ABSTRACT
During recent years, the international community has developed a renewed interest in speeding up the expansion of basic education services. On the occasion of the Unesco regional conferences in Mexico in 1979, Harare in 1982 and Bangkok in 1985, the ministers of planning and education of Latin American, African and Asian countries reaffirmed the urgent need to provide basic education for all in their respective regions, in the form of primary education for children and functional literacy skills for youth and adults. International Literacy Year will be celebrated in 1990 and four major agencies, Unesco, UNICEF, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), have taken the joint initiative to organize a World Conference on Education for All at the beginning of the year.'
