by ignorance. |
| Posted by:Fred |