Gestures not enough to teach the world

The right to education

Larry Elliott and Victoria Brittain

Friday September 8, 2000

The Guardian

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 6bn, 880m 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 conference in Dakar that promised that every child would be inside a classroom by 2015 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 $8bn (J5.6bn) 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 Jontien declaration of 1990, which called for universal education by 2000 but failed to marshal the necessary resources to turn the vision into reality.

Britain’s Clare Short is a strong opponent of earmarking special funds for education, arguing that the problem for developing countries is not a lack of finance but a lack of the proper policies. She believes calls for a fund are simply “gesture politics”.

Tony Blair, who has pledged that the government’s “education, education, education” manifesto should apply to the whole world, failed to move the subject up the agenda of the Group of 7 at its meeting in Okinawa in July. Instead the G7 focussed on closing the digital divide between North and South: the gap in access to new technology between rich and poor countries.

This is a worthwhile objective. One third of the world’s population live in countries which have fewer telephone lines in total than Italy. Around 90% of telecommunications traffic takes place between rich countries, while 50% of the world’s population have never made a phone call. As the knowledge economy takes root in the coming years, this lack of access will take a heavy toll and widen the divide still further.

Bringing telephone lines and computers to poor countries sounds like an excellent idea – particularly to those hi-tech companies lobbying for wider access for their products – but it is putting the cart before the horse. A computer is not much use to a child who cannot read.

Without determined international action these children, their families and their countries will be marginalized in poverty, probably irrevocably, and Fortress Europe will increasingly find it impossible to keep the most desperate individuals out.

And all these figures underestimate the full extent of the literacy problem, perhaps by as much as half. They are based on school attendance figures, and ignore the problem of the numbers of children who leave school functionally illiterate. In Africa, where increasing numbers of children will be out of school unless there is emergency action by western institutions, a new generation of adult illiterates is set to create a dangerously marginalized section of society and fire the wars of deprivation like Sierra Leone’s.

Even in the industrialized world illiteracy is a problem, with almost a quarter of young adults in the US having difficulty reading all but the simplest of texts. In the developed as in the undeveloped world low literacy invariably means poverty and the spiraling problems of drugs, violence and insecurity which go with it.