Educating girls is a social development that works. Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund, urged the representatives at the Dakar World Education Forum to give adequate support to education. During school hours in the teeming cities of the developing world, they can be seen, shining shoes, washing cars, pushing trolleys or collecting refuse. And those are the lucky ones. Without basic education or proper training, street children are easy prey for drug dealers and pimps.
Poverty denies schooling, but exclusion from education in turn perpetuates the cycle of poverty.
Education is the best, and often only means by which a child can break the downward spiral of deprivation. 100 million of them live in developing nations. In other cases the reasons for exclusion may be more mundane but the effect is just as pernicious, such as an African child, usually a girl, kept at home to tend crops, fetch water or look after younger siblings. A tangled web of socio-cultural, economic and physical factors excludes children from education. But for real advances to be made, more effective partnerships between non-governmental organisations and governments must be built.