From Street to School By Sanjay Suri SEVERAL GROUPS of schoolchildren came to the village of the Commonwealth People’s Forum Wednesday. They came from different schools, their different uniforms said so. Some children read out poems. Others were taught the dangers from AIDS. Some seemed too young to know what sex is, but teachers want to be careful these days. The children sang songs warning of the danger from AIDS.

Poetry reading at the People's Forum village.

“Yes, AIDS is for real,” they sang.

And they told stories, and stories were told to them. It was all a part of the efforts made by civil society groups at the Commonwealth People’s Forum, to educate children beyond formal education, to showcase what education could be, that other educators could look at.

The children were given posters on the Commonwealth, they were taught what Commonwealth is. They were taught it is oneness and togetherness, no matter where you come, and no matter what the past of their parents. No matter even that the grandparents if not the parents of several have seen colonial days.

The uniforms looked pretty, so did the children. Pretty also because that is the way children are, the way you would expect children to be.

But the story not very far from the village is a quite different story. A group working with the promotion of education for girls in villages around Abuja is dealing not with school issues. Not even with issues at home. They deal with street children.

Before education can begin, the children need to be moved off the street. That is just what the Change Managers International Network (CMI) around Abuja has been striving to do.

The group held a workshop that focused on a partnership that is need between government and civil society to get children off the streets and into school.

Forget talk of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at conference halls during Commonwealth meetings. The real story about the MDGs sits on the streets around Abuja.

The task of meeting those MDGs is not easy, the streets say. The prime problem inevitably is funding.

“Since funding is one of the major constraints of most civil society organizations, we recommend that a civil society fund be initiated that will be funded by corporate businesses and other good-spirited individuals,” a spokeswoman for CMI told TerraViva.

“We recommend that a responsible board of trustees be appointed to manage the fund,” she added.

The Commonwealth business forum that is meeting in Abuja will certainly not have this on its mind. Civil society groups are often on their own when they take on projects like this. Which gives truth to the claim that it is these groups that are the ones more likely than anyone else to be in touch with ground realities.

The MDGs would have been met if you could pick any group of children at random in or around Abuja, and they could come to the village of the People’s Forum and sing more or less the same songs.