G8 MEETS K-8

Meetings of the G8 (the old G7 plus Russia) have become in recent years little more than festivals of symbolism. Representatives of the world’s strongest economies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus Russia) pose for photographs in some great city or another, making visionary pronouncements regarding mankind’s bright future. Protesters storm that city, don colorful garb, wave placards, chant slogans and make sincere trouble regarding the past and present.

The G8 summit this week (Wednesday and Thursday) may break that pattern. And not just because it’s being held not in a great city but in the boondocks of Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada. That wilderness park high in the Rockies, a good hour from Calgary, is a place so transportation-challenged that protesters are converging instead on Ottawa, 2,000 miles away. Security forces are getting more training in dealing with grizzly bears than with social-justice activists.

This summit could be different because the G8 leaders have before them a proposal that actually could make a difference. The focal point of the meeting is Africa – nothing startling there – but this session will go beyond the finding new ways to finance corrupt governments and to increase the debt of the world’s poorest people. The summiteers will have before them a plan to ensure that by 2015, all the world’s children will have a primary-school education.

The report by the G8 Education Task Force focuses on girls in Africa and other poor regions,; worldwide, 60 percent of the 100 million children not in school are female. Each G8 nation will be asked to make a financial commitment to this agenda and to work with several specific poor nations to implement education plans already developed as well as with poor nations lacking such plans.

The remarkable thing about this initiative is its low cost. A recent World Bank report pegged it at $10 billion to $15 billion a year, a fraction of what any G8 nation spends on a wide variety of indulgences. The report identifies 18 countries that have plans and the desire to educate all their children but lack the funds to make them work. Also included are strategies to bring basic but life-changing education to every remote village without creating more fund-gobbling bureaucracies.

As much as this may appear to be just another plan that will never go beyond the discussion stage, there is very recent precedent to believe the G8’s education initiative may actually work. Just last week, as the World Food Summit was accomplishing nothing in Rome, the World Food Program in Geneva garnered much deserved attention for an approach to hunger based upon the direct-aid model. For a mere 19 cents a day per child, the World Food Program feeds 15 million children in 60 countries; this level of efficiency is achieved by delivering the food through local schools, instead of government bureaucracies.

Protesters have been gearing up for this week by sounding the familiar, and substantially true, refrain that new G8 policies are never anything more than rehashed versions of old policies that failed and that often make poverty worse. If this education initiative gets the funding and follow-through it deserves, the protesters will have to find a new complaint for the next summit. And the G8 won’t have to hide out in the boonies.