Washington, DC — "Education is the best anti-poverty strategy," said Gordon Brown, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer joining World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, Norway Development Minister Hilde Johnson, Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin and representatives from Oxfam at a press conference, Sunday, to announce a new push aimed at "education for all".
A World Bank pilot program will select 10 poor nations for development of "the best approaches" to achieving universal primary education by 2015, one of the "Millennium Development Goals" set by the United Nations. Tanzania, Malawi and Senegal are among the nations being considered.
According to Bank figures, 125m children, 53 percent of them girls, and 74 percent living in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, do not go to school. HIV/Aids, which is expected to kill 10 percent of Africa's teachers, adds to the continent's education difficulties.
Norwegian Development Minister Hilde Johnson called the plan - the first concrete strategy to grow out of the Millennium Development Goals - a breakthrough. "We now hear finance ministers, development ministers with the World Bank's leadership talking about education and providing education for all the kids in the world, it actually shows, in a way, the slogan that the times are a'changing."
But "the question now is, will the rest of the world rally around and make this action plan a reality?" asks Phil Twyford of Oxfam. The anti-poverty group will be working with the World Bank on the education effort. He called for the Bank to put up a US$1 billion "down payment".
To demonstrate the need, Twyford points to Tanzania, which abolished school fees in January. As a result, he says, "school enrollments have doubled. 1.5 million kids turned up in school. Classrooms are bursting at the seams. Unless Tanzania gets the kind of urgent support from donors that it needs, this bold initiative could end in frustration."
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So far only Germany and the Netherlands have said they will support the pilot program, which is expected to cost between US$2.5bn and US$5bn. Twyford said Oxfam will seek crucial endorsement and financing from the G8 nations during their Canada meeting in June.
Meanwhile, protests were held throughout the weekend in Washington, on various issues. Globalisation remained a focus, with protestors rallying at the World Bank on Saturday and at the Washington Monument on Sunday to denounce "global capitalism" for working against the world's poor. "There will always be a role for those who tell us we haven't done enough," said Bank president James Wolfensohn of the protests Friday, "but I wish they would change their tone." The dominant theme of protest was, however, Israeli action against Palestinian settlements and camps on the West Bank.
Bank officials and delegates were generally applauding the success of their meetings as the weekend ended. But they failed to resolve a dispute between the Bank and the Bush Administration which has demanded that the World Bank make grants to poor nations instead of loans that have to be repaid. European nations are opposed to such a policy, saying it would drain the Bank's resources.
Speaking to reporters, Britain's Secretary for Development Clare Short complained that the U.S. stance "delayed considerably" efforts to increase Bank resources.
