UN News:
Mr Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the UK, Special Envoy of the United Nations on Global Education – 1.5 billion U.S. dollars, you’ve just announced, is going out towards education in lower middle income countries around the world. How transformational, how innovative is this?
Gordon Brown:
Well, education has suffered. It’s always the first to be cut in a crisis, and it’s the last to be restored when the crisis is over, and we want to break down the barriers to greater education funding, because 260 million children are not going to school every day. 400 million children will leave education for good at the age of 11, and 800 million children will leave education entirely without any workable qualifications. So we’ve got to do something about this lost generation of children. The money that we’ve raised in this case is very substantial, given the lack of funding for education recently. One-and-a half billion (dollars) will get thousands, indeed tens of thousands of children to school, and we’ve done it in a new way. Think of education funding as grants or loans, but also think of a word “guarantees.” So if a rich country can give a guarantee. Than the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank or the African Development can borrow on the strength of that guarantee. So for one pound of what’s called paid in capital, you can get 27s on that one dollar, you can get $27.00 for resources, yes, so. So it’s a very efficient way. The most efficient way possible of raising money.
UN News:
You are saying here in New York, even if I give $1.00 in New York on the ground somewhere in Asia, somewhere in. Africa. That dollar, somehow magically, in education funding terms, would be equal to what $27.00. How is that?
Gordon Brown:
Basically you’re giving a grant of $1.00. We’re borrowing on the strength of that because we’re borrowing as very credit worthy institutions, we can get a large amount of leverage on the capital, and that means that for the grant money plus guarantees. So let’s say there’s $1.00 of grant and maybe $10.00 of guarantees you can get $27.00 of funding.
UN News:
My sisters did not get a chance to go to school, but they supported me from the village school in Ghana, all the way to Glasgow University for my Master’s (degree).
Gordon Brown:
Congratulations, (thank you) and it’s a tragedy your sisters couldn’t get the same opportunities.
UN News:
Which is why I want to ask you about how much of this is gonna be focused on girl child education?
Gordon Brown:
Girls’ education is the biggest challenge of all, particularly, by the way, in Afghanistan, where girls are denied education altogether. But girls don’t get into education or leave quickly because of child marriage, sometimes because of child labour, sometimes because of trafficking, but often because there’s no school for them to go to and their parents simply cannot afford the costs, whether it be in terms of the education facility itself or travel or anything else. So, we are determined that we are the generation, the 1st generation in history, where every girl can go to school and that’s why the additional funding is necessary. You cannot educate someone for nothing. In an African country, the cost of teachers’ salaries, but also the rising population of young people mean that you’ve got to spend far more on education now than you did a few years ago. More people, more young people, but also we’ve gotta have trained teachers. We can’t just have untrained teachers or teachers [or teachers who’re officially, teachers, but don’t turn up to teach, we’ve gotta have good buildings, we’ve gotta use technology, artificial intelligence, AI, could also help us transform education in Africa and the poorest countries because it’s like having a tutor by your side. And if you have a good teacher plus the tutor provided by artificial intelligence like a personal guide by your side, a coach if you like to help you on. Then it could be cost effective to introduce artificial intelligence as a backup for teachers.
UN News:
You’ve mentioned Africa, but $1.5 billion globally for the next two years, 2024-2025, but you are starting in Asia. Explain.
Gordon Brown:
The reason is that the Asian Development Bank has got a programme, and they are ready to put money into Bangladesh or Pakistan or India or other countries. We are talking to the African Development Bank, and we want the same arrangement and that will happen in the next few months and we’ll talk about the Islamic Development Bank, and we’’ll talk to the Inter-American Development Bank; all of them can play a part in extending education. And we are ready, we want to do more in Africa, because Africa is the continent where the greatest gap between what is needed and what is available is obvious to most people, and so many young children, perhaps 3/4 of children in Africa live without getting final educational qualifications. And that means that Africa can’t offer the skills, that would get them the new data centres, the call centres and so on and so forth that are gonna be very important to the next wave of the industrial revolution. I believe that if we could have skilled, educated African young people, then Africa could be a booming continent in the future.
UN News:
I think that is a very solid assessment, because everybody talks about Africa’s youthful population. Again, I’m sorry to zero in on Africa, with over 1.3 billion people on the continent now. People are saying when you release this money, and it gets to the ground, how do you ensure that it doesn’t end up in the wrong places [pockets] through corruption? What specific projects would you like to see where this [funding] really transforms lives as you are desiring to do?
Gordon Brown:
Well, clearly, governments have got a responsibility. When they are investing in education, they must ensure proper accountability and there is not a secret about how to do it. You can actually do it by monitoring. You can do it by collecting information. You can do it by proper assessment and so on and so forth. So, we, like the global partnership for education, are providing, if you like, the wherewithal by which you can monitor, you can show that money is well spent, and you can show you’re getting value for money. So, the whole secret of this is that the international facility will work with the development banks and with the governments, and this will then get down to the local level, because there are so many great teachers, there’s so many teachers that actually are in a position to do more, headteachers that can actually expand the educational opportunities for kids, and we want to give them the best possible help [in the future.] And if we can use technology in Africa, because Africa is behind, because the investment has not been made, and too many children feel that school is not offering them anything. If we can do more in Africa, it will be the combination of finance, matched by new technology, matched by the training of teachers, and that’s where you get the results on the ground, that’s where the outcomes start to expand and you actually get sort of real benefits. So, you’ve got kids leaving school with the qualifications to get the jobs and then you’ve got companies that say, I want to invest in Africa because I know I’ve got a trained workforce ready to do things, and therefore, Africa can do far better in the future, even with the pressures of population, we can actually do a lot.
UN News:
Please explain. There is a spin off here: if Africa’s youthful population, through your work as a great advocate for global education, if the young people in Africa are well educated, I guess, they are being paid well in Africa, I guess the problems we see of young people or Africans dying in the Mediterranean trying to get to Europe, that would not be necessary. Explain this.
Gordon Brown:
Yeah. This is the most tragic thing that’s happening, that there are people smugglers, basically, people carriers who are making a fortune out of exploiting young people who feel that they can make their fortune in Europe because they can’t do so in Africa. And it is really sad because many of these young people would prefer to stay at home, but they want the opportunity for a job. But if you feel you can be better off poor in a rich country than rich in a poor country, you will tend to want to want to leave.
So, we’ve got to create the job opportunities, and the job opportunities will come from the new industries and new technologies. It’s not going to be the old manufacturing that’s just going to be like China or like Korea before that or like Japan, because many of the jobs are in the digital and in the high technology areas, some of them service jobs and we had call centres for a long time, now the big thing with artificial intelligence is going to be data centres, and data centres need to be powered by electricity, so you need to have infrastructure, and they need to cool, because you need to cool the data as well as you know, have the electricity to power it. So what we need in Africa now is, the combination of more electricity and the ability to power our industries and the possibility of data centres. But data centres will come if we can say, look, we’ve got this young population, we’re going to give them the skills we’re going to give them the opportunity, particularly in this digital area and you can leap forward in a way that perhaps wasn’t possible10 or 20 years ago. So I see huge opportunities, but there’s got to be the investment in education to do it. And I know most government leaders talk about the importance of education now, they’ve got to deliver.
UN News:
Mr Gordon Brown, you sound evangelistic, when I listen to you, and the passion you bring across. Finally, before we go, since you left your job as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you’ve taken on this, with “Education Cannot Wait,” [working on] education, global education: where is that passion coming from? What drives you that you are saying ‘Let me be an agent, using education to solve problems, even poverty alleviation and all this. Where is this coming from?
Gordon Brown:
Well, I think we all want to be ambassadors for hope, and I think just like you are where you are today because of education, I am where I am today because of the opportunities I had in education and I want every single child to have that opportunity for education.
You know, I went to Lebanon some time ago, when the Syrian refugees came to Lebanon, and I asked the young child, as we always do when you’re talking about education, “what do you wanna do, what’s your occupation? What do you wanna do when you grow up?” And this guy said. ‘I want to be an engineer,’ and I said, ‘Why engineer – it’s not that popular these days,’ and he said, ‘an engineer, I want to go back and rebuild Syria.’ And I went to Nigeria and I went with Bono, believe it or not, and we were both at the same school, and we were asking people, as you do, ‘What do you want to do? You want to be an airline pilot and always be surgeon, nurses, doctors, everything.
UN News:
Prime Minister or musician?
Gordon Brown:
No, interestingly enough, nobody wanted to be a politician, and to Bono’s surprise, nobody wanted to be a pop music artiste, but they all had ambition. They all had dreams, like pilots and helping people with their house … a lot want to be medical doctors, and it is possible, that’s the point. There’s nothing that is stopping this, other than the resources to make it happen and getting these resources into place and what we’re doing today just saying we can we can devise and develop plans for more resources. We can help education expand. It’s too often been being neglected. Obviously we’re spending on climate change, we’re spending on health, we’re spending on infrastructure, but we mustn’t ignore that the most precious resource is young people. And you know, my ambition is that in this generation, every single child will go to school. And that’s not happening at the moment. But we gotta do it. And instead of developing some of the potential of some of our young people, in some countries we develop all the potential of all young people in all countries. That’s what universal education is about.
