Our new global fund can fix that
Once a child refugee Àeeing Sudan, and now a prize-winning American entrepreneur, Manyang Kher is using a lifetime of hard knocks, a never-give-up attitude and some rapidly learned skills to change the world.
At the age of just three, he was caught up in his country’s civil war. During a raid, his village was razed to the ground. His father was killed and his mother vanished, presumed dead. Terri¿ed, Manyang ran for his life and kept running, according to The Guardian.
He met others escaping. He became one of the 20,000 Lost Boys of Sudan who made a gruelling 1,600km trek to Ethiopia then spent 13 harrowing years scrimping and surviving in refugee camps.
Finally, at the age of 17, his life changed. Having reached America as an unaccompanied minor, he learned English, and after graduating from college, he founded a remarkable project in Richmond, Virginia, called Humanity Helping Sudan.
Under its banner, his 734 Coffee Company roasts coffee beans from Africanowned farms in the Ethiopian Gambella Province that was once Manyang’s home.
I have come across numbers symbolizing uncomfortable facts before: 7.84 is a theatre company (founded by the British playwright John Mcgrath in 1971) that was set up to remind people that seven percent of the population owned 84 percent of the country’s wealth. In this instance, the number 734 is equally symbolic. It exactly matches the geographical coordinates on the map of the Gambella — seven degrees north and 34 degrees east — highlighting the zone where children’s need for education is greatest.
Now, 80 percent of 734’s pro¿ts are going to help 200,000 refugee boys and girls living in the area.
Today, with Manyang’s support, UN Secretary General António Guterres will back a game-changing plan under which millions of children will be guaranteed a free education without having to depend on charity. On the same day, the World Bank and all multilateral development banks will make a joint statement to take forward what is an education revolution. The Global Partnership for Education and the refugee agency Education Cannot Wait see it as complementing their important work. A petition calling for countries to ¿nance it has already been signed by 1.5 million young people.
The International Finance Facility for Education (IFFED) aims to provide a brand new $10 billion stream of ¿nance which, alongside additional resources from national governments, could create 200 million school places and help us to end child marriage, child traf¿cking and child labor by offering free universal education right across developing countries. When up and running, IFFED will be the biggest single educational investment in history.
And there is good reason why it is urgently needed. More than 260 million children and young people are not going to school today — nor will they go to school any other day in the near future.
Even more shocking is the number of children dropping out of school by the age of 12 or learning so little due to the poor quality of education.
The problem is so severe that in 2030, across all low- and middle-income countries, more than half of the world’s children and young people — 825 million — will not have the basic skills or quali¿cations needed for a modern workforce.
Today, 750 million people over the age of 15 are unable to read and write, and two-thirds of them are women. And in 20 countries more than half the population is illiterate.
* Gordon Brown is the UN special envoy for global education and a former UK prime minister