2017. The online Egyptian Knowledge Bank is believed to be the largest Arabic digital library on
the Internet, offering access to thousands of free periodicals, encyclopedias and specialized
scientific journals (Article 25). The General Authority for Adult Education has also expanded its
activities in partnership with civil society organizations in a bid to eradicate illiteracy among
adults in all sections of society and every age group to all those over 15 years of age. It also
seeks to provide students with various skills that offer the potential to help them achieve
economic empowerment.
In the context of spreading the culture of human rights in society, the educational curriculum
includes human rights education, women's rights, children's rights, democracy, legal awareness,
globalization, life skills, international humanitarian law, citizenship education, etc., with a
particular emphasis on the principles of human rights in the subject matter.
The criteria and indicators for some subjects and activities have been modified to include
behavioral practices and guidelines that must be followed in order to enable expression of
opinions without offending others while building the students' character in order to consolidate
the principles of tolerance and acceptance of the other. Cooperation was also extended
between Egyptian educational authorities with many international organizations and national
and foreign NGOs to establish activities and implement programs to support the practical
implementation of human rights culture in the educational system. This includes a project which
seeks to promote education and protect children from risks, implemented in cooperation with
UNICEF and the UNDP in Egypt with a view to integrating human rights into higher education
curricula, along with the preparation of a national plan of action for the training of university
professors and students, which has been developed in order to familiarize academics and
students with the principles of human rights.
In parallel with the aforementioned initiatives, levels of funding allocated to disadvantaged areas
have also been increased, with the aim of increasing the rates of continuing education, reducing
the rate of deprivation of education, making education compulsory until the ninth grade which
marks the end of the basic education stage, as well as increasing the number of community
schools to about 5,000 in order to serve disadvantaged communities. Cooperation with the
international non-governmental organization Save the Children has resulted in the launch of a
project to combat the worst forms of child labor, in order to provide care for children in preuniversity education and to prevent the most vulnerable from dropping out of education, as well
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