Africa agreement promises education for millions more children

A campaign to educate millions of children in Africa is expanding to reach millions more after it beat its target of raising more than $50 million. The United Nations-backed Schools for Africa partnership, aimed to raise money to build schools in rural Africa. As well as clean, hygienic and well-built classrooms, the partnership aimed to ensure clean drinking water and washing facilities at each of the schools it supports, to help improve the health of the children.

Set up in 2004 by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) and the Hamburg Society to raise money to help more than four million children in Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa and Zimbabwe, the partnership signed an agreement on the expansion in New York today. Under the new agreement, the Schools for Africa initiative will be extended from 6 to 11 countries in eastern, southern, western and central Africa. “I am personally delighted at how much progress has been achieved,” said UNICEF Director of Programmes Dr Nick Alipui. “But the message must also contain a critical sense of urgency. Millions of children cannot wait any longer.”

"Education is a human right,” Dr Alipui said. “Children have the right to a quality basic education which is central to human development and a main component for achieving all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)," he said, referring to the targets set by the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 to ease a bunch of social problems such as poverty, hunger and lack of access to health care and education, all by 2015.

In 2006, 101 million children, more than half of them girls, were not going to primary school, according to UNICEF's latest State of the World's Children report. Almost half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. At this rate, millions of children especially girls, children with disabilities, orphaned and other vulnerable children will still be excluded and be denied their fundamental right to education in 2015.

The funds will be used to but textbooks, chairs, desks and tables, safe drinking water, health checks, school meals, immunization, as well as to rehabilitate or build new classrooms and separate washing areas for girls and boys. There will also be special care and support for orphans and other vulnerable children and money to forge stronger links between schools and communities through student governance bodies and parent-teacher associations.