Between 2016 and 2017, basing on the Europe 2020 Strategy plan to reduce the early school leaving (ESL) to 10%, the first Edu-Action project promoted a common action between organizations from six countries of the world to share best practices and discover new ones in order to face early school leaving. Based on the positive experience of the first edition, the Edu-Action 2.0 project has been created to start cooperating with other youth organizations in Kenya, Nepal, Uruguay, Estonia and Spain, in order to increase the levels of school attendance.
The objective is to promote the exchange of good practices to fight against the early school leaving in these countries through activities of mobility carried out by 12 young workers from the participating organizations in the project. The innovative aspect of this second edition is the realization of a “double observation” period: the participants (youth workers) will spend a month in their hometown accompanying and training another youth worker; in the following month, together, they will travel abroad to one of the partner organizations and advised by another youth worker, in line with the “peer-to-peer” learning approach.
It has been decided to address the issue of school dropout in an international context as the statistical investigations, policies and actions show a worrying phenomenon both within and outside the European Union. Being the school dropout rate generally very high, one of the objectives of the EU 2020 Strategy is to reduce it to less than 10% by 2020.
However, there are very extreme regional differences in this area. Among the project partners, for example, in Estonia the drop-out rate is below the European average; however, it is still far from the 9.5% sought by EU2020. In addition, there are very large differences between the dropout rate in urban areas (4.9%) and in rural areas (16.8%). In Italy, where it has achieved the target figure for 2020 of 16% and reached 14% in 2016, the differences are very marked between the north and the south. The same happens in Spain, where although the dropout rate was 19% in 2016, there are regions where it reaches 25%.
In Kenya, many young people are not in school at all: two out of every five are not in school and it is estimated that 30% of those who do are not attending school; further, this is especially worrying in the case of girls due to various socio-economic and cultural factors. On the other hand, in Nepal, early school leaving prevails in rural areas, because young people are expected to contribute to the family economy with their labour force. In addition, the access to education is discriminatory because of social class issues, and public education is not high quality. In Uruguay the proportion of students who complete their secondary education is the lowest in the region; in addition, it is one of the countries where the students repeat grades the most, so many of them are older than the age, according to the school curriculum.
