S.Africa holds education summit before final, trying to harness attention World Cup commands

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S. Africa holds education summit before WCup final

PRETORIA, South Africa — South Africa’s president read fellow leaders a lesson before inviting them to join him at Sunday’s World Cup final.

Just hours before the Dutch-Spanish final, President Jacob Zuma convened leaders from Burkina Faso, Kenya, Togo, Mozambique, the Netherlands and neighboring Zimbabwe at an education summit in the capital.

At the meeting, he urged African leaders to ensure parents don’t have to pay school fees or buy uniforms, factors that keep children out of school. He also called on leaders from developed countries to honor pledges to support education in poor countries.

“We convened this summit because of our strongly held view that the first soccer World Cup tournament on African soil should have a lasting legacy,” Zuma said at the meeting, which was also attended by U.N. and international sporting officials.

“The most important investment in the future of any nation is in education,” Zuma said. “No legacy could be higher than that.”

The summit is the culmination of 1GOAL, a campaign supported by football’s governing body FIFA to use the attention the World Cup commands to publicize the need to get more children into school. An estimated 72 million children aren’t in school and millions more do not have access to quality education, according to 1GOAL.

1GOAL has brought in luminaries from sports, entertainment and politics to push the campaign — Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, Colombian pop star Shakira, Hillary Clinton and others.

“Football can create chances where there is no hope, and this will remain our mission into the future,” FIFA President Sepp Blatter said at Sunday’s meeting.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said the financial crisis could not be an excuse.

“Destroying education and health systems by cutting budgets is not the way to achieve sound economic recovery,” he said.

Ensuring all the world’s children have a chance to finish at least primary school is one of eight goals set at a U.N. conference in 2000. The Millennium Development Goals, which include halving poverty and halting the spread of AIDS as well as the education target, were to be met by 2015. With five years to go, the struggle to meet the deadline will the subject of a U.N. conference in September in New York.

UNESCO, the U.N. cultural and educational and cultural organization, is urging donors to step up aid for education in Africa. It says aid for basic education in sub-Saharan Africa has dropped from $1.72 billion in 2007 to $1.65 billion in 2008, even as more children enroll in schools.

“Education is Africa’s most powerful antidote to poverty,” UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said in a statement last week lauding Zuma for holding Sunday’s summit. “Leaders must seize this occasion to put their full support behind providing Africa’s children with a quality education.”