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Great Lakes (Education Providers)

Mr. Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab): It is a pleasure to speak this morning about this particularly important issue. Few Members are present, but I hope that one or two of my colleagues will pop in in due course.

My former parliamentary colleague, Oona King, who is still my colleague in the Labour party, started the all-party group on the great lakes region and genocide prevention, and it has done a great deal of tremendous work. It is still a staffed group, and some of the staff are present. It is especially important to keep the group going, because we have good contacts with countries across central Africa, especially the great lakes region, and with people in those countries.

It is particularly timely that I have a chance to debate this issue this morning. It covers the whole of Africa and the developing world, although my interest and personal experience relate to central Africa, so I shall focus on that. The lessons can, however, be generalised and applied across the developing world. The United Kingdom holds the chairmanship of the G8 and will, in due course, hold the presidency of the European Union, so we are in a pivotal position and will be able to have an impact on events over the next few weeks.

There has been a great deal in the press about development issues in general, but I want to focus on education. I recently visited three schools in my constituency—St. Mungo's high school, Larbert high school and Stenhousemuir primary school—which were participating in the "Send My Friend to School" scheme, which is part of the Global Campaign for Education. Across the world, children and campaigners have made model friends, each of which represents a child who is missing out on an education. Many of those children are in Africa and, of course, in central Africa.

The campaign is designed to enable school students in developed countries to make the link between their own education, which is, quite correctly, taken as a right, and the lives of the many children of their age in the developing world who have no access to education or who access it only for relatively few years and only for as long as their parents can afford to pay for it out of their meagre resources. On 6 July, at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, which borders my constituency, 1 million models made by schoolchildren and representing children who are missing out on an education will be presented to the leaders of the richest and most powerful nations on earth.

The "Send My Friend to School" scheme is, in effect, the children's element of the "Make Poverty History" campaign, which, as pretty much everyone in this country, including hermits, knows, will reach its climax between the "Make Poverty History" march in Edinburgh on 2 July and the concerts organised by Bob Geldof and others, which will be held on 6 July to coincide with the G8 meeting in Scotland.

The aims of the "Make Poverty History" campaign are worth restating because they come at a remarkable moment of opportunity and leadership for this country, which, as I said, will simultaneously hold the chairmanship of the G8 and the presidency of the EU. The campaign aims to drop the debt, to have more and better aid and to make trade fairer by removing unfair subsidies to producers in developing countries. If the UK can lead the world in delivering, it will enable developing countries to develop. Development implies hospitals and roads, a growing economy, with inward investment, and the rule of law and democratic governance. It also implies education for all, and that, more than any other area of experience, is the point of contact with the lives of children and older pupils and students in developed countries. That is why initiatives such as "Send My Friend to School" and the Global Campaign for Education are so important.

At this pivotal time in our national and international life, we should constantly re-stress that 100 million children have no access to education. Another 150 million cannot finish primary school; in some cases, they have just a few months of primary school. Those, of course, are rolling figures. Their impact is not only personal, bad though that is. The wider impact is that it is impossible for countries to move out of the cycle of poverty and non-development; they are not able to call in sufficient financial or human capital to run their schools. Without an education system to which all children have entitlement, there can be no justice for developing countries.

As a result of war, poverty and the collapse of states. In a region where more than 4.5 million people are thought to have died as a result of conflict and genocide, education is vital for two reasons—it can address the poverty and hunger that are one cause of conflict and it can neutralise ethnic and political divisions.

Education in the region has been hard hit by conflict, and in many parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo it has disappeared. Grass roots organisations have taken the lead in creating a local education structure, which shows that learning is valued, but the biggest problem, especially in the DRC, is the general collapse of the state, which everything from health to roads. According to some estimates, only a third of children attend primary school. Before the civil war began in the late 1990s, at the end of the Mobutu period, the figure was about two thirds, so there has been a substantial decline. The figures are similar in Burundi.

The education system was targeted in the Rwandan conflict of 10 years ago. Teachers and other educated people were singled out for assassination, and teachers were both victims and perpetrators of the genocide in state and, sadly, church schools. Schools were ransacked and destroyed, as was the ministry of education. Many teachers lost their lives. Little documentation or school supplies remain. Hundreds of thousands of households were left headed by children, who as a result did not receive an education. Although in theory education is free, fees and the cost of materials keep many children away from school. Having said that, the Government were quick to re-establish an education system after the genocide, and by 2000 the primary school enrolment rate was 97 per cent. for boys and 95 per cent. for girls. A quarter of men and just under two fifths of women are illiterate.

Access to education is an issue, especially for vulnerable groups. When money is tight, girls are often kept at home, although the figure of 97 per cent. is extremely good for the area, particularly since the reconstruction following the genocide and civil war. In the Congo, 4.6 million children are out of school, of whom 2.5 million are girls, and almost half of adult women are illiterate, compared with about a quarter of males. The gender issue clearly applies as strongly there as it does everywhere else.

Pygmies are another vulnerable group; they tend to be especially poor and find it harder to pay school fees. Pygmy children are subject to bullying from other ethnic groups. The times when families leave their settlements to go to the forest usually clash with the school calendar, so children are often left with relatives in the village. As a result, children miss vital training on how to live in the forest and use it sustainably. The education system in the Congo does not value the understanding that many Babongo or Batwa have of the forest; indeed it conflicts with their being able to pass on their deep understanding of forest use, and it undermines important cultural practices.

Before the genocide the Rwandan education system mirrored and reinforced ethnic divisions in the country, with ethnic and regional quotas. The current view seems to be that formal education in the great lakes region is not a major factor in causing conflict. However, there are problems. In Rwanda, under President Kagame, ethnic classifications have been abolished and discrimination banned, but history, an important subject, is still not generally taught. There have been no new textbooks since 1994, and—this might be a secondary challenge—no agreement on how to present the years of genocide, which will become more important as time passes.

In Burundi, there is a strong geographical imbalance in that southern and central provinces are much better provided for. That is the result of various factors, not least of which is the fact that every president from 1965 to 1993 came from the south. Army officers need at least a secondary education, and the army wields enormous power, so the imbalance has serious political implications. According to International Alert, the

"serious distortions in access to education . . . are one of the primary causes of the conflict"

in Burundi.

In a broader sense, education and training are a crucial part of practical measures to stabilise the region. The training and education of customs officials is seen as an important part of efforts to fight uncontrolled flows of arms and natural resources fuelling armed groups in areas such as the Kivus and Ituri. The training of the civil service and the new national army are vital to re-establish the state, to reduce corruption and the abuse of power and to bring some measure of development to the region.

In Rwanda, the education system is strong compared with that of Burundi and the Congo and pays its teachers relatively well. The Department for International Development, as the Minister might mention, has a substantial programme in Rwanda and is contributing to teachers' salaries by giving direct budget support. It might do the same in the DRC and Burundi in due course.

In the great lakes, and in the DRC especially, the education sector needs enormous support for materials, salaries, buildings and administration—the stuff of education in the United Kingdom, and which seem fairly prosaic, but there are almost no resources in many parts of the country. Indeed, there are literally no resources at all in parts that I visited, particularly at points further away from the main conurbation in Kinshasa and the east, and from the smaller conurbation, if we can call it a conurbation, around Goma.

Schools would attract many more children if they provided meals and were genuinely free. Education is enormously important if the region is to recover from the devastation of the past decade and is to avoid a repeat of past conflicts. The UK is in a strong position to help.

I know that the Minister will have several things to say about the many very good things that the UK Government are doing in conjunction with our European Union allies and other developed states, but I must tell him of my experiences in the Congo and the reason for my interest in the subject. I first became interested in the Congo on a visit there as part of the all-party group with colleagues from the Labour party and the main Opposition parties. We were shown around a series of educational and health assets in Kinshasa and Goma and at points some distance from Goma. When one visits these places, one has a particular idea of what words such as school, hospital or clinic might mean. In the Congo, however, they do not look much like schools or hospitals. We visited one hospital that was just a collection of huts. One hut had a bed in it and was described as a ward. A woman was dying in it, entirely unnecessarily. That experience branded me, but it was a crucial political lesson.

We visited several schools, which again in essence were collections of huts. Invariably, four or five children would be sitting on the floor. Some would have slates, if their parents could afford them, but others would not and would share or look on. Around the top of the huts—it was the same in each place that we visited—there might be four or five children in the classroom and 30 or 40 children peering through the gap between the walls and the roof. Those were the children who did not have access to any kind of education because their parents did not have the means to fund it. In good times, those parents had the agricultural wherewithal to exchange to pay teachers to teach their children, but quite frequently their children were withdrawn after a very short period.

Such visits—in this instance conducted under the auspices of the all-party group, but funded by organisations such as Save the Children, Christian Aid and the Tearfund—bring home the importance of tackling the whole issue of education and other aspects of infrastructure development in Africa.

The example of the Democratic Republic of the Congo helps us to understand the immensity of the human and technical problems facing people seeking to build a new infrastructure in an African country with much potential but very little material wealth. Until the early 1960s, the infrastructure of the DRC, which was then the Belgian Congo, began to develop. That period ended—this is relevant, at least historically—when Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was elected but murdered shortly thereafter. There were schools in the more developed areas, in Kinshasa, and there were universities too.

Following the death of Patrice Lumumba, we had many years of President Mobutu, who constructed a classical African dictatorship, whereby the natural mineral wealth of the country was looted to buy mansions in Brussels and elsewhere. Those of us who were thinking about spending ill-gotten gains—which none of us would have, of course—might not choose to buy a mansion in Brussels, so perhaps he had bad taste as well as a great deal of loot stashed away. Essentially, that was what this classical African dictatorship used its resources for, and certainly not for infrastructure or education. It was the epitome of the corrupt dictatorship, which led to so many people to hold the wrong-headed view today that African states are intrinsically incapable of achieving progress. That, of course, is so far from the truth.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo's own Parliament there is an all-party group that mirrors our group—the imaginatively named all-party group for the UK. Its members told me that, after several years of armed conflict and many years of mismanagement, the Congolese education system has deteriorated considerably. There is, however, some room for hope because there is a degree of stability under President Kabilla. Resources are extremely modest, and most of them come from outside the country. Only about 1 per cent. of people in the DRC have taxable employment, and most of them work for NGOs. There is a limited tax base and, outside the main cities, almost no funding for schools and education and hospitals.

School attendance has been weak According to my parliamentary colleagues in the Congo, almost half the children who are eligible do not attend school—about 48.3 per cent. About 4.5 million eligible children are at present outside the education system. Only 25 per cent. of children reach year 5. The figures are much worse for provinces directly affected by the civil war and, of course, for girls, where the gender element kicks in.

The Congolese Government at present allocate about only 1 per cent. of their budget to the building of school infrastructure, further weakening the imbalance between the needs of the people and the resources available. In order to improve school admissions and to increase the number of eligible children attending school, the focus needs to be on the rehabilitation of the school infrastructure. Funds are needed to build new schools to cope with the great demand among the Congolese people—reflected well across central Africa—for a decent education.

The emergence of a rehabilitation and reconstruction programme, which was put together with the international donor community, calls for the rehabilitation of 265 schools—about 25 schools per province. That would restore hope and contribute, with other social programmes, to improving the living conditions of Congolese children, but is clearly, ultimately, a drop in the ocean.

The university sector in the DRC is fairly modest in its operations but it has some capable and dedicated academics, working, as one can imagine, with incredibly meagre resources. After independence, the Congo had three universities. Lovanium university was built by the Catholic Church and the University of Kisingani by Protestant missionaries—historically there has been a heavy Church influence in the provision of higher education in the Congo. The only public tertiary education institution was the Université Officielle du Congo. The universities were essentially merged under Mobutu in 1971 for political reasons that are now somewhat opaque. They were run down, had no lights or running water and were not what we would describe as universities.

Since the end of the civil war and the beginnings of a degree of hope and reconstruction in the DRC, a modest amount of funds has been generated and directed towards higher education. However, one needs a higher education sector as one needs tertiary and vocational sectors in between primary and secondary education to ensure that countries such as the DRC are capable of developing talent and working on their infrastructure. Retaining their talent also requires funding to keep people employed in jobs so that as soon as they are trained they do not disappear abroad to earn more money in South Africa or the UK. That is an issue for the UK Government to address and I know that the Minister and other Departments—particularly the Department of Health—are aware of that.

Central Africa has often been passed over by the media because it does not hold much strategic interest for developed countries such as Britain. A great deal is being done by non-governmental organisations such as Save the Children, Christian Aid, the Tearfund and the Red Cross, which all have an impact on education, whether it be through the provision of water, the establishment of infrastructure or helping to fund teachers. As Britain chairs the G8 and serves—through the Government and the Prime Minister—as president of the European Union, we are in an unparalleled situation. The actions that we take now and over the next few weeks will have the most fundamental impact on the quality of life of people in countries across Africa and the developing world such as the DRC, Burundi and Rwanda.

I know that my hon. Friend the Minister will make some remarks about Government policy in some areas that I have mentioned—fundamentally, primary education. However, we must not forget what might be considered to be the more rarefied areas—the higher reaches of higher education—because they also matter in the development of the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi. I look forward to hearing what my hon. Friend the Minister has to say.

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