A workshop on Education for Rural people in Latin America

The regional coordinators of Latin America and the Caribbean for the "Education for All" project attended a regional workshop in Santiago de Chile on 24 September 2004 to discuss how to foster Education for Rural People in this region.

The workshop, organized by FAO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the regional Center for Research and Development in Education (CIDE) presented several case studies conducted on the situation of education for rural people in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Mexico and Peru confirming that poverty is much greater in rural than urban areas and that the educational gap among rural and urban communities is increasing.

The main problems of education in Latin American rural areas are the low number of children able to progress from primary school to secondary, the level of illiteracy which is higher in rural than in urban areas and mainly among women and the low quality of education. The principal causes behind these problems are the quantitative and qualitative deficit of teachers available for rural areas, school programs and books reflecting urban culture, lack of rural secondary schools where rural primary school leavers could continue their studies, lack of opportunities of adoption of innovative and effective educational approaches, and gender discrimination.

Some of the reported examples of successful experiences in addressing such problems where the projects "Casas familiars rurales" in Brazil, "Escuela Nueva" in Colombia, the Chilean program or rural schools, "EDUCO" in El Salvador, AMER in Ecuador, "Educa todos" in Honduras, and the network of "Fe y Alegría" in Peru.

The workshop, which was part of the Second Regional Meeting of Education for All, is a follow up to the global initiative on Education for Rural people launched in Johannesburg by FAO and UNESCO during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2002.

For more information on the Education for Rural People initiative please read the interview published in the Network's August update.

To read the Education for All Global Monitoring Report please click here.