United Kingdom Provides £100 million for Education
BBC reports on how the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) Girls’ Education Challenge will provide £100 million ($129 million) in funding to help 175,000 of the world’s poorest, most marginalized girls get an education.
BBC says 63 million girls worldwide are out of school, and more than half of them are in sub-Saharan Africa.
The £100 million will be spent mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Selected countries include Ethiopia, Nigeria, Malawi and Rwanda.
There will also be programs in Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Nepal.
The DFID says that the Girls’ Education Challenge will “help girls who have dropped out or never attended school due to family crises, poverty, child marriage or early pregnancy. The funding will also be used to continue the Girls’ Education Challenge’s support for 1 million disadvantaged girls across the developing world.”
The Challenge will:
- Provide Android tables and offer smartcards that monitor attendance and incentives for families to send their daughters to school.
- Deploy satellite broadband to improve connectivity in rural areas.
- Set up an interactive learning platform to let students to access lessons in English, math, and life skills.
The Challenge-related and United Kingdom-sponsored iMlango program for girls in Kenya already includes more than 200 schools, with 3,240 computers and reaches 150,000 children.
