Good evening everyone! I am extremely pleased to be here today on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to join others in talking about the United States Government’s investment in global education. 

I am happy to be joined by Representatives Lowey, Dent, Quigley, McGovern, and Lieu, all tireless champions, as well as my Administration colleagues Carrie Hessler-Radelet of the Peace Corps,  Nancy Lee of the MCC, Ambassador Deborah Birx our Global Aids Coordinator, and Tina Tchen, the First Lady’s Chief of Staff.  I want to thank our hosts this evening: Judith Rowland, of the Global Poverty Project; Alice Albright, the CEO of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE); RESULTS; Global Campaign for Education; United States Fund for UNICEF; Chime for Change and Global Citizen.

It is a delight to be with a room full of people who are passionate champions of education and care about it as much as USAID does.  And most especially we are grateful to Representative Lowey for being such an ardent supporter of education for children around the world.

Let me make five points and then turn to others.

1. We Are Getting Results

Fifteen years ago when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were launched, there were 100 million primary school age kids out of school.  MDG Goal 2 set out to change that and improvements in access to school happened, but unfortunately, for millions of children, “schooling” was not leading to “learning.” So, with the strong support of members of Congress, and all of you, we issued our USAID Education Strategy and focused on just three goals. 

The Strategy set ambitious targets which will take a long time to reach, but which are crucial.  And the global community has now agreed, because the new Sustainable Development Goal 4 recognizes the importance of learning in addition to getting kids access to school.  In pioneering this transition, we ended programs not focused on our Strategic goals, created more than 140 new programs to focus on improving reading or increasing access in conflict and crisis settings, and launched the All Children Reading Grand Challenge for Development with Australia and World Vision. 

Since the Education Strategy launched, our work on behalf of the American people has benefitted more than 30 million children.  In 2014 alone, we trained 505,000 teachers and educators, provided 45.7 million textbooks and other teaching and learning materials, and built or repaired 3,172 classrooms around the world.  All this work is enabling children to read. In Tanzania, for example, the percentage of students who can read with comprehension more than tripled – from 6 percent to 21 percent in the region where we are working.

2. Gender

All of us know what a great investment girl’s education is.  That is why 100% of USAID’s education work is designed to give girls as good an education as boys.  And it has led to results.  In 2002, in Afghanistan, women and girls were almost completely excluded from educational opportunities. Today more than 2.5 million girls are enrolled in school.

Last March, we joined the White House, Department of State, Peace Corps, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation to take these efforts to the next level through Let Girls Learn. I’m very grateful to the First Lady for her tireless leadership and work on behalf of the 62 million girls still not in school. 

In 2015, USAID announced new Let Girls Learn commitments, including a partnership with the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development to enable girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to access accelerated and alternative learning programs in conflict-affected areas, a $70 million commitment with the Government of Pakistan, to benefit more than 200,000 adolescent girls aged 10 to 19, and the Let Girls Learn Challenge Fund to collaborate with the private sector, academia, and civil society to co-create and co-design innovative programs to ensure that adolescent girls succeed in school.

3. Integration of Efforts

And the focus on girls leads to my next point about the importance of integrating inter-agency efforts and efforts across sectors.  For example, USAID has provided $5 million to the Peace Corps over the past five years to support education volunteers.  And we work with MCC; for example, in Niger we are working together to increase access opportunities to education for children, improve early grade reading, and to strengthen local community ties. As regards integrating across sectors, to get girls into school, we know we need to use Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene money to provide separate toilet facilities.  Ambassador Birx can tell you how better education can improve HIV/AIDS outcomes at the same time that I can tell you that improved health and nutrition can lead to better education results. 

In Malawi, we are combining our health, water, and education dollars in a single project to improve reading skills, improve health outcomes, and decrease structural and cultural barriers to girls’ access to schooling. So, in the years ahead, we are going to have to work to integrate different development work streams.

4. Crisis

But of course some children are not able to access schools because they are refugees or living in countries in crisis.  Historically, food and shelter were prioritized in those setting for good reasons.  But when we have a third generation of children living in places like the Dadaab camp in Kenya, the largest refugee camp in the world, the global community has recognized that we need to educate children in those situations.  As a result, right now in Lebanon, we are providing school fees for 50,000 Lebanese and 28,000 refugees, to attend public schools.  In Jordan, the United States is building new schools, targeting areas with large numbers of Syrian refugees, supporting remedial programs so that refugee students can make up years of lost schooling, and training teachers to address the psychosocial needs of refugee children.

5. Need new funders and new approaches

So, you can see that strong progress is being made but also that the job is far from finished.  To finish the job, some estimate that it will cost another $25 billion a year.  Given the new development landscape, that is clearly not going to come from the United States alone, which is why these three things are important:

1. Innovations: we can use new methods, new partners, new technologies, and new approaches to finance to be more effective and efficient in our collective efforts.
2. Domestic Resources: We have to help developing countries improve their tax collection and financial management processes so that they can shoulder even more of their own education bill; and
3. We need to back the efforts by GPE and others to engage with new actors such as the private sector, and donor countries such as China and the Gulf countries to greatly increase their assistance to social sectors. 

A concerted effort by all of us here on those items, will do more to get kids in school and learning than anything we can do individually. 

Thank you and enjoy the reception.