A five-day Sub-Regional Education Financing Campaign workshop is underway at Coco Ocean Resort and Spa in Bijilo with participants from The Gambia, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Declaring the five-day workshop open, the Minister of Basic and Secondary Education, Fatou Lamin Faye, said "the workshop is the third in a series" on education financing for education advocates in Anglophone West Africa.
Forty years ago, she noted, the nations of the world, through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declared that everyone has a right to education. Minister Faye said there are over 100 million children two-third of whom have no access to lower basic schooling while more than 700 million adults two-third of whom are illiterate women.
She stated that more than 100 million children and countless adults fail to complete basic education programmes. "Worldwide," she continued, "Lower Basic school enrolments increased by 82 million pupils since 1990 with 44 million more girls in school by 1998."
She said the increases in access and equity in education cannot be devoid of the political commitment and support from development partners in the provision of financial resources to the education sector.
“There is clear evidence that such support must increase in portfolio if they are to meet the MDGs relative to education and the EFA targets by 2015," she said, adding: "Financial resources mobilization is a fundamental requirement in education, particularly basic education."
Hon. Faye said knowledge in educational financing "is a sine qua non for any successful endeavour in the advocacy for additional financial resources sufficient to target every child in school to pursue and complete an uninterrupted education of good quality".
Other speakers on the occasion included Omar Ndure, chairperson of EFANet Gambia; Omar Badjie, an official of ActionAid The Gambia; Boaz Waruku of ANCEF, and Samuel Ngoua Ngou of EI.
