UN General Assembly
2019

Cote d’Ivoire welcomes the celebration, on 24 January 2019, of the very first International Day of Education, established by the General Assembly in 2018. Education, Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals, is indeed one of the responses to major contemporary problems and to the challenges of transforming our societies. In that context, priority must be given to investment in human capital, through education, training, literacy programmes, capacity-building and regular skills acquisition. To that end, the Ivorian Government has introduced free public primary education and education kits and made schooling compulsory across the country for children aged between 6 and 16. Doing so required massive recruitment of teaching staff and an expansion of school and university infrastructure. In addition, our strategic literacy plan, covering the period 2019 to 2024, is aimed at significantly reducing the illiteracy rate to less than 10 per cent by 2024.