Nairobi — Kenya is among seven countries likely to achieve gender parity in primary and secondary education by next year.

This is according to the 2005 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, which was launched in Brasilia, Brazil, yesterday.

The other countries include Austria, Bolivia, Malawi, Portugal and Samoa.

Rwanda is the only African country that has already achieved gender parity at both primary and secondary levels of education (in 2000).

The report says more children are going to school than ever before, but many drop out before Grade 5 of primary school or graduate without mastering even minimum cognitive skills.

It focuses on the quality of education, which it finds insufficient in several regions of the world and could prevent many countries from achieving the Education for All (EFA) goals set at the World Education Forum in Dakar, 2000, by the target date of 2015.

The report provides a detailed analysis of factors influencing the quality of education, including financial and material resources for schools, the number of teachers and their training, core subjects, pedagogy, language, the amount of actual learning time, facilities and leadership.

It also presents case studies from 11 countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Egypt, Finland, Republic of Korea, Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka) showing how both rich and developing nations are tackling the quality issue.

An Education Development Index measures the overall progress of 127 countries towards the EFA goals.

Women hold only one-third, or less, of teaching posts in sixteen Sub-Saharan African countries - representing 40 per cent of those with data.

With the exception of Nepal, no countries have higher gender imbalance among teachers than Sub-Saharan Africa.

In the primary-school systems of fourteen of these sixteen countries, the average GPI for net primary enrolment is 0.79.

In contrast, in several southern African countries where gender ratios in school enrolments in favour of girls exist, over three-quarters of the teachers are women. This is a revealing correlation.

Countries with the lowest number of women teachers at the primary level are those with the highest gender disparities.

In a large majority of countries, including the industrialised ones, the presence of women teachers decreases from primary to secondary to higher education, where women teachers are generally in the minority.