GENEVA, Dec 11 (AFP) - The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said Thursday the 65 million girls who go without schooling is a serious global emergency holding up economic development and leaves the girls open to exploitation and a life of poverty.
"Education is everybody's human right," UNICEF said in its flagship report: "The State of the World's Children 2004."
"It means that no girl, however poor, however desperate her country's situation, is to be excluded from school. There is no acceptable excuse for denying her the opportunities to develop her fullest potential."
Countries that signed the UN Millennium Declaration pledged to achieve equal primary and secondary education for boys and girls by 2005 and a universal primary education by 2015 -- targets that are already slipping out of sight in some regions, according to UNICEF.
"Whether we pass this test (of gender parity) will be a strong indication of how serious we are about the entire development agenda," said UNICEF's executive director, Carol Bellamy, at a news conference in Geneva.
"Education for girls has to be built into country-wide poverty strategies," she told AFP, separately, in an interview.
The annual report says regions that have invested in girls' education, such as South-East Asia, experience faster rates of development.
"Countries that fail to raise the education level to the same as that of men increase the cost of their development efforts and pay for the failure with slower growth and reduced income," it said.
Educating girls has a multiplier effect because they in turn send their children to school, learn to defend themselves against HIV/AIDS and because they are less likely to be forced into prostitution, according to the report.
Girls' education also pays off in better family health.
"If you are looking for a maximiser investment it is girl's education," declared Bellamy.
The main obstacle preventing some 120 million girls and boys from seeing the inside of a classroom this year was school fees, she continued.
"Fees, fees, fees, do away with them. If one thing were to happen -- to do away with school fees -- it would be more of a leap to getting girls and boys back to school than anything else," said Bellamy.
UNICEF urged government leaders to include girls' education as an essential component of development efforts, and create a national ethos "so that communities are as scandalized and concerned about girls kept out of school as they are about boys and girls more visibly exploited at work."
The agency added that industrialized countries should direct 10 percent of official aid to basic education, with programs that benefit girls as their special priority.
Better girls' education can also help countries torn apart by war, such as Iraq and Afghanistan -- where some 4.2 million children, one quarter of them girls, have returned to school since March 2002, noted Bellamy.
"I don't think there is a place in the world today that is in the middle of instability, whether it is in Iraq or Sri Lanka or Columbia or anywhere else, where one of the most important things you can do is get kids back into a learning environment even if it is not a school," she said.
Going to school injects a sense of normality into a child's life and also creates a more informed society to rebuild a country once the fighting stops, said the UNICEF chief.
The fact that an estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked into forced labour, slavery and prostitution every year was "proof of the world's systematic failure to protect its youngest citizens," according to the report.
"Human rights principles have not been integrated into economic development programs, and the ultimate objective of development -- human well-being instead of economic performance has thus been lost," UNICEF said.
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