Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-11-Speech-2-137"
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"en.20000411.6.2-137"2
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"Mr President, I appreciate that wide-ranging coverage of the issues by Mr Corrie. I would like to concentrate on my view that poverty eradication in Africa must begin with children and the realisation of children’s rights.
The Cairo summit will be followed up by another forum in Dakar on basic education. The need for basic education is the single most important cause of global poverty. Therefore, we need to ensure that girls in particular have equal access at least to educational advantage. We can see that education will deliver, it will stimulate the economy, it will offer opportunities to control population and increase health awareness. Dakar is an opportunity to deliver on internationally agreed targets.
The EU should put its political will behind universal primary education by the year 2015. Clearly commitments made a decade ago have not materialised. Africa is falling deeper into mass illiteracy and poverty and being further marginalised from mainstream developments in the economic and democratic fields. In sub-Saharan Africa more children are out of school now than a decade ago. 40 million African children today are not attending school. One third of the classrooms in Africa do not even have a blackboard. They have no toilets. 70% of their schools do not have any clean water. Teachers are under-qualified, often unqualified, and they struggle without pencils, exercise books or blackboards, often trying to teach children who are simply too hungry to listen or concentrate.
Julius Nyrere, one of Africa’s most famous teachers, in those post-independence, optimistic days, said education is not a way of escaping poverty, it is a way of fighting it. Some of you may be aware that Julius Nyrere spent his spare time translating Shakespeare into Swahili. But that man’s wonderful dreams were lost. He lived to see one third of African men illiterate and two thirds of African women.
I urge the Commission and the Council to make the link between poverty eradication and basic education. The benefits for us all will be seen in increased child life expectancy, cuts in population growth and improvements in farm production. We have the blueprints and I urge all of those with the political will to take action, to deliver for the children of Africa."@en1
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