• Excellencies, distinguished guests,
  • If there is one lesson from decades of global development policy, it is this: no investment delivers greater returns than education – especially the education of girls.
  • The World Bank estimates that each additional year of schooling can increase a persons income by up to 10%.
  • Put simply, education not only drives personal growth – it lays the foundation for prosperous and stable societies.
  • Thats why the EU is one of the worlds top investors in education. Together with our Member States, we provide more than half of all global development aid for education.
  • Through our Global Gateway strategy, we are supporting education and skills in more than 100 countries – including in fragile and crisis settings.
  • We are helping to build schools, train teachers, and give young people the competences and skills they need to access decent work.
  • And we are proud to be one of the top contributors to the Global Partnership for Education.
  • With 270 million children and youth still out of school, we know there is so much more to do.
  • We need new, sustainable financing models. This means broadening funding sources, forging new partnerships, and leveraging our limited resources to unlock greater investment.
  • At the same time, we know that even within Europe, we face challenges of our own.
  • In recent years, learning outcomes across a range of basic skills have been getting worse.
  • Today, 30 percent of 15-year-olds do not have minimum proficiency in maths. One in four struggle in reading.
  • These figures also hide wide socio-economic disparities.
  • Earlier this year, we put forward our Union of Skills strategy to reverse these trends and close our skills gaps. We adopted plans targeting specifically basic skills and STEM education.
  • We have set targets to bring down the share of underachievement in basic skills to less than 15 percent by 2030. And to lift the number of students enrolled in STEM fields to 32 percent, with specific targets for women.
  • Next year, we will present an ambitious Education Package. It will feature:
    • a Basic Skills Support Scheme to prevent children from falling behind in school, and European School alliances to pool resources;
    • a European Teachers and Trainers Agenda to improve working conditions and training; and
    • a 2030 Roadmap to guide EU action on digital education and skills.
  • Children who grow up in poverty tend to achieve lower educational outcomes, which then limits their opportunities later in life. The cycle continues, unless we break it.
  • A stronger European Child Guarantee will be one of the pillars of our upcoming Anti-Poverty Strategy. It will support, among others, better access to quality early childhood education and care, and a healthy meal each school day.
  • Let me thank the Global Partnership for Education for their vital work, and the UN Economic Commission for Africa and the government of Kenya for their leadership.
  • We are very proud to host this event together. We are united in the conviction that education is the most powerful force to change lives. It is this belief that drives our policies both at home and abroad.
  • And I am looking forward to working together at all levels to make sure that every child, in every country, has access to quality education and the chance to build a better life.
  • Thank you.