Universal Primary Education (Hansard, 29 November 2001)

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Amos)

There are widely different levels of progress against the millennium development goal of achieving universal primary education (UPE) by 2015. In sub-Saharan Africa an additional 88 million children will need to be enrolled in school between 1997 and 2015. This requires a threefold improvement in the rate of expansion achieved from 1990–97. If the current rate of enrolment increase were to be maintained, less than half of the 43 countries would achieve even a gross enrolment rate of 100 per cent by 2015. Ten times the previous rate of increase will be needed in countries such as Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Liberia and Somalia. In South and West Asia it is estimated that an additional 40 million children will need to be enrolled to achieve the UPE target and that this will require the same pace of enrolment increase that was achieved from 1990 to 1997.

Achieving UPE requires reform and action at the country level. The international community committed itself in the Dakar Framework for Action that "no countries seriously committed to education for all will he thwarted in their achievement of this goal by a lack of resources". At the Education for All High-Level Group meeting convened by UNESCO's Director-General in Paris last month, the Secretary of State for International Development called for change in national and international efforts to achieve UPE by 2015. She presented DFID's paper Children out of School which identifies the different circumstances of children who are not in school and proposes an eight-point plan of action for accelerating progress towards the 2015 target.

The Government give high priority to addressing this challenge. We believe that UPE can be achieved by 2015 if the lessons of the past are learned and if governments in developing countries put in place the right policies and receive appropriate external assistance. We have committed over £600 million to support the development of primary education since 1997. We will do more.