UK Prime Minister
Boris Johnson on June 11
announced the UK has pledged £430 million in support of education across the
world’s poorest countries, targeting over 1 billion children worldwide.
اضافة اعلان
In the first session of the UK’s G7 Summit, leaders discussed how
to build back better from the coronavirus pandemic in a way that creates
opportunities for everyone. Ensuring all girls get a quality education is
central to that goal.
“The best way we can lift countries out of poverty and lead a
global recovery is by investing in education and particularly girls’
education,” Johnson said at the summit.
The
coronavirus pandemic has caused an unprecedented global
education crisis, with 1.6 billion children around the world out of school, at
its height. Girls have been hardest hit as the pandemic compounded the
obstacles to education that girls already face, including poverty, gender-based
violence and child marriage.
The support announced by the UK today will go to the Global
Partnership for Education (GPE), the largest fund dedicated to education in
developing countries.
Since its establishment in 2002, GPE has contributed to the largest
expansion of primary and lower secondary schooling in history, getting 160
million more children into school. In countries where GPE works the number of
girls enrolling in school has increased by 65 percent.
Next month the UK and Kenya will co-host the Global Education
Summit in London, which aims to help raise $5 billion to support the work of
the GPE over the next five years. The funding boost pledged by the UK and other
G7 countries will go a considerable way towards achieving this goal.
Getting girls into school is one of the easiest ways to lift
countries out of poverty and help them rebound from the coronavirus crisis — a
child whose mother can read is twice as likely to go to school themselves and 50
percent more likely to be immunized. With just one additional school year, a
woman’s earnings can increase by a fifth.
Supporting girls’ education is therefore a cornerstone of the UK’s
G7 Presidency. Today G7 leaders reaffirmed their commitment to targets set at
the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in May to get 40 million more girls into
school and 20 million more girls reading by the age of 10 in the next five
years. The work of the GPE will be instrumental in helping achieve those
targets.
Today the Prime Minister called on fellow leaders to make their own
major commitments to achieve these targets, as well as the ambition to ensure
every girl in the world receives 12 years of quality education.
Italy and the European Commission have already made pledges of €25
million and €700 million respectively to GPE and further announcements on
funding are expected from G7 partners in the coming days.
The £430m of new aid funding announced today will go towards GPE’s
work in 90 lower-income countries that are home to 1.1 billion children over
the next five years. In time GPE aim to train 2.2 million more teachers, build
78,000 new classrooms and buy 512 million textbooks.
This funding pledge for the Global Partnership for Education is
separate to the £400m of UK aid which will be spent this year on bilateral
efforts to increase girls’ access to education.
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