9/9/2005
Education Is The Best Road Out Of Poverty For Rural African Poor, UN Says

Education provides the best route for the rural poor in sub-Saharan Africa to work their way out of poverty said the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) education expert Lavinia Gasperini, this week. She was speaking on the eve of an important seminar on development and education taking place in Addis Ababa and organised by FAO, UNESCO, the Association for the Development of Education in Africa and the Ethiopian Ministry of Education.

“Illiteracy is a correlate of poverty and hunger and is mainly a rural phenomenon” she said, emphasising the problems it created for improving living standards around the developing world.

“Since the vast majority of the population in sub-Saharan Africa are rural, and since agriculture is a key sector for rural development and economic growth, more efforts are needed in educating the rural poor and helping them to apply improved technologies to make small-scale farming viable and profitable”, she added.

Ms. Gasperini said the meeting, which was supported by Italian and Norwegian development agencies, gathered ministers of education, agriculture, fisheries and rural development from several African countries. Representatives from the African Union, civil society organisations and development bodies also attended.