§ Mr. Mark Oaten (Winchester)I am pleased to have a chance to raise the issue of education in the developing world. The debate comes at an appropriate time, as those who have followed The Guardian campaign over the past couple of days will know. It also comes on the second day of an action week that has been organised by the Global Campaign for Education. That is a joint initiative, which involves Oxfam, ActionAid, Save the Children and the National Union of Teachers. Activities will be staged in 76 countries to raise awareness about the scale of the education crisis which is developing.
I acknowledge the hard work that is being done and the campaign research that is being carried out. Oxfam, in particular, has done a lot of work to bring the most recent concerns to light. I thank its representatives in my constituency, who have regularly attended my surgery to raise this and other issues.
It is perhaps grossly inappropriate to talk about bringing the issue to light, because the concept of achieving universal primary education is not new. Ten years ago, at the Jomtien world conference, 155 countries pledged to ensure that all the world's children would have access to basic education by 2000. It is now 2000, and it is clear that those countries have been unable to keep that pledge. The current figures suggest that 125 million primary school age children across the world are not in school; that is double Britain's entire population. Those children are denied their right to education, which is one of the fundamental rights enshrined in the 1948 universal declaration of human rights. It is unacceptable that, 50 years after that declaration was established, many of the world's children are missing out on basic education.
At the end of the month, there will be an opportunity to pay more than lip service to solving the problem. In a little more than three weeks' time, a United Nations conference on primary education will take place in Dakar. It will, I hope, deliver a strategy to meet the new target of achieving universal primary education by 2015. It also represents an opportunity for the Government to take an important leadership role, and I welcome the Prime Minister's article in The Guardian this morning, which set out clearly some of his personal objectives on the issue. Achieving those will, however, involve mobilising the resources of the international community and promoting the will among Governments to provide primary education for all their children.
The Government are well known in this country for their catchphrase "Education, education, education". The Prime Minister and the Government now have a good opportunity to take that message on to the world stage.
§ Dr. Jenny Tonge (Richmond Park)Does my hon. Friend agree that the wars and civil wars that are raging all over the world, and in Africa in particular, are one of the factors that militate against children receiving primary education? I am thinking of southern Sudan, where the most recent wave of the war has already lasted for 12 years and where children have received hardly any education. We often hear about education being carried on in the refugee camps, but does my hon. Friend not 193WH think that the Government should pay more attention to the education of children at a time of war? Otherwise, whole generations will go without any education.
§ Mr. OatenMy hon. Friend makes an important point. Clearly, a lot of evidence links military conflict to the lack of education. Let us hope that increased access to education will lead to a decrease in conflicts as individuals consider ways other than conflict to deal with their difficulties.
Achieving primary education for all by 2015 is one of the United Nation's major goals for the 21st century. Other organisations and agencies are also committed to that. I was at the United Nations in New York last November and also met representatives from the World bank. I was taken by their commitment to use their resources to tackle education issues. However, the problems are enormously difficult ones for Governments throughout the world to tackle.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, classes are taught in dilapidated buildings without roofs, toilets or access to clean water. Millions of children are taught in classrooms that do not even have basic equipment such as a blackboard or chalk. The fact that children miss out on education lies at the heart of the poverty cycle, frustrating economic growth and human development. Getting education right is the key to tackling the serious problems gripping the developing world, including poverty, HIV/AIDS and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge) said, civil conflicts.
It is significant that girls make up two thirds of the 125 million children currently not in school. The international community has set a target date of 2005 to close the gender gap. That will involve more than simply throwing money at the developing world. Increasing the number of school places will not, on is own, close the gender gap, because important demand-side factors need to be individually addressed. For example, girls in many parts of the developing world are required to work at a young age to help to support their families. Oxfam quote a 1994 study of rural families in northern Ghana, which discovered that girls were often the sole breadwinners in the family.
The role of women in many developing countries is still narrowly defined in terms of marriage and child rearing. Families often view girls as a short-term investment that provides no return, because they marry and move away and someone else benefits from it. Consequently, very little value is placed on girls receiving an education.
Such cultural barriers cannot be removed through primary education programmes alone. However, they must be challenged if the benefits of education are to have a knock-on effect on the other problems in the developing world. In the Indian state of Kerala, for example, where 86 per cent. of women are literate, female life expectancy is 73. That is in stark contrast to Uttar Pradesh, where less than 25 per cent. of women can read and female life expectancy stands at 45. The generational impact of educating girls suggests that they marry later, have fewer children, provide better care and nutrition for their families and seek medical attention more promptly. There are real gains to be made by closing the gender gap.
194WH Where are the examples of this happening in practice? Last week, I met Bill Katenga Kaunda, the secretary general of the United Democratic Front in Malawi, a very charismatic individual. He told me how, when his country became democratic and he took control in the ruling party, its priority was "education, education, education". It has put that into practice by abolishing user fees for primary education, which has had an enormous impact. That has also happened in Uganda, where the development budget should more than double from $60 million in 1997 to $125 million by 2002. That is an inspiring example of what can be achieved when political will is combined with aid and debt relief. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, the introduction of flexible school hours to allow girls to do their household tasks before going to school has increased attendance. Dealing with such practical issues can lead to success.
Universal primary education cannot be achieved only by addressing the individual circumstances of each developing country. In Pakistan, for example, the Government spend 27 per cent. of their budget on defence and only 4 per cent. on education. That suggests that the problem there is less a matter of finance than of the national Government's political will. In contrast, Tanzania spends six times more on debt repayment than on education, which shows that debt relief and extra resources would make an impact in helping education in that country.
How much money is needed to achieve education for all, and who would provide it? UNICEF estimates that it would cost about £4.5 billion a year over 10 years to achieve universal primary education. It was reported—rather amusingly, I thought—in the national press yesterday that this figure represents less than Americans spend in a year on cosmetics. The total amount is equivalent to four days' global military spending. Oxfam proposes that half the money should be raised by national Governments and the other half by the international community.
For developing-country Governments, that would involve increased resource mobilisation, the redistribution of wasteful public spending and the reallocation of money in education budgets towards basic education. Meanwhile, the international community would be able to provide more money through a combination of debt relief, increased aid, contributions from private capital and the reallocation of aid from higher to lower levels of education.
Many charities and organisations have been working hard to address the education crisis. I was impressed on a recent visit to the BBC World Service to see the valuable projects that its trust carries out in countries such as Tanzania, Somalia and Zambia on issues such as leprosy, smoking and sexual health. Those are welcome initiatives.
The article in the national press this morning by the Prime Minister was encouraging. I know that Oxfam and other organisations have launched campaigns saying that the Prime Minister himself should go to the conference. I recognise that he has pressing issues to deal with, both domestic and international, and that it is wrong to put pressure on him to go, but it is encouraging that in today's article he says that he wants to prevent Dakar from becoming another international talking shop, and we welcome the commitment that he will raise this issue at the G8 summit later this year. Can the 195WH Minister give us more information about the issues that the Secretary of State for International Development will raise at the Dakar conference, now that it has been confirmed that she will attend on behalf of the British Government?
The Prime Minister's article sends a positive message that the Government understand the key issues involved and want to achieve universal primary education and eliminate the gender disparity. However, it is still not clear whether they will use that position to play an international leadership role in this matter, and I hope that the Minister can give us some comfort on that. If they do not, in a debate in 10 years' time we shall look back on the Dakar conference in the same way as we are looking back at the Jomtien conference of 10 years ago. That is not acceptable, and I hope that the Minister will give us more encouragement to build on the good news in the Prime Minister's article this morning.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr. George Foulkes)I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) for the knowledge and concern expressed in his speech. Having listened carefully to everything that he said, I shall try to respond to all his points and answer his questions.
I also want to congratulate the all-party group on overseas development and the non-governmental organisations that support it on the excellent meeting on "Education for All" which was held in the House of Commons last Thursday, when we were privileged to have President Museveni from Uganda as the main speaker. He made clear his country's commitment to achieving universal primary education by 2003. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State reiterated at that meeting the Government's determination to provide strong support to developing-country Governments who are fully committed to providing effective primary education for all. I shall expand on that later.
I join the hon. Gentleman in welcoming the spotlight that Oxfam's global action plan for education and the excellent "Read the World" campaign in The Guardian have shone on raising our awareness of the plight of about 130 million children who should be and are not receiving education. Education opportunity for all, especially at the primary level, is not just a fundamental human right but a precondition for progress in development and the reduction of poverty. To deny children education puts a massive block on their country's development prospects.
The development case for investing in primary education is, as the hon. Gentleman said, unanswerable. Education helps people to become more productive and to earn more and leads to improvements in health, nutrition and child mortality. People are enabled to transform their own lives and their own society, and acquire the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, as well as the capacity to use that knowledge and information.
As the hon. Gentleman said, those benefits are even more pronounced in the case of girls. Research into girls' education shows that women with as little as four years of education are more likely to have smaller, 196WH healthier families, to work their way out of poverty and to send their children to school. World bank research suggests that the education of girls is the single most valuable development intervention that a country can make, but we must overcome ingrained attitudes in some countries towards the education of girls and the perception that it is a waste of resources.
The hon. Members for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge) and for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) will remember the expression used by my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) in our debate last Thursday. He said that, on its visit to the sub-continent, the Select Committee on International Development heard the expression
educating a girl is like watering another man's garden.—[Official Report, Westminster Hall, 30 March 2000; Vol. 347, c. 133WH.]We must overcome that attitude if we are to achieve our aim. I thought that last Thursday's discussion was extremely valuable. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Winchester has had an opportunity to read the debate in Hansard, but I commend it to him.All the evidence about the development benefits of investing in primary schooling should help us to forge greater political will behind the goal of universal primary education. That is one of the key targets in our White Paper; it is a goal that is increasingly accepted. The political will is building up, but greater effort must be put into it.
The Government believe that four things need to be done if we are to make gender equality and universal primary education a reality and to achieve the UPE target by 2015.
First, we need a sustained commitment from the Governments of the developing countries to universal primary education.
Secondly, as the hon. Gentleman rightly said, in looking at the balance of developing countries' budgets, we must address the issue of resourcing for education and the need to increase the resources that developing countries commit to primary and basic education. The hon. Gentleman gave a particular example. The developed countries can also play a vital role. Through the Department for International Development budget, the British Government have current commitments to education of about £800 million, a substantial amount, of which 77 per cent. is for basic and primary education. Two thirds of those resources are concentrated in 11 of the poorest countries of sub-Sahara Africa and south Asia.
Thirdly, we must move away from the project-based approach of schools with Union Jacks on them—the gift of the British people—to a sector-wide approach, giving the country resources that enable it to provide all the basic primary education that it needs. We must co-ordinate the work of the different development donors around a focused, agreed strategy drawn up by the Government of the country concerned. They know the country's needs; they can best assess them and draw up a plan. We must drive forward with a new, more collaborative agenda for education and development co-operation generally, which means all the relevant donors working together with developing countries in a much more joined-up way.
As the hon. Gentleman said, Uganda provides an excellent example. In collaboration with key partner agencies and the Government of Uganda, the DFID has 197WH played a key role in establishing this sector-wide approach to education, resulting, in 1998, in its largest ever commitment to a programme in Africa—£67 million towards the education sector support programmes. That will provide flexible budget support to the Government for five years. That is spelled out in more detail in a country study in the briefing document produced by the Department. If hon. Members have not already seen it, I hope that they will take the opportunity to look at it.
The fourth thing that we must do if we are to achieve universal primary education by 2015 is to link education policy with the country's wider development strategy, including policies on health, sanitation, livelihoods and rural transport. Members of the Select Committee know the importance of that. Countries cannot and will not secure universal primary education if they focus simply on education. They must deal with the other aspects.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the Dakar forum. He is to be congratulated on initiating this debate in the run-up to the forum, which is to be held on 26 to 28 April. Governments, development agencies and non-governmental organisations from the north and south will have an opportunity to re-commit themselves to education for all and to achieving the target of universal primary education by 2015 and the gender equality target in primary and secondary education by 2005. As the hon. Gentleman said, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development will lead the British delegation. Hon. Members and you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, know of the strength with which she can deploy these arguments. With gender equality being an important issue, it is good that a female Secretary of State is leading our delegation.
We are working closely with the forum convenors to ensure that the process leading up to Dakar and the conference itself focus on a set of key objectives—specific actions that will extend educational opportunity for the millions of children to whom the hon. Gentleman and I have referred. In preparing for the forum, the DFID has drafted a paper entitled "Education for All: The Challenge of Universal Primary Education", which will be published on Friday. I shall send a copy to the hon. Members who are here today, and it will be available to other hon. Members who would like it. We plan to consult widely on the document, and I hope that those hon. Members who are here and others will let us have their views.
The hon. Gentleman asked what the Government believe the Dakar forum should pay particular attention to. We think that it should analyse why some countries, particularly some of the poorest, have managed to achieve considerably more than others since the 1990 world conference in Jomtien. We have set seven priorities for Dakar.
First, there must be collective reaffirmation of the "Education for All" goals, allied to focused strategies for their achievement, and particularly the attainment of the international development targets.
Secondly, it must be reaffirmed and stated in Dakar that developing country Governments must give priority to basic education. As the hon. Gentleman said, in some cases that will involve changing their spending priorities.
198WH Thirdly, Dakar must send a clear signal that the international community will back the developing countries' reforms. The new framework for action should make it clear that funding agencies will allocate significant additional resources to primary and basic education, provided that the developing-country Government are committed to that objective and have put in place appropriate policies. As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, some of those additional resources can and should be made available by debt cancellation, in which Britain is again taking the lead. No Government seriously committed to universal primary education should be thwarted in achieving that ambition by a lack of resources. It would be terrible if countries could not achieve it because they did not have the necessary money, so we in the west must make a commitment to making that money available.
Fourthly, Dakar should focus on gender equality. We must move beyond the language of awareness to the language of action, as we heard last Thursday.
Fifthly, sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia should be accorded international priority.
Sixthly, we need better monitoring of progress towards the goals and targets. That requires investment in developing national capacity for monitoring, allied to efficient international monitoring systems. We must be able to see that we are making progress. We heard on Thursday about phantom schools, so monitoring is vital.
Seventhly, Dakar should seriously consider whether the existing inter-agency "Education for All" structure will be adequate for its future purpose.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Prime Minister's article in today's edition of The Guardian. That article illustrates my right hon. Friend's commitment to the issue. Of course, it will not be possible for every Prime Minister to attend, and I understand that other European Heads of Government will not be attending. It is right that the key Ministers should attend, and our Secretary of State has the Prime Minister's full backing. However, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said at the Okinawa summit, he will himself be involved in the follow-up to Dakar, and he has already made it clear that we must make the best possible use of new information and communication technologies in education. He wants Britain to take the lead in ensuring that those technologies are used to bring the world together, not to widen existing divisions, and that they are used to deliver real practical improvements in education in the developing world. ICT-based distance learning can be cheaper, better and more accessible than traditional teaching methods, and the internet provides new ways to share information and knowledge and to pool experiences. Wireless technology, which I have seen in operation, can be used in areas with limited—or no—telecommunications infrastructure. Last week, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister asked DFIID to put together a project team including people from the private sector and the development NGOs to take the work forward. Already, we have had significant support from Cisco Systems, and that is an important element in our overall strategy.
Universal primary education is the fundamental building-block of our support for education in developing countries, but primary education cannot 199WH stand alone in an education system. We need a balanced view of the whole education sector, including the provision of adult literacy and lifelong learning. In many developing countries, it is not unusual to find that less than five per cent. of the work force has some form of secondary schooling. Such a lack of skills is clearly a drag on the development of the economy, as well as on the individual's earning capacity, but the answer is not that donors should invest large sums in the construction of secondary schools, providing expensive bricks and mortar, but no recurrent funding to pay for teachers and books. We have been down that road before. Along with relevant Governments, we need to look at different ways to provide education at that level that are more efficient and less costly. Distance learning, which uses new technologies to extend access to secondary education and skills training, is one possibility. For many years, we have supported the commonwealth of learning, which provides training, institutional networking and expertise in distance course development for Commonwealth countries. Information technology provides major new opportunities to increase access to such courses.
Trade and investment can have a much greater impact on development than aid, as the Select Committee pointed out. Developing countries must create the conditions to attract investment; that is the only way to achieve the growth necessary to reduce poverty by their own actions. A skilled labour force will facilitate such 200WH investment. Too many poor countries suffer from a desperate shortage of skills and of unemployed graduates. Those skills cannot be provided without some kind of policy framework or institutional base, which is why we have committed £25 million over the next two years to a new skills for development initiative. The initiative will facilitate the stimulation of the entrepreneurial skills required by the poorest countries to allow their economies to grow.
I return to the principal subject of our debate—the provision of basic, primary education for all. Although the internet and new technology are hugely significant potential tools for spreading educational opportunities, many people may never learn to read, and millions of children may not have the opportunity to go to school unless we take more effective action. The hon. Gentleman said that, if we look back over the past 10 years, we do not see a huge improvement. Over the next 10 years, there must be a real improvement. In 2000, we have a great opportunity to do that; the start of the new millennium is the moment to turn all the fine words uttered at United Nations conferences and in the Chamber into action, into real deeds. The Government are strongly committed to bringing the benefits of educational opportunity to those millions of children—especially, to the girls—and to helping the spread of skills and knowledge, so that all countries can accelerate their development, reduce poverty and give everyone the chance to realise their potential.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at one minute to One o'clock.