United nations crc

Table 15

Key indicators and data on alphabetical literacy centres and
women’s basic training centres in the Republic, 2000/01

Indicator	The Republic as a whole		Urban areas of the Republic		Rural areas of the Republic
	Number	Percentage	Number	Percentage	Number	Percentage
Total number of alphabetical literacy centres for women	795	100	262	33	533	67
Total number of students	45 668	100	17 077	37	2 859	63
Males	7 687	100	2 030	26	5 657	74
Females	37 981	100	17 047	40	22 934	60

Source: Report on the findings of the Periodic Education Survey of 2000/01, Department of Planning, Ministry of Education.

247. Difficulties facing the education process: Despite the efforts of the State to develop and modernize education and teaching, a number of difficulties stand in the way of those efforts:

• 
  The difficulty of matching the requirements of the education process with the speed of the growing demand within society for education, given the limited economic resources available, in addition to the high growth in population, which stood at 18.3 million in 2000 and has a young age composition; it is estimated that 48.8 per cent of the population are in the 5-15 age group. This population composition is a burden on society, increasing as it does the need for essential social services. The basic school provision, for instance, is inadequate to cover the growing social demand; 2,058,095 children, most of them female, are outside basic education and constitute a considerable obstacle to development in view of the implications for literacy, as is visible from the following table:
  

Table 16

Rates of enrolment in the basic education stage compared with
the population in the 6-14 age group

6-14 age group in 2000		Numbers enrolled in 2000/01			Rates of enrolment (percentage)			Children outside education
Females	Total	Males	Females	Total	Males	Females	Total	Males	Females
3 105 603	5 959 603	2 185 278	1 216 230	3 401 508	64.26	35.76	100	668 722	1 389 373

Source: Report on the findings of the Periodic Education Survey of 2000/01, Department of Planning, Ministry of Education.

• 
  The highly dispersed population, which has made its mark on the course of development in basic education, as the competent authorities have been obliged to rely on school arrangements that promote no improvement in the quality of education. Such arrangements include combined classes and one-teacher schools, both of which are commonplace, in addition to which many basic schools are unfinished and do not offer the facilities needed to encourage girls to enrol in or continue with education;
  
• 
  The large size of Yemeni families;
  
• 
  The lack of desire which families show for girls’ education; data indicate that 42 per cent of girls in the 6-15 age group are not enrolled in education, a result of the absence of social intermediaries whose role it is to deepen awareness of the importance of girls’ education;
  
• 
  The imbalance between quantity and quality; emphasis has been laid on the quantitative expansion of education in order to meet demand, while quality has been neglected, leading to a decline in the quality of education in general;
  
• 
  The ceiling placed on financial allocations for recruitment, which makes it impossible to take on all those graduating from education colleges, particularly in subjects suffering a shortage of teachers;
  
• 
  The poor preparation of teachers at the basic education stage and the lack of any worthwhile on-the-job training programmes;
  
• 
  The failure of school social services to perform the role entrusted to them and the lack of qualified personnel in that area.