Global Education for the Most Marginalised

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. It is also a great pleasure to follow all three of the previous speakers in this debate.

I wish to contribute a comment in my role as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to Nigeria. Many Members who have heard me speak before about it will know that I look on that job not simply as one about trade but as one with a wider perspective of the UK’s relations with Nigeria. Education has been a great factor in that.

I will first comment on the figures mentioned, such as our commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income to fund foreign aid. If we think about that for a minute, it means that for every £100 that we earn, only 70p goes to foreign aid. That is all that the commitment is, so I find it amazing that it generates such hostile press for some people in the UK. When I looked at the DFID figures—I praise the Department enormously for its work—education took up something like 11% of the budget. I do not know whether the figure remains the same, but it is about 11%, which is a substantial contribution.

Like the two previous speakers, I want to comment on the Send My Friend to School programme. My hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) made a comment about the Hansard report, and I found that the response of No. 10 to submissions from schools involved in that programme has been outstanding. It has been very supportive of the whole initiative, which has gone down incredibly well with the schoolchildren.

On that basis, let us look at what we fund and how we should fund it. The first point to make is that, although it is difficult on 11% of the budget to segment the market, there is a need to improve girls’ education, in particular in Nigeria. I have been very pleased to see programmes undertaken by DFID to improve girls’ education. I noticed one in particular, which was intended to improve the social and economic basis on which girls had opportunities to exist in the country.

Why is the role of girls in Nigeria important? We do not have to look far. In recent news programmes, we have seen the kidnap of so many girls in Nigeria, and their use and misuse by Boko Haram, and that is the origin of my fears. I have also made a much broader point to the leaders of that country over a number of years: they will not defeat Boko Haram by military means; they will have to defeat it by giving the people of the area something that they do not already have. One such thing that they can give is education, which can play a great role in that.

It is also important to look not only at education itself but at the other side of the coin, which is the provision of training for teachers. In Nigeria, one impressive project is to train another 66,000 effective mathematicians as teachers, its particular effect being to improve the lives of up to 2 million children. That is something we should all be proud of, because we are talking not just about people—the girls and the teachers—but about the quality of schools, of teachers and of the learning, which all need to be improved.