WASHINGTON, April 25 (AFP) - An ambitious World Bank initiative to ensure universal primary education by 2015 has gotten off to a rocky start and faces a "moment of truth" as rich countries have been slow to make good on financial commitments, Bank officials said here Sunday.
"Now is the moment of truth," World Bank President James Wolfensohn told a press conference ahead of a meeting of the Development Committee, the Bank's policymaking body.
"We've gone through all the preliminaries, we've made all the excuses. Now -- can we come up with the dough?"
The "dough" in this case comes to 5.6 billion dollars a year, the annual additional amount that the international aid group Oxfam says rich nations must provide to ensure that every child goes to school.
At the moment donors commit 1.4 billion dollars, according to Oxfam, which is a partner in the World Bank's Education for All campaign.
The aim is to make education available to all the world's children by 2015, consistent with the Millennium Development Goals adopted by 189 countries in 2000. At present an estimated 100 million children do not attend school.
"We decided on education for all because we thought it was THE subject everybody would agree on," Wolfensohn recalled.
"How could you not agree on education for children?"
Nonetheless, the project encountered "quite a number of bumps," as it was "damned difficult at the beginning to focus people on the subject," he said.
World Bank donors decided to kickstart the initiative in April 2002 with an initial focus on 12 countries -- Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guyana, Honduras, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Vietnam and Yemen.
But two years later, according to Oxfam, the donor shortfall comes to 751.9 million dollars from the estimated 1.7 billion dollars the 12 countries were seen as needing in 2004.
"Only the Netherlands and Luxembourg are providing their fair share of overall education aid," Oxfam said in a statement.
"The United States, Germany, Italy and Japan need to increase aid to education by at least 10 times.
"The United States spent 300 times more invading Iraq than it spends supporting education in poor countries," Oxfam said, adding that Washington commits 300 million dollars a year to basic education in poor countries.
A progress report prepared by the World Bank for Sunday's meeting warned that the experience so far with the 12-country plan suggests that the chances it will reach its targets "are dim unless there is a significant improvement in the international response."
Appearing with Wolfensohn at the press conference, Norwegian Minister for International Development Hilde Johnson noted that the additional 5.6 billion dollars in educational aid needed each year is one third of what the world spends annually on video games.
Governments allocate an estimated 850 billion dollars a year to military spending, she said, which stands in stark relief against the annual 50-60 billion dollars in develpment aid offered by rich countries.
A new report from the Global Campaign for Education concluded that seven million cases of the HIV virus could be prevented over the next 10 years if all children in the world received a full primary education.
It said its research showed that young people between the ages of 15 and 24 whose behavior had been modified through primary education were less than half as likely to contract HIV as those who did not go to primary school.
The study pointed to household surveys in 11 countries showing that women with some schooling were nearly five times as likely as uneducated women to insist that their partners use a condom.
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