Primary Education

Education

The second millennium development goal is - Primary Education for All.  These four words for me personally are so obvious like saying that water is wet or that while staying in the sun makes you warmer. But after reading couple of articles and watching short movies I feel privileged that I can educate not only in primary school, but also in high school and after this go to a college. In my country -Poland -we have compulsory education till we become 18 years old. In meaning of lack of education all over the world - compulsory can mean also that everybody are allowed to learn without any gender or financial restrictions. It is also strange for me that so many children can exist without reading ability.

According to the education table of unicef the smallest number of literacy rate among the youth was in Eastern and Southern Africa with percentage of 75 by males and 64 by females. If we would like to choose the country which has the lowest literacy rate it would be Burkina Faso with percentage of 40 males and 27 females. Comparing to some European countries like Portugal, Slovenia or Italy that all have the same level of 100% we see a enormous gap. These differences could explain the fact, that in less developed countries the primary enrollment ratio is also very low. If the children do not attend to school, they cannot get some basic skills, like reading abilities, which are necessary to develop themselves.

The table shows us also that in East Asia and Pacific the primary school enrollment ratio is the largest worldwide with numbers of 98 for males and 97 for females. The smallest one is in West and Central Africa with percentage of 68 for males and 59 for females. The highest percentage was in Japan, Spain and Canada and the lowest was in Djibouti – in East Africa. As we can see in most of countries are less female students then male students. The cause could be here the tradition of the country – for example that woman should stay at home and take care of it, or also religion, habits. But the more people will be well educated, the more opportunists  their country will have in the future.

“Eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education” – was an idea included to the second millennium development goal.  The percentage of enrollments to primary schools between genders in low income countries in 80’ was very uneven.  In those days the percentage gap between boys and girls was at the level  of 38% for  females and 62% for males. Nowadays  the rates are close to 48% for females and 52% for males. This fact shows, that these countries made a huge step to avoid gender gap in education. But still there is a big  gender gap in some countries like for instance  Guinea-Bissau in  West Africa, where only 40% students in primary school are females and others are males. 

Used by writing:

• UNICEF 2008. Basic education and gender equality.
• Education for all
• The big picture
• The World Bank 2008. Education and Development.
• The World Bank 2008. Girls' education.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNBvtM1hmzQ&feature=player_embedded

Poverty

Poverty as a huge problem of public health

In the article of Farmer et al (2006) we can see two main topics – the first one is the structural violence which was described by Johan Galtung during the 1960s :

´´ social structures—economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural—that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching their full potential´´ As I understood his thought this correctly we cannot treat poverty only as a matter of lack of money, but also as a restricted policies, religion, law or culture. If one billion of people on the whole world try to survive couple of days more because they are starving, it is a enormous problem which cannot be solve only by giving them money, because it can be so, that they don’t have proper infrastructure to use this money. The same will be with treatment or any interventions provided by physicians or public health experts to society – it could fail if they do not know the social aspects of chosen group - and this is a second topic – clinical medicine. Poverty means unfortunately that health level of poor people is much worse than the well-being wealthy person, because they just do not have enough or any money to visit a doctor when they are ill.

Used by writing:

*Galtung J (1969) Violence, peace and peaceresearch. J Peace Res 6:167–191.

*Dying for change. Poor people's experience of health and ill-health. (pdf) WHO & The World Bank. Complete report. (to the appropriate extent) You can also choose applicable parts in this Dying for change.

*Farmer, P., Nizeye, B., Stulac, S. & Keshavjee, S. 2006. Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine. (pdf) PLoS Medicine, Vol. 3(10).

*Poverty in Focus 2006. What is poverty? Concepts and measures. (pdf) (This publication contents many interesting articles on gender equality and poverty, read someone)

*Sanchez, P. & Swaminathan, M.S. 2005. Hunger in Africa: the link between unhealthy people and unhealthy soils. (pdf) The Lancet, Vol. 365, 442-444.

Public Health

Health at global level.

-Public health, as a science which is extracting knowledge from many fields like biology, epidemiology, medicine, demography, economics and many others, is a very important tool, which should be used to keep the society healthy. It also helps to create proper health policies in many countries, which are interested in rising their health level. Is it possible to prevent all citizens all over the world at high level ? Unfortunately not, because of few factors. The most important seems to by the lack of money in poor countries. There are also other factors like social-cultural, environmental and institutional. The influence of all of them decides about the shape of population health.

References used:

• Huynen, M., Martens, P. & Hilderink, H. 2005. The health impacts of globalisation: a conceptual framework. Globalization and Health 1:14. (pdf)
• Kickbusch, I. 2002. Global Health - A definition. (pdf)
• Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) 2002.Public Health: What's it really about?