22-мәтін

Gestures not enough to change the world

We have been here before. The high-level conferences, the firm commitments, the hand-wringing, the international agreements that promise the earth and deliver next to nothing – all have been part of the backdrop to the campaign for debt relief. Now there is a threat that the campaign for universal primary education could go the same way.

Today is international literacy day and there is plenty for the world community to do. Out of a global population of 6 bn (six billion), 880 (eight hundred and eighty) m (million) adults are illiterate, two thirds of them women, most of them in south Asia. The next generation of people that will be unable to read and write has already been born unless action is taken speedily to turn fine words into action.

It is four months since the UN (United Nations) conference in Dakar that promised that every child would be inside a classroom by 2015 (twenty fifteen) and the signs are not promising. In theory, the conference was a step forward, committing every country in the developing world to produce an action plan for education and pledging governments in the developed world to ensure that the plans would not go unimplemented for lack of cash – around $8 bn (eight billion dollars) a year.

The World Bank is now trying to put together a global initiative, but as is the way with global initiatives, this is taking time. And time for a child out of school in sub-Saharan Africa is a commodity that quickly loses its value.

One of the reasons it is taking time is because of the attitude of some western governments, including Britain. The aid agency Oxfam called for a dedicated global action fund to ensure that the Dakar declaration did not go the way of the Jomtien declaration of 1990 (nineteen ninety), which called for universal education by 2000 (two thousand) but failed to marshal the necessary resources to turn the vision into reality. (The Guardian)