Caribbean region making primary school progress

A statement yesterday said Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) were among five regions which have almost achieved universal primary school enrolment.

The latest statistics compiled by the United Nations on the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), said there was a 96 percent net enrolment in primary schools for the joint region in 2001/2002 as compared to 86 percent in 1990/1991.

The 2005 report on the MDG notes that the "greatest progress in primary school completion has been made in LAC and South-East Asia, where more than 90 percent of children reach the final grade."

In terms of goal number three, which is to promote gender equality and empower women, the report said that LAC, Eastern and South-Eastern Asia girls were more likely than boys to remain in school. In secondary enrolment, the LAC region also went against the norm for the rest of the world, with more girls than boys being enrolled. Women in the LAC region also compared favourably to those in the developed work, with 44 percent having access to non-agricultural wage employment, as compared to 46 percent in the developed world.

On the issue of women achieving parity in terms of their share of parliamentary seats, the report said no region was successful, but the LAC region outpaced other regions with a 19 percent representation when compared to 21 percent for the developed world, and 16 percent for the world as a whole.

In the area of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, the UN report said statistics for 2001 suggested that 9.5 percent of the population of the region was living on less than US$1 per day, as compared to 11.3 percent in 1990. Ten percent were suffering from chronic hunger and seven percent of children under age five were underweight, that is suffering from malnutrition, infectious diseases or lack of care. In the LAC region in 2003, there were 32 deaths per 1,000 live births in children under five, and the region was identified as one of only three which maintained a rapid pace in terms of reducing child mortality.