Lack of access to quality education is preventing millions of people from escaping the cycle of extreme poverty around the world. Most of the 67.5 million children still out of school are amongst the poorest and hardest to reach. More than half of them are girls, and most are living in countries in conflict and in rural areas.

Recent Facts

• One in six African children dies before the age of five. Most of these deaths could be prevented. (source: Africa 2015) 25% of children will not reach their 5th birthday.
• Nearly one third of children in Sub-Saharan Africa are underweight. (source: UNICEF)
• In sub-Saharan Africa, measles takes the life of a child nearly every minute of every day. An effective measles vaccine costs as little as $1 per child. (source: UNICEF)
• Between 12 and 14 million African children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS. (source: World Bank/UNICEF)
• Nearly 2 million children under 14 years old are HIV positive. (source: UNICEF)
• 43% of children in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have safe, accessible drinking water. (source: UNICEF)
• 64% of children in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have adequate sanitation. (source: UNICEF
• Half of the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.
• The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined.
• Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
• 51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.
• The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation.
• The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debts repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.
• 20% of the populations in the developed nations consume 86% of the world’s goods.
• The top fifth of the world’s people in the richest countries enjoy 82% of the expanding export trade and 68% of foreign direct investment — the bottom fifth, barely more than 1%.
• In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.
• An analysis of long-term trends shows the distance between the richest and poorest countries was about:
• 3 to 1 in 1820
• 11 to 1 in 1913
• 35 to 1 in 1950
• 44 to 1 in 1973
• 72 to 1 in 1992
• The developing world now spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants.
• A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people.
• The 48 poorest countries account for less than 0.4 per cent of global exports.
• The combined wealth of the world’s 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 1999; the combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries are $146 billion.
• Of all human rights failures today, those in economic and social areas affect by far the larger number and are the most widespread across the world’s nations and large numbers of people.
• Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.
• For economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years [of the current form of globalization, from 1980 - 2000] have shown a very clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980]. For each indicator, countries were divided into five roughly equal groups, according to what level the countries had achieved by the start of the period (1960 or 1980). Among the findings:
• Growth: The fall in economic growth rates was most pronounced and across the board for all groups or countries.
• Life Expectancy: Progress in life expectancy was also reduced for 4 out of the 5 groups of countries, with the exception of the highest group (life expectancy 69-76 years).
• Infant and Child Mortality: Progress in reducing infant mortality was also considerably slower during the period of globalization (1980-1998) than over the previous two decades.
• Education and literacy: Progress in education also slowed during the period of globalization.
• Today, across the world, 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; 3 billion live on fewer than two dollars a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation; 2 billion have no access to electricity.
• The richest 50 million people in Europe and North America have the same income as 2.7 billion poor people. The slice of the cake taken by 1% is the same size as that handed to the poorest 57%.
• The world’s 497 billionaires in 2001 registered a combined wealth of $1.54 trillion, well over the combined gross national products of all the nations of sub-Saharan Africa ($929.3 billion) or those of the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and North Africa ($1.34 trillion). It is also greater than the combined incomes of the poorest half of humanity.
• A mere 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water, and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World.
• The total wealth of the top 8.3 million people around the world “rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world’s financial assets.
• In other words, about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s assets in 2004.