CALGARY (CP) - Leaders attending next month's G-8 summit in Alberta should ensure free, basic education for all African youth who now account for one-third of the world's uneducated children, a parliamentary committee was urged Wednesday.
Randy Rudolph, an organizer of a public forum to be held in Calgary during the summit called the G6B, told the Commons committee that Canada should commit to educating five per cent of the 110 million African children who aren't in school.
"Education for all is achievable and affordable," Rudolph told the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
"What is lacking is simply political direction."
Leaders from the Group of Eight highly industrialized countries are meeting on June 26-27 in Kananaskis, Alta., a wilderness area 100 kilometres west of Calgary.
The committee is on a 12-city tour across the country, listening to Canadians talk about the G-8 agenda as well as Canada's new security challenges after last September's terrorist attack on the United States.
Rudolph told the committee that well-intentioned politicians too often break grandiose promises to educate African children.
He pointed to a meeting two years ago of officials from 180 countries in Dakar, Senegal, when politicians made goals to cut Africa's adult illiteracy by 2015 and to eliminate educational gender disparities by 2005.
"Two years after Dakar, we have almost no progress to show in those areas," Rudolph told the committee, adding that the number of uneducated children has increased in recent years.
"Education in Africa is off the rails," he said.
Rev. Clint Mooney who represents a group called Churches and Corporate Social Responsibility, said they want G-8 leaders to promote an international code of business ethics to ensure human rights.
"The code would require regular, comprehensive and public disclosure of corporate practises by corporations operating outside of their country of origin," Mooney said.
Such a code would suspend business operations for those working in conflict zones where human rights can't be guaranteed, he said.
Cathy Little of RESULTS Canada, an anti-poverty group, told the committee that the G-8 leaders must make AIDs and HIV in Africa a priority issue if they want to help the problem-riddled continent.
Liberal Manitoba MP John Harvard asked Rudolph if Canada should attach conditions to education money offered to Africa.
"Should we insist that some of our own western values - be it democracy, pluralism, respect for women - be respected in the programs of support that we might provide?" Harvard asked.
"I, for one, would be somewhat reluctant to give a helping hand to . . . governments that have no respect for women."
Rudolph said that it would be preferable to educate both genders but if a country's policy was to only send boys to school, then Canada should still help that underdeveloped country.
"If the principal is to truly provide education for all, then I think we need to . . . overlook these issues," he said.
"If there are leaders who provide bad direction, bad counselling for their people, do we say that the people themselves don't deserve assistance?"
Prime Minister Jean Chretien, the host for the G-8 leaders, has three priorities for the summit - strengthening global economics, fighting terrorism and building new partnerships to develop Africa.
The committee is to give the federal government recommendations for developing the agenda for the G-8 summit. Its report is to be tabled in the House of Commons in early June.
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