Suite or Slum? Ghana's Serious Shortage of Affordable Housing

Due to a lack of mid-price housing, urban Ghanaians are often confined to two options: plush penthouse or crammed shanty town.

When filmmaker Leslie Amponsah was shown round a squalid and waterlogged property up for rent in a suburb of Accra, Ghana, he was quoted a monthly rate that was barely affordable, even on a decent income, and was told that the landlord wanted two years up front. The estate agent would also be charging a 10% commission, he was reminded, and was already being paid a fee for every viewing.

As frustrating as this experience was, it is nothing out of the ordinary in Accra. Amponsah endured fruitless searches for months before finding a new home, and tales of middle-class Ghanaians looking aimlessly for suitable properties in Accra are common. "Even when you have the money to rent, it's terrible,” says Amponsah, "that is how ridiculous it is.”

Accra is in the grip of a serious housing crisis. Ghana’s economy has been one of the fastest-growing in the world in recent years, but growth has completely outstripped investment in infrastructure. Despite rising incomes, the housing market has been neglected and this has led to a yawning gap in middle-income properties. On the one hand, 90% of Ghana’s urban housing is informal, much of it in slums on the outskirts of cities; on the other hand, plush gated communities and mansion complexes have sprung up to cater for the new super-wealthy.

Many middle-income Ghanaians, faced with a choice between exorbitantly-priced real estate and slum conditions, have thus been forced further and further out to the edges of cities where house prices and landlords may be more reasonable. The resulting commute, however, can stretch to three hours, and many leave their homes well before dawn to beat the heavy traffic.

Profit-seeking rent-seeking

Around half of Ghana’s 25 million residents now live in urban areas, and suburban sprawl has subsumed towns near major cities. To deal with these growing urban populations, UN Habitat estimates that 5.7 million new rooms – or 2 million new households – will be required by 2020; “If these are to be successfully supplied, 3.8 new rooms must be completed in every minute of the working day for ten years,” the report calculates dramatically.

However, Ghana is nowhere near this target, and the only significant housing developments being built in the heart of Accra are luxury apartments affordable to only a tiny minority of the capital’s 2.3 million population.

"This is without question the biggest problem that Accra faces," says Nat Amarteifio, who was mayor of Accra from 1994 to 1998. He blames much of the housing problems he and his successors have faced to IMF-backed structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which were designed to take the economy out of state control, limiting public spending and investment. These policies inhibited the government’s ability to meet Ghana’s housing needs and instead left the property market in the hands of private companies.

"The market is naturally interested in returns on investment,” says Amarteifio, “and private firms are much more assured of that when dealing with upper income buyers than in building housing for the masses.”

Indeed, private developers have tended to focus heavily on building homes to sell to wealthy Ghanaians who can afford $500,000 apartments, and investors who want to be able to charge $3,000 a month in rent.

A tale of two Accras

The result of this is that Accra tells a tale of two cities. In East Legon, flash mansions owned by footballers, retired politicians and senior civil servants sit alongside informal neighbourhoods in which residents have to put up their own streetlights and dig their own sewage systems. In suburbs like Haatso, homes protected by high walls and electrified razor-wire share space with crammed ad hoc slums.

As you move further out, the tarmac roads start to thin out, replaced by deeply-rutted dirt tracks. Soon the only signs of infrastructure are the towering electricity pylons surrounded by the ruins of the half-built houses that were there first.

Keep going, however, and the number of building sites grows as you drive through neighbourhoods named after the small towns they subsumed – Ashongman, Abokobi, Pantang – until there horizon is dotted with thousands of half-built houses perched on the foothills that mark the border between Greater Accra and the mountains of the Eastern Region.

Those half-built houses – on the outskirts of the region, let alone the city – are the single biggest investment most Ghanaians are likely to ever make. And most are built gradually, some over the course of as much as a decade, because land and construction materials – 80% of which have to be imported – are prohibitively expensive.

According to developers, this is one of the main reasons building affordable housing in Ghana is so difficult. According to Alex Tweneboa, former president of the Ghana Real Estate Developers’ Association, even modest homes can cost around $300 per square-foot to build, taking into account the money spent on building the necessary infrastructure and the costs of construction.

"The biggest factor of all is money," he says. Furthermore with lenders seemingly unwilling to invest much faith in the housing market, he adds: "As a developer, if I'm borrowing in Ghana, I will end up paying close to 40% a year in interest."

Who will build?

The result of all this is that most real estate is out of reach for the vast majority of Ghanaians. Tweneboa, for example, revealed that he had recently sold properties in an Accra suburb to high-ranking employees at banks and insurance companies and claimed that even they could only buy the $30,000 homes because their employers provided cheap mortgages. This suggests the government’s plans to build around 9,000 homes at $25,000 will also price out all but the wealthiest groups of Ghanaians. And according to Tweneboa’s research, a more realistic cost for a home for Ghanaians on middle incomes would be closer to $5,000, and that is with large subsidies and a generous mortgage.

But who will build these homes? The government has largely deferred to the private sector, but as Amarteifio insists, “There's simply no way in which the private sector can meet the demand." According to Tweneboa, there is also little profit-making incentive for private firms to want to build affordable housing.

However, the stakes for Ghana and its urban residents are high, and until a solution is found, shanty towns will continue to pop up in even the fanciest of neighbourhoods, slumlords will carry on making a killing renting wooden shacks and repurposed shipping containers to the limitless stream of people looking for a place to live, and the intense competition for the few decent and affordable properties that do exist in the city will mean rents will keep on rising and rising.

This Article was originally published on Think Africa Press and was written by Yepoka Yeebo- a reporter and photographer currently based in London. See and read more of her work on her website. http://www.yepokayeebo.com/

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A Girl’s Escape

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — She was a 13-year-old girl who said she was beaten daily by strangers who forced her to work unpaid in their home, and she wanted to escape.

Marilaine was one of 200,000 or more Haitian children called restaveks, typically serving as unpaid maids in strangers’ homes, working for room and board. It is a vast system of child trafficking that is often characterized as a modern form of slavery. I followed Marilaine for a week in Haiti as she tried to flee, find her parents and start life over — and this is her story.

Marilaine grew up in a remote village where no family planning or public schooling is available, one of 12 children to impoverished parents who later separated. As Marilaine tells the story, one day when she was 10 years old, she walked to her father’s house to ask him to help pay her school fees. Instead, he dispatched her here to the capital to work as a restavek, a Creole term used to describe child laborers, without even telling her mother.

“My father didn’t want to spend money on my school fees,” Marilaine explained.

As is common for restaveks, Marilaine slept on the floor and woke up at 5 each morning to clean the house, fetch water and wash dishes. She says she was beaten daily with electrical cords.

Marilaine was allowed no contact with her family. Once, she says, she tried to run away but was caught and beaten. At school, she often cried, and she had scars on her arms and legs from beatings.

Yet the restavek system isn’t always slavery. Sometimes the child gets more food and education than would have been the case in her own family (two-thirds of restaveks are girls). Marilaine says that she was fed properly and that she was also allowed to attend a free afternoon school.

Many Haitian restaveks are treated much worse. One 12-year-old restavek I interviewed said that she rises at 4 each morning to get everything ready for “the princesses,” as she calls the teenage girls in the house. Everyone in the house beats her, she says, and they refuse to let her see her mother for fear that she might run away.

An aid group called the Restavek Freedom Foundation helped Marilaine escape her home and find refuge in a safe house for restaveks. The mood was festive in the beautiful home as the dozen girls living there cheered Marilaine’s arrival and hugged her.

Marilaine picked up a book, telling me that she wasn’t allowed to touch books at her old house. She tried on new clothes. She slept in a bed.

But the family that Marilaine had been working for was furious. I visited the woman of the house, and she insisted that she had never beaten the girl and that Marilaine had in effect been kidnapped from her.

The leader of the neighborhood association, Junior Pataud, offered a conflicting defense. “In Haitian culture, it’s normal to beat a child,” he said. “But that’s not the same as mistreatment.”

The next day, the neighbors gathered angrily outside the school Marilaine had attended, blaming it for the girl’s escape and threatening to set fire to it unless Marilaine was returned. After hours of tense negotiations, the police averted a riot.

A few days later, I drove for several hours with the police and the Restavek Freedom Foundation to Marilaine’s village. When Marilaine stepped out of the car, family members and neighbors were stunned. They had assumed that she had died years ago.

Yet the reunion was a letdown. Marilaine’s mom didn’t seem at all thrilled to see her daughter again, and Marilaine quickly made it clear that she wanted to return to the safe house in the capital so that she could attend a good school. The police told Marilaine that she would have to stay in the village with her family, and she burst into tears.

The authorities will probably eventually let Marilaine return to the Restavek Freedom Foundation safe house, but the episode was a reminder that helping people is a complex, uphill task — and that the underlying problem behind human trafficking is poverty.

One way to fight such human trafficking would be to provide free and accessible birth control, so that women like Marilaine’s mother don’t end up with 12 children that they struggle to feed.

Another would be to provide free public education, so that parents don’t feel that the only way to get schooling for their children is to send them off as restaveks.

That’s why what’s at stake in fighting global poverty isn’t just poor people’s incomes. It’s also dignity and freedom — and the right of a girl to grow up in something better than quasi slavery.

My New Year’s wish: May Marilaine in 2014 finally find freedom and an education

This Article was published originally in Nytimes and was written by  Nicholas Kristof

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Never again? : Crimes Against Humanity In North Korea

North Korea's leadership is committing systematic and appalling human rights abuses against its own citizens on a scale unparalleled in the modern world, crimes against humanity with strong resemblances to those committed by the Nazis, a United Nations inquiry has concluded.

The UN's commission on human rights in North Korea, which gathered evidence for almost a year, including often harrowing testimony at public hearings worldwide, said there was compelling evidence of torture, execution and arbitrary imprisonment, deliberate starvation and an almost complete lack of free thought and belief.

The chair of the three-strong panel set up by the UN commissioner on human rights has personally written to North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, to warn that he could face trial at the international criminal court (ICC) for his personal culpability as head of state and leader of the military.

"The commission wishes to draw your attention that it will therefore recommend that the United Nations refer the situation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [the formal name for North Korea] to the international criminal court to render accountable all those, including possibly yourself, who may be responsible for the crimes against humanity," Michael Kirby, an Australian retired judge, wrote to Kim.

At a press conference to launch the report, Kirby said there were "many parallels" between the evidence he had heard and crimes committed by the Nazis and their allies in the second world war. He noted the evidence of one prison camp inmate who said his duties involved burning the bodies of those who had starved to death and using the remains as fertiliser.

"When you see that image in your mind of bodies being burned it does bring back memories of the end of world war two, and the horror and the shame and the shock," Kirby said. "I never thought that in my lifetime it would be part of my duty to bring revelations of a similar kind."

Holding up a copy of the report, Kirby said other nations could not say of North Korea, as happened with the Nazis, that they did not know the extent of the crimes: "Now the international community does know. There will be no excusing a failure of action because we didn't know. It's too long now. The suffering and the tears of the people of North Korea demand action."

Asked how many North Korean leaders and officials could ultimately be held responsible, Kirby said it could reach the hundreds.

The inquiry heard public evidence in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington. Among more than 80 witnesses, along with 240 people who gave confidential interviews to avoid reprisals against relatives in North Korea, were escapers from the country's feared prison camps, including one who reported seeing a female prisoner forced to drown her newborn baby because it was presumed to have a Chinese father.

The near-400-page main report concludes there is overwhelming evidence that crimes against humanity have been, and are still being, committed within the hermetic nation.

It says: "These are not mere excesses of the state: they are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded. The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world."

North Korea refused to participate in the investigation or allow the commission to visit, and immediately rejected the findings, calling them "a product of politicisation of human rights on the part of EU and Japan in alliance with the US hostile policy".

The report recommends that the UN refer the situation in North Korea to the ICC. While North Korea is not a signatory to the treaty that created the ICC, the UN security council can extend the court's remit in exceptional cases.

In practice this would probably be vetoed by China, which has close links with North Korea and maintains a policy of sending back people found to have fled across the border, despite widespread evidence that they face mistreatment and detention on their return. The commission's report heavily criticises China for this, saying the policy appears to breach international laws on refugees.

The report concludes that many of the crimes against humanity stem directly from state policies in a country which, since it was formed from the division of Korea, has been run on a highly individual variant of Stalinist-based self-reliance and centralised dynastic rule. The inquiry found "an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion", with citizens brought into an all-encompassing system of indoctrination from childhood.

Perhaps the most chilling section describes the vast network of secret prison camps, known as kwanliso, where hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are believed to have died through starvation, execution or other means. It is estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are still held, in many cases secretly

The report says: "Their families are not informed of their fate or whereabouts. Persons accused of political crimes therefore become victims of enforced disappearance. Making the suspect disappear is a deliberate feature of the system that serves to instil fear in the population."

Other particularly disturbing parts of the report detail the experiences of women who are interned on their forced return from China when it is believed they could be pregnant from a Chinese man, something which contravenes North Korea notions of racial purity. Aside from the drowning of the newborn baby the panel heard testimony of forced abortions, sometimes using chemicals or beatings, or surgical procedures without anaesthetic.

Other sections of the report cover abuses such as the lack of food. While natural disasters were in part to blame for a famine that killed huge numbers in the 1990s, the report notes that the North Korean state has "used food as a means of control over the population". It adds: "It has prioritised those whom the authorities believe to be crucial in maintaining the regime over those deemed expendable."

The commission also condemns the almost complete lack of freedom of movement for North Koreans both within their country and abroad, the discrimination of the so-called songbun system, where the state politically classifies people based on their birth and family, and the large-scale abduction of people from other countries, mainly Japan and South Korea.

The report says the abuses clearly meet the threshold needed for proof of crimes against humanity in international law. t adds: "The perpetrators enjoy impunity. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is unwilling to implement its international obligation to prosecute and bring the perpetrators to justice, because those perpetrators act in accordance with state policy."

Asked whether he believed the report would change anything immediately in North Korea, Kirby recalled a UN mission he led in the early 1990s to report on human rights abuses in Cambodia, some years before that country's eventual UN-led tribunal on Khmer Rouge crimes. He said: "Bearing witness, collecting the stories, recording them and putting them there for future use can sometimes bear fruit a little later."

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON "THE GUARDIAN"  AND WAS WRITTEN BY Peter Walker

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Children of the Congo who risk their lives to supply our mobile phones

in unsafe mines deep underground in eastern Congo, children are working to extract minerals essential for the electronics industry. The profits from the minerals finance the bloodiest conflict since the second world war; the war has lasted nearly 20 years and has recently flared up again.

In that same 20-year period, the concept of corporate social responsibility in the west has evolved from companies giving employees a gym and having some photo opportunities for the chief executive, to addressing human rights throughout the supply chain, yet ICT companies such as Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Apple still cannot guarantee there will be no child labour used in the manufacturing of their products. There is now an increased focus on the supply chain as a crucial element if a company wants to call itself socially responsible.

For the last 15 years, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been a major source of natural resources for the mobile phone industry. This special relationship has caused incalculable damage.

I have never experienced anything like what I saw the first time I entered the mines of Bisie. Armed groups had made a simple gate of sticks, and everybody going in or out had to pay them money. Around 15-25,000 people were trapped inside this village made of mud and plastic bags.

It was like stepping into the front yard of hell. Women everywhere were calling out their offers of sexual services to bypassers as if they were selling vegetables. Boys as young as 12 stared at us with layers of dried mud on their still-childish cheeks, shy of the bright light after days underground digging out valuable minerals. Everything brought into the village is taxed at the gate; a bottle of water cost several dollars, a kilo of meat cost $12. But because it is more expensive to leave, people stay inside just to get a meal.

There is still hope

It doesn't have to be this way. Fortunately, there are some very powerful tools business can use to help change this. If the will is there, plenty can be done to improve things.

Due diligence must come first. When the electronics industry cannot guarantee that there are no blood minerals in their products, it is because they often do not know who they subcontract to. A guarantee requires that one actually knows one's supply chains. Companies must appoint in-house representatives to get out of their offices and be agents who travel down the supply chain. They should be able to tell the truth about the circumstances when they return – preferably with cameras. Video can be a powerful tool when it comes to understanding the need for policies.

If there are too many weapons in circulation, and it is not safe for an issued agent to investigate whether a mine uses child labour, that is likely to be a very good indicator that one should not source from that particular area.

Transparency is a fantastic tool if one wants to be socially responsible. Warlords finance large-scale killing of civilians with minerals that get melted in Malaysia and then disappear into the undergrowth of subcontractors. Transparency is absolutely crucial when you want to track them down. These supply chains must be published.

It is time that the electronics industries got together to take real action. There is even an industry body set up to help: the Global e-Sustainability Initiative works for responsible ICT-enabled transformation to a sustainable world.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been associated with the electronics industry's intoxicating cash flows since the middle of the 1990s; the industry has claimed the lives of more than 5 million people. The case of this country is special, but natural resources becoming a curse for developing countries is far from rare.

We need transparency in business to spot the grim truth. Some things have not changed very much since colonial times, but instead of theft sanctioned by empires, it's now controlled by markets. Especially in Africa, companies operate with super-cynical exploitation of natural resources. Value simply disappears out of the continent without benefiting the local people.

The funding needed for a boost of the developing world lies within the countries themselves, but the power lies with businesses who are willing to pay a fair price for the natural resources they import. For every euro the international community spends on development and humanitarian aid in Africa, 10 euros are going the other way in the form of natural resources. That is certainly not corporate social responsibility.

this article was originally published in 'The Guardian' and was written by Frank Piasecki Poulsen

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10 Barriers to Education around the world

Children in poor countries face many barriers to accessing an education. Some are obvious – like not having a school to go to – while others are more subtle, like the teacher at the school not having had the training needed to effectively help children to learn. Here we list 10 major barriers to education, and look at how the Global Partnership for Education is working to overcome them. By taking action to encourage the UK Government to make a strong commitment to the Global Partnership, you’ll be helping to break down these barriers.

1. A lack of funding for education

While the Global Partnership for Education is helping many developing countries to increase their own domestic financing for education, global donor support for education is decreasing at an alarming rate.  Total aid delivered for basic education has dropped for three years in a row, resulting in a 16% reduction between 2009 and 2012. Aid to basic education is now at the same level as it was in 2008. This is creating a global funding crisis that is having serious consequences on countries’ ability to get children into school and learning. The 59 developing countries that are GPE partners face a funding shortage of $34 billion over the next four years for primary and secondary education. Money isn’t everything, but it is a key foundation for a successful education system.

The Global Partnership is aiming to raise $3.5 billion in new investment from donors like the UK into the GPE fund, as well as increases in other aid to education, and is also asking developing country partners to pledge increases in their own domestic financing. If these pledges are made, GPE estimate that they can leverage a further $16 billion in spending by developing countries on education, aiming to close the global education funding gap.

2. Having no teacher, or having an untrained teacher

What’s the number one thing any child needs to be able to learn? A teacher of course. We’re facing multiple challenges when it comes to teachers. Not only are there not enough teachers globally to achieve universal primary education (let alone secondary), but many of the teachers that are currently working are also untrained, leading to children failing to learn the basics, such as maths and language skills. Globally, the UN estimates that 1.6 million additional new teachers are required to achieve universal primary education by 2015, and 5.1 million more are needed to achieve universal lower secondary education by 2030. Meanwhile, in one out of three countries, less than three-quarters of teachers are trained to national standards.

Since 2011 the Global Partnership for Education has helped to train over 300,000 teachers worldwide. With a successful replenishment, GPE can make teacher recruitment and training a top global priority for delivering quality education for all.

3. No classroom

This seems like a pretty obvious one – if you don’t have a classroom, you don’t really have much of a chance of getting a decent education. But again, that’s a reality for millions of children worldwide. Children in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are often squeezed into overcrowded classrooms, classrooms that are falling apart, or are learning outside. In Malawi, for example, there are 130 children per classroom in grade 1 on average. It’s not just a lack of classrooms that’s the problem, but also all the basic facilities you would expect a school to have – like running water and toilets. In Chad, only one in seven schools has potable water, and just one in four has a toilet; moreover, only one-third of the toilets that do exist are for girls only – a real disincentive and barrier for girls to come to school.

Since 2011 funding from the Global Partnership for Education has helped to build or rehabilitate 53,000 classrooms. If they receive the money they need from donors like the UK, the GPE can ensure that many more children are able to learn in a decent classroom.

4. A lack of learning materials

Outdated and worn-out textbooks are often shared by six or more students in many parts of the world. In the United Republic of Tanzania, for example, only 3.5% of all grade 6 pupils had sole use of a reading textbook. In Cameroon, there are 11 primary school students for every reading textbook and 13 for every mathematics textbook in grade 2. Workbooks, exercise sheets, readers and other core materials to help students learn their lessons are in short supply. Teachers also need materials to help prepare their lessons, share with their students, and guide their lessons.

Between 2011 and 2014, the Global Partnership’s developing country partners are on track to distribute 55 million textbooks thanks to GPE support.

5. The exclusion of children with disabilities

Despite the fact that education is a universal human right, being denied access to school is common for the world’s 93 million children with disabilities. In some of the world’s poorest countries, up to 95% of children with disabilities are out of school. A combination of discrimination, lack of training in inclusive teaching methods among teachers, and a straightforward lack of disabled accessible schools leave this group uniquely vulnerable to being denied their right to education.

Children with disabilities are one of the Global Partnership for Education’s priorities over the next four years. With a successful replenishment, the GPE will be able to work with its 59 developing country partners to promote inclusive education. The Global Partnership has pledged that by 2018, 80% of its partner countries will have explicit policy and legislation on education for children with disabilities.

6. Being the ‘wrong’ gender

Put simply, gender is one of the biggest reasons why children are denied an education.  Despite recent advances in girls’ education, a generation of young women has been left behind. Over 100 million young women living in developing countries are unable to read a single sentence. At least one in five adolescent girls around the world is denied an education by the daily realities of poverty, conflict and discrimination. Poverty forces many families to choose which of their children to send to school. Girls often miss out due to belief that there’s less value in educating a girl than a boy. Instead, they are sent to work or made to stay at home to look after siblings and work on household chores.

Ensuring girls can access and complete a quality education is a top priority for the Global Partnership for Education. Since its inception, GPE has helped 10 million girls to go to school. 28 of GPE’s developing country partners have succeeded in getting equal numbers of girls and boys to complete primary school. With a successful replenishment, GPE aims to increase the percentage of girls completing primary school from 74% to 84% by 2018.

7. Living in a country in conflict or at risk of conflict

There are many casualties of any war, and education systems are often destroyed. While this may seem obvious, the impact of conflict cannot be overstated. In 2011, around 50% of all of the world’s out-of-school children were living in countries affected by conflict. Conflict prevents governments from functioning, teachers and students often flee their homes, and continuity of learning is greatly disrupted. Worryingly, education has thus far been a very low priority in humanitarian aid to countries in conflict – only 1.4% of global humanitarian assistance was allocated to education in 2012.

Since its establishment, the Global Partnership for Education has committed 61% of its funds to conflict-affected and fragile states — higher than most other donors. Of the 29 million children GPE hope to get into school between 2015 and 2018, 23 million are living in fragile and conflict-affected states. The Global Partnership is also right now looking at how to further improve its operations to accelerate support to countries in emergencies or early recovery situations.

8. Distance from home to school

For many children around the world, a walk to school of up to three hours in each direction is not uncommon. This is just too much for many children, particularly those children with a disability, those suffering from malnutrition or illness, or those who are required to work around the household. Imagine having to set off for school, hungry, at 5am every day, not to return until 7pm. Many children, especially girls, are also vulnerable to violence on their long and hazardous journeys to and from school.

By investing in new schools, more schools, the Global Partnership for Education is helping to reduce the distances children have to travel to get to school for a decent education. With pledges of support from donors like the UK, the GPE can help ensure no child has to endure such long journeys just to fulfil their basic right to education.

9. Hunger and poor nutrition

T

The Impact of hunger on education systems is gravely underreported. Being severely malnourished, to the point it impacts on brain development, can be the same as losing four grades of schooling. Around 171 million children in developing countries are stunted by hunger by the time they reach age 5. Stunting can affect a child’s cognitive abilities as well as their focus and concentration in school. As a result, stunted children are 19% less likely to be able to read by age eight. Conversely, good nutrition can be crucial preparation for good learning.

The Global Partnership for Education seeks to address national priorities as decided by developing country governments themselves. Where under-nutrition is a major concern, the GPE is stepping in to address the problem. For instance, in Lao People’s Democratic Republic, an innovative School Meals Program funded by GPE is addressing students’ nutritional deficits as well as promoting self-reliance, community ownership, and sustainability through integrated local food production and the active involvement of community members. As a result, Lao PDR has seen increased school enrollment (especially for girls), improved nutritional status, reduced household expenses, and stronger student-teacher-parent and community relations.

10. The expense of education (formal or informal fees)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes clear that every child has the right to a free basic education, so that poverty and lack of money should not be a barrier to schooling. In many developing countries, over the last decades governments have announced the abolition of school fees and as a result, seen impressive increases in the number of children going to school. But for many of the poorest families, school remains too expensive and children are forced to stay at home doing chores or work themselves. Families remain locked in a cycle of poverty that goes on for generations. In many countries in Africa, while education is theoretically free, in practice ‘informal fees’ see parents forced to pay for ‘compulsory items’ like uniforms, books, pens, extra lessons, exam fees or funds to support the school buildings. In other places, the lack of functioning public (government) schools means that parents have no choice but to send their children to private schools that, even when technically ‘low fee’, are unaffordable for the poorest families who risk making themselves destitute in their efforts to get their children better lives through education.

The Global Partnership for Education’s primary purpose is to help strengthen the national education systems of the poorest countries, building their capacity to deliver quality affordable education for all citizens. The GPE specifically priorities the most marginalised children out of school, supporting countries to find ways to provide even the poorest families with access to basic education. If donors like the UK pledge funds to the GPE this year, the Global Partnership aims to support 29 million more children to get a good education.

This article was published originally in GlobalCitizen.org

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