Boris Johnson and Kenyan leader meet to rally world on education

Boris Johnson Hosts Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta
Kenyan leader Uhuru Kenyatta and Boris Johnson shake hands at 10 Downing Street
Getty Images

Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta and Boris Johnson rallied world leaders on Wednesday to step up efforts to provide life-transforming education to tens of millions more children.

Co-hosting the two-day Global Education Summit in London, they issued the appeal as the pandemic continues to wreak a devastating impact on many youngsters’ lives around the globe.

At the peak of global school closures, 1.3 billion children, including 650 million girls, were out of education, according to experts, and many of them will never return to the classroom.

Ahead of the in-person summit at Battersea Evolution on Thursday, President Kenyatta said: “Even before the pandemic, we were facing a global education crisis. Now, exacerbated by Covid-19 and its knock-on effects on learning, we are in a make-or-break situation, where progress previously made is at risk of becoming undone.”

He added: “We know that girls have been disproportionately affected. It has compounded the barriers to an education they already faced: child marriage, gender-based violence, female genital mutilation and teenage pregnancies. We risk a lost generation of girls.”

He also emphasised the opportunity to tackle the digital divide so that “all children can access quality education”.

Mr Johnson stressed: “Educating the world’s children, and girls in particular, is the single greatest investment we can make for the prosperity of our societies.

“I am determined that young people will be at the vanguard of the global effort to build back better from the pandemic. Our role as world leaders is to give them the life chances they need.”

As part of the UK’s presidency of the G7 group, the Prime Minister announced at the summit in Cornwall that £430 million in UK aid for the Global Partnership for Education. Mr Johnson and Mr Kenyatta were today holding talks at Chequers on UK-Kenyan co-operation and other issues.

They are urging governments to contribute to raise $5 billion (£3.6 billion) over the next five years to get 175 million children into learning.

Britain has offered 817,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses to Kenya to address the pandemic.

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