First and most important is getting parents - and in most countries these days that means voters - angry and involved in the debate over the state of education. Just go from one end of India to the other and you can see the difference motivated parents prepared to thump the school desk to get the attention of a local educational establishment can make. UNDP has a very important advocacy role and we have wonderful tools to use: Through the global and national Human Development Reports we can work with our local partners help identify educational disparities and gaps and build policy momentum to address them. Then with our partners in the UN system and the World Bank we can - and in many cases already do -- help integrate education into broader national poverty eradication strategies. All intended to drive government ownership of education policy that encompasses political, legislative, and budgetary action and responds to the insistent drumbeat of a public demand to educate our kids.

Second, however, we have to recognize that this is not something that can be driven at a national level alone. The point about parent power is that it is felt first at the community level. And not just on behalf of their children; often it should be to demand vocational training to meet their own needs - particularly when members of a disenfranchised informal sector. Shifting responsibility to the local level is the best way to ensure both implementation and accountability. In many countries, there are wide regional discrepancies in education provision -for example here in Senegal, I understand primary enrollment rates vary from over 90 per cent in Dakar to under 30 per cent in Diourbel. Often such gaps reflect in large part the varying strengths of accountable local institutions, including parent-teacher associations. As UNDP's new Poverty Report clearly pointed out to bring change within reach of the poor, you need to use local institutions, particularly transparent and effective local governments.

This is something that Brazil has managed to do very effectively over the past decade. To implement a reform process funded by the World Bank and other partners, UNDP was asked to support the establishment of financial mechanisms to decentralize funding to local school councils. In the first mould-breaking phase of state level educational bureaucracies this sometimes meant sending cheques straight to Parent-Teacher Associations or headmasters to get resources to frontline classrooms. As the reforms progressed we also helped develop an Integrated System of Education Information that integrated 25 state databases into a national system. That information has become a critical tool for the ministry to improve coverage and targeting of everything from school lunches to textbooks. Unlike the system in many OECD countries it works in real time. That is it identifies bottlenecks in the current school year, not after the fact. Brazil, with a huge school age population has met the challenge of Jomtien through smart policy, political commitment - and, I might add, using IT through distance learning.

Third, we need to maintain international political support for EFA. This Forum marks one very important way of doing that. But it also means continually working to ensure that funds freed up through debt relief and other initiatives are properly and effectively channeled to education programmes. At the same time all of us on the governmental and inter-governmental side need to use partnerships with international civil society groups like the Global Campaign for Education and Oxfam, the private sector and the media to keep these issues firmly on the global agenda. National educational reform must be rewarded with increased international financial support.

GENDER AND HEALTH

Fourth, is the overwhelming importance of girls'education. This is - rightly - a major theme of this Forum, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan has already very eloquently highlighted the scale of the problem. But it cannot be emphasized enough. Not only is education the key to lasting gender empowerment: it can have a dramatic effect on poverty reduction and quality of life for entire communities. More than 60 per cent of the children not in school are girls, with the problem particularly acute in parts of Asia and Africa. That is why the new global Initiative to educate girls is a test the United Nations system and its partners must not fail. Working through the UN Development Group that I chair, UNICEF has taken an important leadership role on the issue and we are absolutely committed to the Initiative's broader success.

Fifth, we can no longer isolate the issue of HIV/AIDS and regard it as simply a health problem. It is also now a potentially devastating education problem, especially on this continent. One on level it is decimating already thinly stretched professional ranks: in some areas as many as one in three teachers are now affected, exacerbating already serious capacity problems. On another, education remains our best weapon in combating the disease through prevention strategies. And as countries like Uganda and our hosts in Senegal have shown us, integrating HIV/AIDS issues into education planning is one of the most effective ways of doing this successfully.

THE INTERNET AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Sixth we need to recognize and embrace the genuinely transformative power of the telecommunications revolution for education. Too many people dismiss the Internet as a tool for rich countries. They argue that in a world where half the population has yet to use a telephone, and there are still so many illiterate adults, it is inappropriate, expensive and ineffective. But the point about revolutions is that they are revolutions: they transform all processes they touch from financial transactions to educational provision. Unlike old telephone systems it can reach anywhere without an expensive landline infrastructure and access costs are falling dramatically. Vast pools of interactive information from textbooks to technology and instructor support that would otherwise be inaccessible are being sprung open for the world's poorest. Even now, at a time when Africa has nearly 10 per cent of the world's population but just 0.1 per cent of Internet connections, it can already make a dramatic difference in poor countries. South Africa's growing - and successful -- experience with special telecentres for disadvantaged communities is a model UNDP has been working to help spread elsewhere in the continent.

And that brings me to my seventh and final point, which is an appeal to keep in mind that while basic education is an absolutely necessary building block for real success in this new global knowledge economy, it is far from sufficient. It is only the foundation for what must be a focus on life-long learning and skills acquisition. As Mark Twain laconically observed, I have never allowed schooling get in the way of my education. Developing countries as a group contain 80 per cent of the world's population but only half its higher education students despite huge demand and scarce resources. At the Public University of Kinshasa, as many as 2,500 students are forced to cram into a single class in biomedical sciences. At Nairobi Medical School library, the number of journals have shrunk to 20 from 300 a decade ago. Restoring higher education is unlikely to be a bricks and mortar strategy alone; rather expect old institutions' capacities to be renewed by internet support.