Mr President, as you suggested, this report is meant to focus on the real opportunity that the UN Special Conference on Children and Children's Rights which takes place later this month gives this Parliament to focus on a fundamental way in which we can tackle global poverty. It is an opportunity for us not only to give a profile to this subject but also to call for action. Let me set out what the targets are: free and compulsory education for all, halving adult illiteracy by 2015, eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary schools by 2005 and extending learning opportunities for adults and young people and improvements in the quality of education provided. We are quite tired of hearing about development targets. They are set and they are endless. We know the ‘whys’ for all these development concerns. What we from the Committee on Development and Cooperation are asking is ‘how’ we are going to deliver on these targets. The subject is at the heart of the global strategy that we, in our committee, discuss on poverty. The EU clearly has a key and central role to play here. Clear commitments were made at Dakar in Senegal last year. But neither from the EU nor anyone else really are we getting practical strategies. I was a teacher myself for 30 years, mostly in primary education so I think I am quite justified in having a passion about looking at the reasons for this crisis. One in six of the world's population are functionally illiterate. One hundred and thirty million – one in five – of the total number of children are not in any kind of primary education. One terrible statistic is that two-thirds of those are little girls. Their learning situation is terrible. Many of will have seen children trying to learn sitting under a tree with not even a blackboard to assist the teacher. When we talk about information technology we are often talking about children who have never even held a pencil in their hand, never mind being likely to sit at the keyboard of a computer. In these schools too the quality of their education is often affected by the fact that they are not taught in their own language. There is a clear link between illiteracy and income poverty. Average incomes in a country mirror very clearly the levels of access to education. There is a clear link between child mortality rates and the level of parental education. A 10% increase in girls' enrolment in primary school would bring a substantial improvement in infant and maternal mortality rates. And yet we see aid from developed countries to basic education being slashed from budgets across the globe. It is only 1% of the total. Developing countries themselves take insufficient interest in the importance of education. The sub-continent of India spends less than 1% of GDP on education. As far as the EU is concerned, I hope the Commissioner will agree that this is not enough. I hope you are not going to state in your presentation that all of this will be incorporated into existing procedures. We need an answer from the Commissioner on how we intend to implement the goals. I would like to hear how he intends to improve coordination of the national indicative programmes for Cotonou and about our involvement in the steering committee working on education in Africa. I also know that there is a promise of a communication on basic education from the Commission during the Belgian Presidency. I would like to know when we might expect to see that. Let me just touch on one or two issues. Priority for girls obviously, and I suspect that Mrs Junker will speak about that. Last in, first out; that is what happens to girls. Girls have a low status and therefore there is no priority for getting them into school. I would like to see a lot more training in ministries in developing countries and concrete programmes to ensure that we get girls into school. The impact of HIV is enormous. There are millions of AIDS orphans in the developing world and in a country like Zambia there are more teachers infected annually with HIV than they are able to train to put in their schools. These are clearly very critical issues for us to discuss. Meeting the targets looks difficult. Is there sufficient political commitment in current circumstances to ensure that we will get all the girls into school by 2005? The reality is, and I hope that people will admit this very clearly at the UN Conference the week after next, that as things are going all of these targets are unachievable. Meeting the target of universal primary education looks extremely difficult. I would like to know from the Commission how its work in trying to achieve these targets includes NGOs and civil society and all those people who are involved in the Global Education Campaign. It is a very successful, active and dynamic campaign. I would hope that the European Commission is very much engaged with them but I suspect that is not the case. According to the Global Education Campaign, the targets on education would require USD 8 billion a year. This is the equivalent of four days of global military spending and 9 minutes of international currency speculation. Therefore it seems to me that if the commitment was there, we could deliver. It is a price worth paying. The current inequities that I have described are untenable and certainly indefensible.

Political group: PSE