DOHA, 16 March 2007 — A UNESCO conference on Wednesday proposed the setting up a fund to combat illiteracy which affects almost 60 million inhabitants of the Arab world.
The conference in Qatar’s capital urged Arab leaders to combat illiteracy in a region “where 58 million people don’t know how to read or write, apart from the 6.5 million children not in school.”
It proposed the creation of a regional fund but without suggesting a mechanism. Basic education needs six billion dollars a year in the Arab world, which according to UN figures has an overall population of almost 300 million people, said Omani Mussa ibn Jaffar ibn Hassan of the UN’s cultural body. This amount is “minimal in a world where more than $1,100 billion are spent on the military, 300 billion on advertising, and 500 billion on tobacco (industry) each year,” he said.
