Assessing Basic Learning Competencies among Youth and Young Adults in Developing Countries: Analytic Survey Framework and Implementation Guidelines

The World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) in 190 at Jomtien, Thailand, included a number of educational targets related to out-of-school youth and adults, including: (1) to reduce the number of adilt illiterates to half of the 1990 level by the year 2000; and (2) to improve learning achievement to an agreed percentage of an appropriate age cohort. WCEFA also stresed the need to monitor and evaluate the performance of individual learners as well as the delivery mechanisms and outcomes of literacy and other non-formal education programmes. At the Mid-Decade Review meeting on EFA in Amman (in June 1996), the international community further called for efforts at both international and national levels to adopt new techniques and strategies to collect and analyze meaningful data to monitor progress towards the Jomtien goals. In the year 2000, UNESCO and other agencies will gather together worldwide data on education in order to take stock of the worldwide progress toward the WCEFA goals, a decade after Jomtien.