Send My Friend to School 08

This year’s campaign sent Gordon Brown off to the G8 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan with 250,000 ‘missing out’ cards telling the world leaders to make education for all a reality.

Send My Friend 08 also saw:

• School children across the UK and the world break the record for the World’s Biggest Lesson – over 7.5 million people were involved.
• Hundreds of MPs visit their local schools to learn more about the campaign.
• Schools across the country take part and demand that every child should be able to go to school.

With this level of commitment from children across the UK and the world as part of the Global Campaign for Education, it was disappointing to see the G8 leaders seemingly backtrack on promises.

They announced $1 billion in funding to help global education but this is less than 10% of their fair share.

Did they ignore the Global Campaign for Education’s progress?

Here are some examples:

• India - a new government education programme to get 7.5 million girls and socially marginalised children into school by 2010
• Uganda – a new law was passed to enshrine the right to a free education for children.
• Indonesia – the president promised annual increases in education funding including raising teachers’ salaries in June.

This couldn’t have been achieved without your help so we would like to say a big THANK YOU. If you haven’t already got your certificates, sign up for them at www.sendmyfriend.org

And if you missed this year’s campaign and want to hear about what to do next year, sign up for the free e-newsletter. 

photo : ©Chryssa Panoussiadou/Insight/ActionAid