Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. However, as stated in the progress report for 2019, SDG 4 may not be met by the year 2030. 262 million children and youth aged 6 to 17 are still out of school and more than half of children and adolescents are not meeting minimum proficiency standards in reading and mathematics. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) addresses the issues of inclusive and equitable education in their Grand Challenges. All Children Reading is a USAID initiative that is advancing edtech innovation and research to improve reading outcomes for marginalized children in low-resource contexts. Through the use of technology, USAID has been able to reach over 600, 00 children with early grade reading materials and approaches, distributed 1.3 million learning materials in over 140 languages spoken. All Children Reading also source and test solutions that address barriers to child literacy in the books in underserved languages, foundations of literacy, and children with disabilities. The use of technology to make education inclusive and accessible has been a major turn in realizing SDG 4 as it has not only connected our world to share resources but also given the ability for these resources to be put to good use such as meeting the need for education for all children regardless of their background, language, culture, or ability.
The challenge is how do we expound on these efforts to use technology to forward quality education for all that is inclusive more rapidly to meet SDG 4 by 2030? I believe that a greater spread of data and information, increasing the number of teachers that are properly trained to meet diverse student needs and technological capabilities for education, as well as use technology to shape the classroom environment are all ways to investigate and forward to potentially close gaps in meeting SDG 4 by the year 2030. USAID’s All Children Reading initiative is a great example and leader in pursuing technological capabilities to create quality education for every child around the world and other efforts should follow suit in using technology to advance SDG 4 by the year and beyond 2030.
Inclusive Sustainable Development 