Sustainable Development Goals

Mark Williams Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to say a few words, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to the request of the hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) to hold this important debate.

As chair of the all-party group on global education, I will restrict my comments to the cause of global education. Members of the House would be forgiven, given the enormity of the refugee crisis, for being unaware that Tuesday was International Literacy Day. I echo the words of the director general of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, who rightly described literacy as “a human right”, “a force for dignity” and

“a foundation for cohesive societies and sustainable development”.

How right she was that promoting literacy must be at the heart of the new agenda. By empowering individual women and men, literacy helps to enhance sustainable development across the board, from better healthcare to food security, eradicating poverty and promoting decent work. Few would deviate from that sentiment, and it is borne out in goal 4 of the new sustainable development goals.

The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) is right to describe the millennium development goals as a success. We should not characterise the past 15 years as a failure, but we must be mindful of the need to build on those goals and of the challenge. We need to set the goals for the next 15 years in a spirit of challenge.

There are 250 million children in schools who are not learning basic skills, despite the fact that half of them have spent at least four years in school. There has been success in getting many millions of children into school. The hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) and I went on a trip to Nigeria to see the policies that are getting children who were out of school into school. However, we need to look with renewed vigour at the quality of the education in those schools and at the value we place on the teaching profession across the world. I say that as a former primary school teacher here.

There is a continuing gender divide between boys and girls, although great strides have been taken and DFID has undertaken excellent work to bridge the gap. There remain 774 million illiterate adults in the world—a decline of just 1% since 2000. Some 58 million primary school children remain out of school and 59 million adolescents remain out of secondary school. UNESCO has described this as a global learning crisis, and it is right. In short, this is a period of vastly unfinished business.

If the SDGs are to be effective, they will demand more stability and predictable funding from existing funding mechanisms. The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) spoke about the different funding cycles, with the 15-year cycles of the targets and the three-year cycles under which DFID operates.

[Mrs Helen Grant]

Funding is essential. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that attracting private finance and embracing the BRIC countries is important?

[Mr Williams]

Given the enormity of the task before us, that is an inevitability. There will be a mix of funding prospects and I will move on to talk about one of them now.

I saw at first hand the approach of the Global Partnership for Education in Tanzania, as well as the funding it secured. It built a partnership between government, civil society, international organisations, students, teachers, foundations and the private sector, and got them all working together. But—and this is a big but—despite the UK making the largest pledge of any donor, the Global Partnership for Education fell well short of its £3.5 billion target. The UK pledge is contingent on the UK making up no more than 15% of donor contributions, and there is concern about the conditionality of that pledge. Although it has already been called for this afternoon, it is critical that the Government continue to put as much pressure as they can on other countries throughout the world to make pledges or to increase their pledges, specifically in the area of education.

Time is short, but I want to reflect quickly on one other issue. One omission from the millennium development goals in respect of education was the issue of disability and access. There was no mention in 2000 of disability. I commend DFID for its disability framework, which is now being enacted, but it is staggering to reflect that disability was not mentioned then. It is mentioned in the sustainable development goals, but, if we are to meet meaningful targets on disability and access to education, we need the data as well. I visited schools in Nigeria and Tanzania, and I will shortly go to Kenya with the all-party group. I do not want to see what I have seen elsewhere, which is little evidence of provision for the disabled or differentiation in treatment. We need data to make a judgment on success and where we need to go.

Finally, SDG 4 makes impressive reading. Many of the overriding omissions in the MDGs—matters we have been campaigning for over many years—have been dealt with and are now included. I do not want, in 15 years’ time, anybody to be talking about vagueness, vacuousness or a lack of enthusiasm in the targets. I therefore suggest that, when the goals are accepted, DFID put in place an overarching strategy for SDG delivery with reviewing and reporting mechanisms, as we have heard this afternoon, so we can assess whether the targets are being met and the wish list, the entitlements of the goals, are practically delivered on the ground for the benefit of humanity.