The Huffington Post – Alister Doyle
“Armed conflicts deprive about 30 million children of education worldwide and governments need to step up investments to make schools safer, partly by widening use of the Internet, Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg said on Monday. Solberg, co-chair of a United Nations group advocating new development goals for the world for 2030, told Reuters that higher spending on education would also benefit health, economic growth and women’s equality. “We still lack 58 million children,” she said of global primary school attendance, which is lagging a U.N. goal set in 2000 of full access for all children by 2015. “Half of them are in areas where there are conflicts.” Girls were far more likely to be kept away than boys. Norway will host an international meeting on July 6-7, to be attended by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, about improving education and reducing threats from groups like the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Boko Haram in Nigeria.”(more)