"...education for all is not just a moral right, an economic necessity, a matter of social justice, it is also a security issue and I hope the whole world will take on note..." said the Prime Minister in a recent speech on the Education Fund.
There is no more special reason why we should support Education for All than the testimonies we have had from Oblavi and Devli (phon), and I wish them well as they pursue from school their careers to be a doctor and a teacher, and I would like to make sure that that is possible and that their dreams can come true.
I believe that this is the widest coalition ever assembled to put pressure on the whole world to make sure that in our generation, for the first time ever in the history of the world, we can be able to say to each other that every child in every continent is able to go to school. And I want to thank all those who have come together to make this possible, not just governments and international organisations, but business leaders, charities, faith organisations, civic and sporting organisations like FIFA who are involved in this as well, and I believe that together the funding commitments that are going to be announced this afternoon - commitments that have not been previously made before and show the historic significance of what we are doing - $4.5 billion is being pledged today, and that will make possible in itself education for 18 million children around the world. So thank you all for what you have achieved.
I have had the privilege of visiting so many countries where in every place I have seen the case for education, not just as a matter of social justice, and not just as an economic necessity, but as the right that every child should have as a human being.
I went to Tanzania and I had 12 year old boys pressing me – why could we not go to school? And unlike our countries where people are saying why do I have to go to school, they were saying we must go to school. And then I went to Abuja in Nigeria and I saw another reason why we had to have children educated by funds that we can provide to make it possible. In fact Bono, who is here and has done a wonderful job promoting education, I am proud of what he has done, but Bono and I were in a school just outside Abuja in Nigeria and we were asking the school pupils what they wanted to be – they wanted to be engineers, and doctors and nurses and all the things that in every country children who get long years of schooling are allowed to dream is possible. None of them wanted to be a politician, none of them actually wanted to be pop singer, Bono, I know, but in that school with dilapidated roofs, where children 3 to a desk, some classrooms where there were no desks at all, the children were chanting the song – “Give us our Education”. And I also saw the problem because they told us that up the road there was a Madrassa that had been created offering free education to children, in very good quality conditions, but of course the condition was that they were preached at with violent extremist ideology.
So education for all is not just a moral right, an economic necessity, a matter of social justice, it is also a security issue and I hope the whole world will take on note that if we don’t do what we should do to provide education for all, then other people will prosper by violent ideologies and extremism prospering in these parts of the world.
Now there are 77 million children still not at school today, and they have little hope of going to school any day unless we take the sort of action that we are taking today. But the blunt truth is that even with the successes we have had – 44 million children to school, and it is a marvellous success over the last few years, even with the announcements today, the fact is we will not meet that Millennium Development Goal that every child be at school in 2015 unless we change action.
On present rates of progress, we will not meet it in 2015, or 2050, not even by 2100. And as I said this morning to the UN General Assembly itself, a century is too long for young people to wait, for the world to wait, for social justice and that is why we must act.
So my message today is have confidence in what we can do together, have confidence that coming together today for this special summit, business, charitable groups, governments, international organisations, we have been able to show what can be done in one day. Let us have confidence that we can move from here, country by country, organisation by organisation, and make real our commitment to achieve education for all by 2015.
We in Britain are going to work with Comic Relief, a great charitable organisation in our country, and we are going to make sure that every penny that is given to Comic Relief for education in Africa over the next year will be matched pound for pound by our government, and I am proud of what Comic Relief achieves in persuading young people to take an interest in developing countries.
We are announcing today that we will make good the missing money in the fast track initiatives of the World Bank by providing 100 million for Bob Zoellick to continue the good work that the World Bank is doing. And I want to repeat, finally, that we, the UK government, have a pledge that we will provide over ten years $15 billion for education to make our commitment to ensuring that every child in the world can go to school. And if we can come together with other countries in the European Union and elsewhere, with the work that has been done by charitable and faith organisations, with this new great interest from the business community, some of whom have been doing it for many years, some who are now coming to help us for the first time, I have no doubt that we can prove the power of a generation working together to change the world, and what better way to change the world, one child at a time, than give every child the chance of education.
