Of the world's 101 million children who are not granted the right to a quality education, about 50% to 70% belong to minoritised communities and indigenous peoples. The figures have been released in the annual report issued by Minority Rights Group (MRG) and UNICEF. The State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009 highlights that minority and indigenous children "have been systematically excluded, discriminated against, or are too poor to afford an education".

The report states that if the situation is not reversed, UN's Millennium Development Goal on education -universal primary education by 2015- will not be met. The authors issue several recommendations, such as building more schools in rural areas, recruiting teachers with command of minoritised languages and abolishing segregation in classes.

According to the report, in developing countries with the largest number of children out of school "minority and indigenous populations enjoy far less access to schooling than majority groups". As MRG's Executive Director Mark Lattimer explains, it is not just lack of resources that is restricting access to education, but "exclusion" of tens of millions of children because of ethnic or religious discrimination.

Apart from social exclusion and indigenous poverty, the lack of access to schooling is "holding back economic growth, sowing the seeds for inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict" and contributing to "the eradication of cultures, languages and ways of life." The authors of the report quote African conflicts in Burundi, Rwanda and Sudan as examples of how "exclusion from school and the lack of educational opportunities for young people have been critical factors in fuelling conflict over past decades". Out of these, the most discriminated against are girls "living in poor families in rural areas who belong to a minority community".

The report includes a list of some specific cases of educational issues affecting indigenous and minority communities such as Kurds in Turkey, the Mandaean community in Iraq, the Batwas in the region of the Great Lakes, Roma people in Macedonia, the Dalit community in India and African Colombians.

Peoples under threat
Within the report Minority Rights Group also publishes a chapter called Peoples under Threat, in which it is provided a top-20 list with the States showing the least concern towards their minorities. Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Myanmar are leading the list, which also includes Pakistan, Israel, Chad, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

Further information:

• MRG: State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009
• Galdu.org: Over half of world´s school dropouts are from minorities -Report