Global community fails to keep education vow

By John Vidal

DAKAR, Senegal: You cannot feel proud walking out of the House of Slaves on the island of Goree, off the coast of Senegal. Here, less than 200 years ago, millions of young west Africans were manacled and shipped to Cuba and the Americas, consigned to early death, their communities and families divided and crushed.

Goree is now a moving shrine to the African diaspora and over the next few days most of the 500 world leaders from 181 countries gathering three miles away in Dakar will visit the island to condemn slavery -- even as they effectively chain hundreds of millions of the poorest children to lifetimes of ignorance and permanent disadvantage.

The United Nations' World Education Forum -- the equivalent of the earth summit for education -- opened on Wednesday at the five star Meridien hotel in Dakar. Set behind huge walls far from the city's slums and pollution, the Meridien this week whiffs of complacency, abject failure and broken promises.

The same UN bodies, the same governments and the same global financial institutions that 10 years ago in Thailand pledged to provide primary schooling for all by the year 2000, are in Dakar having failed to keep their promises.

Today, 125 million children have never seen the inside of a school. Another 150 million have been forced to drop out of education in the past decade before they could even read or write. Meanwhile, 880 million adults are illiterate and few governments or world bodies will admit there is even a crisis.

There have been advances, especially in Asia, but the situation now is being likened by charities and grassroots groups to 19th century slavery, with governments deliberately seeking to deprive the poorest of education.

Across the world, schools are roofless, teachers have no materials and the poorest parents are being expected to pay for the most basic schooling.

During the next three days, the leaders of all the main UN agencies -- including the secretary general, Kofi Annan -- the 181 government delegations, the head of the World Bank and other global financial institutions, together with Nelson Mandela, Nobel prize winners and other statesman, will hum and haw, hold workshops and plenary sessions and are expected to reaffirm education as a human right and pledge universal primary education by 2015.

But the world community and national politicians are unable to agree an action plan or offer more money -- no heads of state of any rich northern country are coming to Dakar and the message for the poorest must be that education for the poorest one billion people is not a priority.

Meanwhile, an increasingly vocal band of development groups, teachers' unions and grassroots organizations from rich and poor countries is throwing up its hands in horror at what they see as the continuing complacency and impotence of the political and financial elites.

Just 5 billion pounds sterling -- less than a third of what the U.S. spends on cosmetics a year, or the equivalent of just four days of global defense spending, they argue -- would provide free education for all.

Under the banner of the Global Campaign for Education, more than 300 groups from around the world have arrived in Dakar hoping to be shown a global action plan that mobilizes the world to give education to all.

If the politicians and bureaucrats ever doubted the value or simple humanity of giving a child a primary education, they could head to Diomaye Sene Street, a semi-slum in downtown Dakar. There, at number nine, they would meet two 10-year-old girls, best friends Ndieumbe Ngom and Coumba Mdoye.

Ndieumbe has never been inside a school and lives with her parents and four brothers and sisters in a single, rotting wooden shack. Her mother has no work and her father earns less than 1.50 pounds sterling a day selling western cosmetics in the street. Every penny earned goes on food and rent.

Ndieumbe is bright and desperately wants to go to school but however much her parents know that education is the only hope she will have to escape life in the slums, there is nothing they can do.

In the past 10 years, largely due to International Monetary Fund constraints on spending, the massively indebted Senegalese government has been forced to charge parents for books, pencils, teachers' salaries and paper.

The US$ 40 it would cost to send Ndieumbe to school for a year may as well be $400,000.

Coumba lives next door in the same courtyard. Her parents have work and live in markedly better conditions. Every morning the two children walk round the corner arm in arm to the local primary school. Coumba goes through the door, Ndieumbe returns home to cook and clean. At the end of the day, the two children meet again to play.

"I feel very sad when Coumba goes to school," says Ndieumbe. "I want to learn, I want to be a teacher. If I am to help my family =I must have a job. I do not want to sell cosmetics."

Coumba picks up a slate and in three seconds has added 25 + 19, and then 38 + 27. Ndieumbe recognizes only the 2 and the plus signs. But with Coumba's help, Ndieumbe has learned to count to 100 and speak a bit of French, Senegal's second language.

She knows, too, how to add, but cannot yet write the figures. She cannot write her name but her father, uneducated himself, is teaching her the Arabic alphabet.

Coumba loves school. "I learn many things," she says. "Going to school is like waking up. Today I learned maths and conjugations. I feel very sorry for Ndieumbe and other children I know who do not go to school. I'd like to help them learn, to teach them to write letters. I want them to learn so they can help their parents."

The difference between the two friends is already marked. Coumba is more confident, open and proud of what she can do, Ndieumbe is shy and retiring. Coumba wants to go to university like her eldest sister, Ndieumbe doesn't know what a university is. Coumba has a sense of a life beyond poverty. Ndieumbe's life is defined by the home where she must work eight hours a day. "But I want knowledge," she says.

"The gap between children with and without education increases as they get older," says Ibrahima Faye, who teaches at a primary school 124 miles from Dakar. "Education gives confidence and independence, it allows people to participate in society," he says.

So great is the demand for education in his village, he says, that 750 children attend his school and classes must be doubled up. Even so, about 10 percent of all children in the village cannot afford to go. These children, he says "will be divided from society, from other families and in their own communities".

Ibrahima is paying for his own children's education as well as that of a 10-year-old boy from a family of subsistence farmers. "Life is getting more and more expensive," he says. "The modernization of society means that families need more money, and therefore work.

"Education is the only way that they can get it. When some people get education and others don't, the poor just become poorer and poorer. It means the rich profit from the situation and the gaps in society are emphasized. People must make huge sacrifices to send children to school."

The same story is repeated across Africa and the world. In the copper belt of Zambia, mothers are paying 70 percent or more of their family's incomes to hire teachers and set up their own schools.

In Brazil, the landless have been forced to bypass the non- existent state education whose budget mostly goes to the middle classes and elite.

From South Africa to the Philippines, Bangladesh and Peru, parents are turning to self-help schemes and making the most extraordinary sacrifices to educate their children.

Back on the former slave island of Goree, Thioro Fall teaches science at Senegal's most elite school, the Bao academy for girls, which draws on the most brilliant youngsters from Senegal.

The school has 30 teachers for 180 students, computers, theaters and a library. The teachers help pay for the poor students. All will go to university and many, says Mr Fall, will get scholarships to study abroad.

He says: "It goes without saying that a lack of education today is the new slavery. Anyone without education today, in the new millennium, is like a slave.

"In fact it's worse than slavery. It's unforgivable."

-- Guardian News Service