KABUL (PAN): Afghanistan has set an ambitious target to decrease its illiteracy rate from 74 percent to 50 percent in the next five years, a UN official said on Monday.
Only about 26 percent of the population over 15 years old can read and write, with that number falling to 12 percent where woman are concerned, Shigeru Aoyagi, representative of the UN's education and culture unit, UNESCO, said
However, Afghanistan has set a target to increase that to 50 percent by 2015, he said.
To mark international literacy day on September 8, a number of projects will be launched across the country. This year's motto will be "educated women, educated society", Aoyagi said.
More than 228,000 people, 60 percent of them women, will benefit from the new programmes, to be funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Aoyagi said insecurity was the biggest challenge to ensuring everyone had access to education.
"We are also trying to launch literacy programmes in insecure parts of Afghanistan," he said.
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