The current meeting of the contact group in charge of piloting the project of the African Forum of parliamentarians on education shows without any doubt the extreme dynamism of the parliamentarians of the continent, who with multipartism and democratic pluralism are more and more aware of the issues of the society, mainly among which, illiteracy, AIDS, poverty, which are regarded as obstacles to the progress of society.

On behalf of Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, the Director-General of UNESCO, I thank the Parliament and Government of Senegal for planning and organising this meeting. Special thanks go to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr Youssou Diagne and to the Minister of Education, Mr Moustapha Sourang.

This project, which will express the commitment of African parliamentarians to education, is a joint initiative of Senegal and Mauritius. That is why it is a special pleasure to have with us a strong delegation from Mauritius under the leadership of the Speaker of the National Assembly of Mauritius, the Honourable Dev Ramnah. We greet him and his colleagues and thank them for their invitation to hold the Founding General Assembly of the African Parliamentary Forum for Education in Port-Louis, Mauritius, in December this year in association with MINEDAF VIII.

It is then natural for UNESCO to back that project. We hope thus, to fit our action in the framework of our partnership policy. It has already allowed us to have fruitful links of co-operation with a certain number of parliamentarian Institutions, such as the Interparliamentary Union with which we signed an agreement in June 1997. Other agreements of the same kind exist between us and the Latin-American parliaments, of the Commonwealth, of the Francophonie , of the Council of Europe, Asia and Africa. We also wish to have multiform ties for promoting common programmes with the African parliamentary Union (U.P.A)

UNESCO has also intervened in many fields of interest for the national parliaments themselves. That is why 32 leagues of parliamentarians, friends of UNESCO have been created throughout the world for promoting the objectives and ideals of UNESCO. They can be found for instance in Gabon, Burkina-Faso, Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan and Mali.

Today we want to mobilise parliamentarians to address the challenge of illiteracy. Africa continues to be sorely afflicted by this problem, which is a major brake on its social, economic and cultural development. In the work that was done to prepare for the World Forum on Education held here in Dakar two years ago, the number of illiterates was estimated at over 800 million. Many of them are in Africa. More than 60% of them are women and rural areas present a particularly depressing picture.

This problem is made worse by the wars, crises and conflicts, which continue to blight this continent. They undermine national unity, destroy community life, weaken the moral framework of society and destroy the economic, social, cultural and educational infrastructure that has been put in place at the cost of great effort. The future of the next generation is in jeopardy.

The Machel Report on the impact of armed conflicts on children shows, explicitly, several cases of rapes, kidnapping, destroying of schools, recruitment of children soldiers, children who should have been learning at school. There are also huge displacements of populations, famine afflicting much more the children and women than grown-up men, the increasing number of orphans and widows, the split of the family, generalised insecurity, havoc of children because of minefields - After the war, everything is to be rebuild, the schools, the infrastructures, the educational systems. Men must also be educated to have a different mentality. But, above all, children must be trained for peace and for building a future of concord.

In front of all those individual and collective tragedies, parliamentarians must get committed, as political leaders for the restoration of peace, and the non recurse to violence as a means for settling political, cultural, ethnic and economic conflicts.

The culture of peace and education for the values of tolerance and mutual respect must be at the heart of such endeavours. This is the foundation for the democratic dialogue, respect for others, and the search for consensus on which social and political life can be built. Eradicating the disease of war is a prime task for parliamentarians.

However, peace is fragile when the people live in poverty. South of the Sahara one in two Africans lives below the poverty threshold. Ignorance and illiteracy are prime causes of poverty. That is why the United Nations system is putting such emphasis on education. In an era when developments in information and communications technology are opening up so many new possibilities it is a scandal that millions of men, women and children are excluded from the wave of human development because they cannot read, they cannot write and they cannot count.

Even more fundamentally, no democratic system can survive and prosper if so many citizens are marginalized in this way. Ignorance and illiteracy are not just a handicap for the individuals concerned. They place strict limits on the economic, social and cultural development of their nations.

Fighting against ignorance is fighting against poverty for it is through the awakening of intelligence, education, and awareness that man gets the instruments of his own progress.

The forum which is going to be set up will have for mission to increase the capacities of the parliamentarians in the field of education. First of all on the legislative field, it is necessary to make education compulsory everywhere in Africa with legislative texts. From that point of view, it must be noted that only four African countries have not yet taken the necessary steps in that sense.

It is then question for the Forum, to help with its own means those countries to adopt logical laws, and thus to put themselves at the same normative level as the rest of the continent. This task must be one of the concerns of the parliamentarians. The right to education which is also one of the themes of the communications deserves to be written in the constitutions everywhere in Africa with the aim of generalising education. In the same way, it is necessary to review the numerous normative instruments of UNESCO. Here are, among many others, the tasks which are waiting for the parliamentarians.

The setting up of this forum will in other respect reinforce the intervention capacities of UNESCO which has already, with the conference of the Ministers of Education of the Member-States from Africa which meets every four years under its patronage, give a permanent framework of exchange, dialogue, conception, assessment, of their educational policies.

Therefore UNESCO will back your efforts, will accompany your processes, and will favour the setting up of the quadrennial programme of activities which will be adopted after the general assembly of Port-Louis.

It is my pleasure to underline that UNESCO will not be the only organisation to support you. The presence of the World Bank, UNDP, FNUAP and UNICEF, of the African Union, the African Parliamentary Union, proves eloquently the mobilisation of the universal community behind the parliaments of the continents.

Allow-me to greet and thank them heartily for their support, I can say that this project is also their project, they have participated in it.

I end by expressing my respects to Senegal's Head of State, His Excellency Abdoulaye WADE, who has given this project such a good send off. As one of those who initiated the New Partnership for African Development, President Wade has made very clear the priority that must be given to education and human development. It is very appropriate that this project is being launched today in Dakar.

I wish this meeting a frank success.